History TomatoInTheMirror / VideoGames

* In ''VideoGame/NoUmbrellasAllowed'', the protagonist gets washed ashore weeks after a fire broke out at Citizens Alliance Research Institute. Darcy then finds him and has him pose as his missing son Bob and lets him run his secondhand store. As "Bob" works at the shop, he slowly regains his memories through the [[DreamingOfTimesGoneBy nightmares of the past]] he gets at the end of each week. AVAC also puts up Wanted posters of four people who went missing during the fire: three people who worked for CARI, and one who was suspected to be behind the fire. [[spoiler:At the end of Week 5, it's revealed by the Blackmailer, who had been spying on "Bob" since the start of the game, that the latter is actually one of the missing people, and he has a bounty of at least 3,000V on his head.]]

* In ''VideoGame/NoUmbrellasAllowed'', the protagonist gets washed ashore weeks after a fire broke out at Citizens Alliance Research Institute. Darcy then finds him and has him pose as his missing son Bob and lets him run his secondhand store. As "Bob" works at the shop, he slowly regains his memories through the [[DreamingOfTimesGoneBy nightmares of the past]] he gets at the end of each week. AVAC also puts up Wanted posters of four people who went missing during the fire: three people who worked for CARI, and one who was suspected to be behind the fire. [[spoiler:It's later revealed at the end of Week 5 by the Blackmailer, who had been spying on "Bob" since the start of the game that "he" is actually one of the missing people, and he has a bounty of at least 3,000V on his head.]]

* In ''VideoGame/NoUmbrellasAllowed'', the protagonist gets washed ashore weeks after a fire broke out at Citizens Alliance Research Institute. Darcy then finds him and has him pose as his missing son Bob and lets him run his secondhand store. As "Bob" works at the shop, he slowly regains his memories through the [[DreamingOfTimesGoneBy nightmares of the past]] he gets at the end of each week. AVAC also puts up Wanted posters of four people who went missing during the fire: three people who worked for CARI, and one who was suspected to be behind the fire. [[spoiler:It's later revealed at the end of Week 5 that "Bob" is actually one of the missing people, and he has a bounty of at least 3,000V on his head.]]

* In ''VideoGame/NoUmbrellasAllowed'', the protagonist gets washed ashore after a fire broke out at Citizens Alliance Research Institute. Darcy then finds him and has him pose as his missing son Bob and lets him run his secondhand store. As "Bob" works at the shop, he slowly regains his memories through the [[DreamingOfTimesGoneBy nightmares of the past]] he gets at the end of each week. AVAC also puts up Wanted posters of four people who went missing during the fire: three people who worked for CARI, and one who was suspected to be behind the fire. [[spoiler:It's later revealed at the end of Week 5 that "Bob" is actually one of the missing people, and he has a bounty of at least 3,000V on his head.]]

* In ''VideoGame/NoUmbrellasAllowed'', the protagonist gets washed ashore after a fire broke out at Citizens Alliance Research Institute. Darcy then finds him and has him pose as his missing son Bob and lets him run his secondhand store. As "Bob" works at the shop, AVAC puts up Wanted posters of four people who went missing during the fire, and "Bob" slowly regains his memories through the [[DreamingOfTimesGoneBy nightmares of the past]] he gets at the end of each week. [[spoiler:It's later revealed at the end of Week 5 that "Bob" is actually one of the missing people, and he has a bounty of at least 3,000V on his head.]]

* In ''VideoGame/NoUmbrellasAllowed'', the protagonist gets washed ashore after a fire broke out at Citizens Alliance Research Institute. Darcy then finds him and has him pose as his missing son Bob and lets him run his secondhand store. As "Bob" works at the shop, AVAC puts up Wanted posters of four people who went missing during the fire. [[spoiler:It's later revealed at the end of Week 5 that "Bob" is actually one of the missing people, and he has a bounty of at least 3,000V on his head.]]

* ''VideoGame/{{Onmyoji}}'' has Onigiri, the personification of the treasure sword owned by the Minamoto clan who dedicates himself to [[FantasticRacism wiping out]] [[WhatMeasureIsANonHuman demons]] except he really isn't, as he later found out. He is actually a demon and had been tricked by his owner into [[HunterOfHisOwnKind mass-murdering his own kind]] all along. [[DespairEventHorizon Naturally, he didn't take this well]].

* ''VideoGame/ShadowOfTheColossus'': players are used to being the good guy out to destroy the evil monsters. This seems to be the case at the start of the game, but as time goes on, the hero's appearance begins changing, becoming ragged and dark, and some of the monsters you defeat seem benign and even peaceful. Some won't even attack unless provoked. The player must confront their feelings of the morality of continuing to play the game. The big turning point comes after killing Phalanx (#14), a ''truly'' majestic creature that never once tries to attack the player. As this is also around the time the plot kicks in, it counts as somewhat of a WhamEpisode.

* For a good portion of ''VideoGame/{{Stray}}'', we are led to believe that the cat's RobotBuddy B-12 was created by a human scientist whose name (among other things) they can't remember--they've lost their memories due to being stuck in the electronic network for an unknowably long time. Only in the beginning of Antvillage does B-12 discover an artifact of human society and from there remember the terrible truth--''they'' were the human scientist all this time. This revelation sends them into a HeroicBSOD, rendering them unable to translate the robots' speech for the cat's benefit until they make it to Zbaltazar.

** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'': One of the earliest examples in video games as well. Cloud Strife, the protagonist, suffers from freaky headaches and weird disjointed flashbacks. It turns out that Cloud was never in SOLDIER, let alone had ever been a 1st Class SOLDIER, as he had been proclaiming throughout the game. Cloud had instead been a Shinra Infantryman, but the combined trauma of having been experimented on by [[MadScientist Dr. Hojo]] for five years turning him into a "[[CloningBlues clone]]" or "copy" of the villain, Sephiroth, and has been acting under Sephiroth's MindControl for the game so far[[note]]which ironically, did involve a key component of SOLDIER creation, giving him genuine SOLDIER abilities[[/note]]. Even more, it is eventually revealed that much of his memories were not his own, but were in fact partly borrowed from that of his dead best friend Zack Fair, and watching his best friend, the actual Zack, get shot to death by Shinra soldiers, caused Cloud to have a mental breakdown in which he adopted Zack's identity as a 1st Class SOLDIER, and replaced his memories featuring Zack with memories of himself doing what Zack did. When [[BigBad Sephiroth]] reveals this to Cloud, he doesn't take it well. [[HeroicBSOD At all]]. Even more confusingly, when he recovers from said HeroicBSOD, he realizes he was never a clone to begin with (what he really is, is quite complicated, but it involves the way the {{Super Soldier}}s are created, and how TheVirus contains the {{genetic memor|y}}ies of those infected). However, when he finally regains his [[FakeMemories true memories]], he finally [[CharacterDevelopment develops]] into a fully fledged person.

* ''VideoGame/GhostTrick'': Sissel spends the entire evening hunting down clues to who he was before his demise. At first, he assumes himself to be the blond man in the red suit seen on the game's cover. He spends the majority of the game using this persona until he discovers that the man in red is alive (kind of) and reverts back to a wisp. He all but gives up hope on finding his identity until the person whose face he was borrowing eventually reveals that Sissel was his cat. Major clues for this revelation include Sissel's limited understanding of human technology and complete inability to read.

** It's implied, that Shepard ''is'' the real one, but [[TheUnreveal its never directly confirmed]]. Unless Liara accompanies you on that mission, in which case she responds to Shepard by saying that she knew Shepard was real the moment she met them in Mass Effect 2, and given the tactile telepathy that her species appears to have there's no reason to doubt her.

* ''Videogame/MetalGear''

* In the Genocide route of ''Undertale'', the FinalBoss mentions the Anomaly. From what he tells us about this Anomaly, it's very clear that the Anomaly is '''''{{YOU|bastard}}, [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou the]] [[WhatTheHellPlayer player]]'''''. And before you ask, the game treats you, the player, as a separate character from the kid that you are controlling.
* The protagonist of ''Videogame/VagrantStory'', Ashley Riot, begins the game believing that he once had a wife and son who were murdered by thugs during a family picnic, but [[ManipulativeBastard Sydney]] proposes an alternate version of his backstory - Ashley was a soldier who murdered an innocent woman and her child in the course of his duties, and became so ashamed of what he'd done that he subjected himself to advanced military brainwashing, rewriting his own memories rather than deal with his grief. [[TheUnreveal It's ultimately left ambiguous as to which version of Ashley's backstory is correct]].
* ''Videogame/{{Warframe}}'': Seemingly nobody -- InUniverse or out -- knows what [[PlayerCharacter the Tenno]] ''are''. Captain Vor calls them EnergyBeings, various Infested entities call them their "own flesh", and Codex entries mention terrible accidents that exposed people to the Void and gave them [[PowerIncontinence uncontrolled powers]]. In The Second Dream, a WhamEpisode, the player realizes that ''all'' of them are true. The warframes are cultured Infested bodies, piloted remotely via projected consciousness by children/teenagers that had been exposed to the Void. Up 'til the finale of the quest, the player was piloting their warframe in a lucid dream without realizing they are even human.

** In the sequel, ''Sandbox/SilenceTheWhisperedWorld2'', Noah returns to Silence along with his little sister Renie after their shelter gets bombed during a war. Eventually, Noah comes to realize that Renie is the only living person in Silence, and that he is just an image of her brother that she dreamed up. This causes him to take up the Sadwick persona again.

* ''Videogame/YsIXMonstrumNox'': Similar to the ''Slayers'' example above, the Adol Christin you play is a, long story short, a homunculus, while the real Adol Christin is captured for almost the entirety of the game.

* ''VideoGame/Phantasmagoria2: A Puzzle of Flesh'' has this as its big endgame twist: Over the course of the game, the player character Curtis is haunted by insane visions, compounded with his own guilt over presumably causing his mother to hate him and eventually commit suicide, as various people he doesn't like around his office at Wyntech are being killed off. As Curtis investigates deeper into Wyntech's past, he discovers that the company used to dabble in experimenting with transdimensional portals, his father was involved in their projects, and Curtis himself was used as a guinea pig. The final reveal is that Curtis, who you've just spent the entire game playing as, is in fact an alien duplicate: The '''real''' Curtis never left the alien dimension, and has mutated and developed psychic powers to torment the clone Curtis with past dimensional barriers.

* ''VideoGame/{{Klonoa}}: Door to Phantomile'': Klonoa learns he's actually a warrior from another dimension who was brought into Phantomile to save it from destruction. [[FakeMemories All his memories and friends were just fabrications]] by Huepow to motivate him further on his quest. When Phantomile is about to be cleansed from anything that doesn't belong there, Klonoa is among the things that are forcibly removed from the world.

* In the true route in ''VisualNovel/{{Ever 17}}'', the amnesiac Kid looks himself in a mirror and realizes that he is not the same Kid seen in Takeshi's perspective. In fact, he isn't even the Kid he sees in the mirror. He is the reader.

* In the UsefulNotes/SuperNES ''Lightnovel/{{Slayers}}'' game, Lina turns out to have been a duplicate for the entire game, while the real deal has been held hostage offscreen for most of it.
* ''VisualNovel/{{Snatcher}}'' pulls this off rather beautifully. So, Gillian Seed is a [[Film/BladeRunner Deckard]] {{Expy}} working for an organization hunting down Snatchers, robots that look like humans. Also, you and your wife have amnesia and can't remember anything about your past. Well, it's quite obvious that You and your wife are amnesiac Snatchers. Except...Actually, neither of you are. You invented the Snatchers 50 years ago and were cryogenically stored. Creator/HideoKojima is so good a writer even the GenreSavvy are left in surprise. There are about 5 other {{Tomato Surprise}}s that are subverted in the very same game too.

** ''[[VideoGame/FatalFrameIICrimsonButterfly Crimson Butterfly]]'': Minakami Village's ritual involves twins, with the older one having to kill the younger one to be thrown into the Abyss and prevent the Repentance from occurring. When Mayu and Mio get lost in the village, Mayu gets possessed by a spirit and plans to go through the ritual with Mio. While wanting to save her older sister from possession, Mio is now in danger of being killed by her, too. The penultimate chapter reveals a note that mentions the village having an extremely out-dated way of 'counting' twins. They believed that the last-born twin was the older one, as they would 'allow' the younger sibling to be born first. ''Mio'' is supposed to be the one to kill ''Mayu'', not the other way around.
** ''[[VideoGame/FatalFrameIVMaskOfTheLunarEclipse Mask of the Lunar Eclipse]]'': Choushiro Kirishima is on Rougetsu Island and intent on finally confronting Yuu Haibara, the man who kidnapped five girls to help him perform a strange ritual, and bringing him to justice. As he runs after Haibara all over the island, he ends up cornering him on top of a roof and gets stabbed in the stomach by him. Kirishima tackles Haibara and both go over the railing. And Kirishima looks back down at his own body, back in the very spot he initially awoke and had no idea how he got there. He's one of the ghosts stuck on the island, having died in its tragedy eight years ago.

* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'':

* ''VideoGame/NobodySavesTheWorld'' begins with "Nobody", the amnesiac and completely featureless (save for an EyelessFace) protagonist, waking up in an abandoned shed next to the house of Nostramagus, a powerful mage who has vanished right as a world-ending threat known as The Calamity has appeared. Around the game's halfway point, you learn that "Nobody" is actually Nostramagus after being tainted by The Calamity.

* For a good portion of ''VideoGame/{{Stray}}'', we are led to believe that the cat's RobotBuddy B-12 was created by a human scientist whose name (among other things) they can't remember--they've lost their memories due to being stuck in the electronic network for ages. Only in the beginning of Antvillage does B-12 discover an artifact of human society and from there remember the terrible truth--''they'' were the human scientist all this time. This revelation sends them into a HeroicBSOD, rendering them unable to translate the robots' speech for the cat's benefit until they make it to Zbaltazar.

* Discussed at length in ''VideoGame/Cyberpunk2077''. The Johnny Silverhand you meet in the game is not the ''real'' Johnny Silverhand, but an [[VirtualGhost engramatic construct]] created by Arasaka's "Soulkiller" technology and stored on a biochip called "The Relic". [[spoiler:V, similarly, was clinically dead after taking a bullet to the head while the Relic was inserted into his brain. The Relic works by overwriting the neural pathways of a fresh cadaver into a copy of the engram's brain, thus allowing the engram to, in theory, come BackFromTheDead. However, because V was OnlyMostlyDead, in addition to the Relic and his chip slot being damaged, the process was halted partway, thus leading to V and "Johnny" sharing the same mind. Some characters may even talk of how the old V died when he took the shot to the head, and the V that awoke afterwards is a new person. At the end of the game, the process of V uploading his mind to Arasaka's Mikoshi data fortress to untangle their mind from Johnny's results in V original mind dying while an engramatic construct is made in their likeness. Should they decide to return to their body [[YourDaysAreNumbered knowing that they may only have six months to live]], they may question whether they are the still the real "V', or just a copy.]]

* In the Genocide route of ''Undertale'', the FinalBoss mentions the Anomaly. From what he tells us about this Anomaly, it's very clear that the Anomaly is '''''[[YouBastard YOU]], [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou the]] [[WhatTheHellPlayer player]]'''''. And before you ask, the game treats you, the player, as a separate character from the kid that you are controlling.

** ''VideoGame/TheForceUnleashed II'' is all about Galen Marek aka [[AwesomeMcCoolName Starkiller]] trying to find out whether or not he's the original Starkiller or a clone. Turns out he never does get an answer.