Ah, the “evil all the time” twist. Not every story needs one, and not all pay off, but they are very memorable when done right. Games are better suited than any other medium to pull off this storytelling trick, forcing players to confront the chaos they've spent the last 10 hours dealing with. Spec Ops: The Line and Shadow of the Colossus used these kinds of jaw drops to cement their legacies, and FPS game are well equipped to handle villain protagonist twist.
Considering we're talking about games that revolve around killing everything that moves, only a few titles recontextualize events to reveal that you're actually the bad guy, and most instead justify your actions. However, the few stories that go in this direction tend to rank among the best in the genre, and the twist ensures that these FPS games are not quickly forgotten.
Spoiler warning for the following games: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, The darkness 2, BioShock Infinite, Far cry 3and ULTRA KILL.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
Silas is a cold-blooded assassin without a single righteous bone in him
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The Wild West is no place for heroes.
Right from the start, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger make it crystal clear that Silas Greaves, an aging bounty hunter, is an unreliable narrator. The campaign uses a clever framing device: each mission is based on a legendary story told by Silas in a saloon. He talks about the glorious escapades that saw him take on the likes of Billy the Kid, Jesse James and the Dalton Gang.
As you play through Silas' memories as he tells them, you appear as a lightning-fast, righteous lawman who wipes out dozens of bandits in heroic battles. Silas regularly adjusts or forgets details that cause the world to change around you, confirming 100% that what you experience is not necessarily what actually happened. Still, you're a cool western anti-hero who brings justice to the limit, right?
Yes, but also no. Silas isn't a mustache-twirling villain, but even describing him as an “anti-hero” is a stretch. The drunker he gets, the more his true personality begins to shine through, revealing a person driven by revenge who only occasionally carries a sense of justice. The law means nothing to Silas, and he likely killed quite a few men by nefarious means such as ambushes or shots in the back.
Silas is not much better than the people he kills; he's just a great storyteller.
The darkness 2
Jackie's rescue locks him in Hell forever
A story called The darkness can't feature a cookie-cutter protagonist who doesn't make some morally questionable decisions, especially when they're a mob don. Nevertheless, both games sell successfully Jackie Estacado as a likable anti-hero driven by grief over the murder of his girlfriend Jenny. Yes, he massacres many people in gruesome ways, but he mainly axes gangsters with hands covered in blood.
While the first game almost keeps Jackie on the right side, the sequel turns him into one the harbinger of the apocalypse who is so blinded by his desperation to save Jackie that he completely succumbs to the dark's manipulation. Granted, almost every other character is terrible and hardly a good option, but Jackie causes the most damage to the world.
After embracing his demonic powers, Jackie rages leaving a mountain of bodiesabout to dive into Hell to save Jenny. In fact, Jenny did not need to be saved and was chosen to host The Angelus, the counter force to the darkness. Jenny locks Jackie and the Darkness in Hell, because that's the only place for them now.
BioShock Infinite
Booker is Comstock
BioShock Infinite is complicated, but Booker's initial goal is pretty simple: Take Elizabeth and erase the guilt.
A disgraced detective, Booker heads to the floating Columbia to rescue Elizabeth from the oppressive tyrant known as Zachary Comstock. A short section on world building aside, BioShock Infinite Primarily, you've rampaged through the cloud-based city, slaying zealots while freeing Elizabeth from her prison. Booker's violence is completely justified in his noble rescue mission.
The dispute reveals that Comstock and Booker are the exact same person, just from two timelines separated by a single moment when Booker was on the verge of a baptism. If he completed the process, he became a Comstock; if he didn't, he became a drunkard who eventually sells his own daughter.
While the player-controlled version of Booker isn't quite the villain, BioShock Infinite still reveals that the main villain is the protagonist.
Far cry 3
Jason kills so many people, he loses count
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Learning the definition of insanity.
Along with being completely overshadowed by their villains, Far Cry the main characters consistently walk the line between hero and mass murderer. Far cry 3 explores its main character's descent into madness more directly than any of the othersturns a California kid into the god of death. Both story endings culminate with the same message, although presented very differently: Jason passes the point of no return without realizing it.
After being captured by pirates on the Rook Islands, Jason is “rescued” by the Rakyat tribe and Citra, setting him on a path where escape becomes secondary to violence. With each new mission, he becomes a more effective killereventually become directly addicted to it. He embraces Citra's fanaticism and buys himself as a strange messiah designed to save the Rakyat.
Jason frames everything as an attempt to save his friends from monsters, but ends up becoming one himself. His friends clearly see him as a psychopath under the spell of Citra, and Jason realizes too late that he is walking a path that will never let him return to his former life.
ULTRA KILL
V1 Doesn't Become Doomguy; A unique kind of twist
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The V1 is a killing machine willing to go to hell to find its bloody fuel.
Let's wrap things up with a slightly different kind of reveal, like ULTRA KILL does not present V1 as a hero at any point. Right from the start, players are aware that they are a killing machine descending into hell to stylishly obliterate everything that moves. You know what V1 is from the very beginning.
ULTRA KILL imagines a reality where humanity is extinct, and the V1 is a machine built during the last war. Needing blood to survive and Earth offering none, V1 heads to Hell to kill shells, demons, and fallen angels.
The twist comes from the fact that there isn't really a twist. Although they technically took out some oppressive forces, ULTRA KILL never recontextualizes V1's actions or portrays him as some unlikely force for good. At best, V1 is an emotionless machine used as a toy by truly evil beings. The arcade FPS game makes you feel like a brutal badass taking out the powers of hell, kind of like DOWNFALLs protagonist; but you are ultimately just a vacuum cleaner sucking up the last remaining fragments of existence.
If anything, you kill the few remaining units that tried to maintain some order.
