Not games with a convoluted mysterious story, per se, but if it’s something that re-contextualizes the story somehow, that’s the kind of thing I’m interested in.
Inspired by my digging into the FF:06:5B mystery in my current playthrough of Cyberpunk. There are all sorts of weird codes and ciphers, bizarre rituals you have to do at certain places and times, and vague clues in weird places. One clue was even in an update to The Witcher 3, apparently. Based on my reading, the community found a sort of conclusion to this one, but it really doesn’t clearly explain things (though it fairly strongly hints at Night City 2077 being a simulation, and us not really playing V, but rather whoever is breaching the system at the title screen).
There’s the fan theory from the Pokémon Black/White series that N, the half-rival/half-enemy, is secretly a Zoroark. He has a similar hairstyle and it would explain his backstory as a wild child and why he somehow has the ability to understand Pokémon. There’s also a chase sequence where you follow a Zoroark around, but you reach the dead end of a cave and it’s just him there.
A few years ago I stumbled down a rabbit hole that led to the Shadow of the Colossus fan theory community.
If you play the game normally, you’ll wander a deserted, forbidden land and defeat the 16 colossi, revealing a little more back story each time, see the finale, and finish the game.
If you explore every nook and cranny of the world, make careful charts, compare the PS2 original and the re-releases, and even hack the game to take the camera out of bounds, you’ll find an astounding amount of detail that, at first, seems to be wasted. But over the years, fans have turned all of it into a surprisingly coherent possible expansion of the game’s universe, including linking it more directly to the developer’s previous game, Ico.
For a long time, many people were sure that some hidden secret remained buried in the game, to be revealed if only the right set of actions could be discovered. Most of the community seems to have given up on that now, but looking at what they assembled, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there still may be something to it all.
I loved that game. I still play it every few years.
Control, in that the Board is really up to something that nobody can even begin to understand, and that the oldest house is not just a building on Earth that happens to connect to other realities and the astral world, but that Earth is actually one of those astral worlds…it’s just held in place by the collective will of humanity.
It’s something you miss unless you take the time to read deep into things.
Ohh, neat. I should go back and finish that one. It was really good, but the machine I was playing it on died spectacularly and I never got around to reinstalling it on the next one.
When you pick it up again, be sure to get the extra mission DLCs. They are well worth it and really do flesh out the story!
I loved reading all of that, I hope the 2nd expands on that.
Inscryption. There was an ARG puzzle event at one point if you wanted to get REAL deep.
Didn’t that require months of community coordination to solve?
I was playing Cult of the Lamb and beating it, decided to look up any videos to see if I missed any lore or whatever, like what happens if you make other choices…
Surprisingly missed so fucking much about the world. Either the streamer was making up bullshit or the world is way deeper than I thought, with a whole history of why the crowns and gods exist.
Really? I’m playing that game now. What sort of things am I missing?
Did you hear the one about what the bishop did to the horsey in chess?
