10 ‘WTF’ Moments in Video Games

Any game that starts in medias res is likely to elicit a WTF from anyone playing, but starting off with Drake dangling from a train car hanging off a cliff in the middle of the mountains has to rank high on the WTF scale. It leaves you yearning for more information. How did he get there? Why is he there? What’s going to happen after he passes out into the snow? It’s a WTF moment that keeps you playing on and on just to see what happens.

The Joker is dead?! WHAT THE…

From the beginning of Partal 2, you are constantly being conditioned that GLaDOS is the baddie. But, when your old pal Wheatley becomes drunk on power and banishes that passive aggressive AI to a battery powered potato, well, you know what happens -- the dysfunctional little guy becomes as homicidal as GLaDOS.

JRPG’s are strange at the best of times, but in Final Fantasy VII you have to bathe with an assortment of men in order to save Tifa. Why does bathing with a bunch of men help you to save Tifa? Damned if we know.

Drinking from strange fountains in previously lost cities is probably not the smartest idea. When Nathan Drake has a sip of the water, your grip on reality suddenly fades. In a scene worthy of the best adventure films, a patch of blood starts seeping through Sully’s shirt. You can feel your ire rise and the end of the game feels near and you can only hope the murderers get what they deserve. But, then you come to find out that Nate has been hallucinating this whole event and that Sully is perfectly fine. It’s quite a relief. Who else would keep Drake in check while chomping on cigars.

All throughout Eternal Darkness, you are constantly being treated to a thorough brain wringing. There is no single WTF moment in the game, but the whole game itself is a giant WTF moment. Here’s a few of our favorite “glitches”. When you go to save the game, it gleefully tells you that all your save files have been deleted. Occasionally it will mute your TV or turn up the volume to the max. Sometimes the game will give you a blank screen claiming that a plug has come undone. It even makes it look like some bugs are crawling across your screen. If you can make it through this game without losing your own sanity, you win.

The Modern Warfare games are full of WTF moments, but the first and most powerful was when Washington DC becomes a smoldering shell of what it used to be before a nuke set off an EMP in the atmosphere. From the perspective of an astronaut on the International Space Station, you can see the whole blast just before the force of it knocks the station out of the sky. Then you’re thrown back into the fray where you have to fight your way out. Usually something get’s nuked in a Modern Warfare game, but this brought it to US home turf.

Considered, by far, to be one of the best Star Wars games ever made. This is due, at least in part, to the absolutely astonishing revelation that comes around in the third act of the story. Every Star Wars movie is about destroying the Sith, but by the end of KOTR, you find that you’ve been working against all the good in the galaxy and are actually a Sith Lord. But you didn’t care, because being evil is much more fun anyway.

Shadow of the Colossus is itself is a deceptively simple game. But, as you might know, it becomes much more complex as you move along. With each gigantic animal you slay, you start questioning your motives as the protagonist. This all becomes evident right at the end when the true heroes ride into the temple to find you transformed into a shadow monster. You were the villain all along. But you did it for love, so you don’t feel all that bad.

Who would have thought that from the first moment you stepped into the Bathysphere and entered the horribly wonderful world of Rapture that you would be conditioned, like Pavlov's dog, to a simple phrase? “Would you kindly” is such an innocuous grouping of words that anyone could speak, but when it's revealed the power that it has over you as you explore rapture, it made you wonder if the game had been controlling you in the real world? It makes you suspicious of anyone asking if you would kindly do anything for them.