No, not the Republican administration!

This is something I’m coming across recently that puzzles and annoys me. As a reader, I’m presented with a character and story, but in a late plot twist, it is revealed that the character is actually experiencing a psychotic break with reality. It goes beyond the “unreliable narrator” some authors like to use.

Example 1: In the video game Veilguard (Dragon Age 4), your character is second-in-command to a beloved character from the previous games. Early on, that character gets stabbed in the chest. Your character is also kayoed, and you wake up in the infirmary with the other character in the bed next to yours. Your character is quickly up and about, and you proceed through the plot, frequently checking in with your chief. But near the end, it turns out that character has been dead the whole time. Your character has been hallucinating those conversations.

Example 2: In the video game Dredge, you are a fisherman working for a mysterious collector who has you fetching arcane artifacts from around the map. You also uncover clues to why there are eldritch monsters and mutant fish infesting the region. But in the end, it turns out the collector… is you! With a delusion of some kind, you have “forgotten” what you did in the past.

Both my examples are video games, rather than other storytelling forms. Maybe this is a fashion in video games? Whatever, it really burns my biscuits. The game writers had to engage in a lot of deception to hide this information from the player. For example, in Veilguard, the other characters should have been talking about memorials, informing the fallen hero’s family, and other evidence of grief. Ignoring that cheapened the characters for me. Maybe the writers think the shock of the revelation makes the deception worth while, but for me as a player, I lost confidence in the writers.

So this technique of deluding characters would be something I don’t recommend my fellow writers to do.