How We Got Here / Video Games

Examples of How We Got Here in Video Games.

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• 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is about how the thirteen young protagonists end up getting to the final battle that makes up the strategy portions of the game, mixed with Tarantino-esque storytelling.
• Alpha Protocol opens with the Player Character Agent Thorton being interrogated by the Big Bad about their actions throughout the story, occasionally cutting back to the interrogation after every main mission with the final one taking place shortly after it.
• Always Sometimes Monsters opens with a Mexican Standoff in an alleyway, as a Mysterious Stranger recounts a story about whichever protagonist you selected. This story contains its own Flashbacks to events that shaped the protagonist's past.
• American Arcadia: The demo and full game open with Trevor recounting the story to someone interviewing him. The full game makes frequent cutbacks to the interview throughout the game.
• Antarctica 88 begins with the Player Character escaping from an underground room and fighting his way through an ice tunnel. Chapter two flashes back several hours to show the events leading up to that.
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: At the beginning, we see Ezio fighting Cesare Borgia at Vanna, but since Desmond lacks the synchronization necessary to stay there, he gets booted out. It takes until the rest of the game until we see how they got there. Turns out to also be a case of Once More, with Clarity.
• The events of Bastion start at the beginning of the story and continue on normally, but eventually it's revealed that Rucks' ongoing narrative is being told to Zia while The Kid storms the final dungeon of the game. When the player finally reaches that point, Rucks runs out of story to tell, and instead starts talking about their present situation and speculating what's going on on The Kid's end.
• Battlefield 3, of the Battlefield series, does this with the campaign. You start out with handcuffs on one of your arms, the player running from the police, and then jumping onto a subway train. And then you immediately start fighting masked soldiers on said train, where people seem to recognize you, and you run into the Big Bad. The final mission has you repeating that segment, in a Once More, with Clarity fashion.
• The popular freeware RPG Maker game A Blurred Line starts with three agents of sort trying to stop a terrorist from destroying an extremely important facility. After the intro, the player goes back to one year earlier, and takes control over the terrorist.
• Call of Duty:
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops uses this as its framing device, with Mason in the midst of an interrogation for 95% of the game and the actual missions being him recounting his experiences to the other men in the room.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has a level that starts out with Delta Force in the middle of an ambush. The mission then flashes back 20 minutes to show the events leading up to it.
• The first level of The Conduit consists of a tutorial set in a subway system. The second level starts with a flashback five days earlier, and the story doesn't return to the subway until late in the game.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day starts off with an intro parodying the film A Clockwork Orange with Conker sitting on a throne, as king. The rest of the game is the day before leading up to that point, a day which he calls "a bad fur day".
• Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening begins with Lady narrating over the fight between Dante and Vergil, which really happens in Mission 7 of the game and is only the first of three major clashes the brothers have.
• Discworld Noir opens with an Impending Doom P.O.V. shot of something chasing Lewton down and eviscerating him, before his Private Eye Monologue begins "I've had some bad days since I started work as a private investigator. But I've never woken up dead before. It all started the week before..."
• In Dragon Age II, the legend of Hawke is told by Varric, a dwarven companion of his/hers to the Chantry Seeker Cassandra. Varric for his part plays a bit of the Unreliable Narrator, exaggerating certain parts of the story whenever he feels like it while Cassandra tries to find the true story.
• Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is presented as a narration of the primary protagonist Zoe Castillo, who lies in a coma and recalls the events that left her in this condition.
• Elemental Gearbolt, as evidenced by its introductory cutscene.
• Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep opens with whales absolutely everywhere, the player in a boat with a bunch of strangers, an entrance to a mysterious ruin... and then the flashback kicks in and you're asked what you look like and given your job interview.
• Eternal Sonata: The opening scene is that of Polka standing on the edge of a cliff, facing away from it. She convinces herself that "this" is something she has to do... and lets herself fall off, uttering a couple more lines over the course of her fall. After you beat Frederic, the final boss (in game terms), if the appearance of the environment hasn't tipped you off, the next part will. Against Allegretto's protests, she says... most of the lines from the first scene again (but compare the last thing she says in that scene where she's falling to what she says in the analogous scene here). Then we proceed beyond the scene and see what's probably been happening afterward.
• Fabulous: Angela's High School Reunion: After the end of Level 10, we build up to how and why Angela ended up in prison.
• Fahrenheit is narrated past tense by the main character. When you get a game over, though, he says things like "And that's the end of my story. I never cleared my name and I never found out why I killed that man."
• Far Cry 3 has flashbacks that the player can optionally view by taking drugs after every time they rescue one of the protagonist's friends. Each flashback shows a little bit of what the group was up to at a bar in Bangkok, which was supposed to be their last stop on their vacation, before the DJ that Jason befriended told them about a little-known island where they could do anything they wanted...
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy Tactics begins with Ovelia's kidnapping, and then goes into flashback for Chapter One to show how the characters got to where they are "now". Furthermore, the Framing Device of the game itself is that it's presenting the "true story" of the Lion War generations after the fact.
  • Final Fantasy X opens with the first part of a sombre campfire cutscene outside Zanarkand. Tidus narrates: "Listen to my story. This may be our last chance." You really get to this campfire about 2/3 of the way through the game.
  • Final Fantasy X-2 plays with this by explaining the beginning. A small sidequest explains what the real Yuna was doing while Rikku and Paine were gate-crashing the concert from the opening scene.
  • Final Fantasy XV opens with Noctis and his friends about to do battle with a mysterious pyrokinetic entity before taking you back to the very beginning of the game. This shows up later as the penultimate boss battle.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening you start the game in one of the last chapters of the story before jumping to the prologue. Although, unlike the other examples on this page, this was a premonition of events by one of the main characters and presumably a future memory about how things went wrong in the Bad Future.
  • Fire Emblem Echoes, the remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden, also does this twice:
    • In the beginning, there's a cutscene that shows how Alm kills Celica with his sword. Then the game goes back in time to tell why he did it.
    • The cutscene where Celica dreams of Alm fighting with the Emperor is also this.
• Flippin Kaktus: At the end of the first level (which is set in 1984), the cactus meets a donkey who decides to tell the player the story that lead the cactus to where he is in the present. The second level then states that it's set in 1914.
• In Freedom Planet, Milla's Story Mode has her being captured after clearing the first stage, then Neera captures her and takes her to the cell with Lilac and Carol, after a message "28 hours ago...", and another cutscene, the second stage starts.
• The campaign of Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars starts off with a Forced Tutorial of two soldiers in a mission with no explanation of why they were there in the first place except a few dialogue. After which the actual campaign starts in the beginning. Four-fifth through the game, the tutorial mission got to be replayed again as an actual mission near the end of the story.
• God of War:
  • God of War begins with the protagonist attempting to commit suicide, with the rest of the game leading up to why.
  • God of War III begins with Kratos declaring "my vengeance... ends now." It's not until the end of the game we see who he's saying it to.
• Halo:
  • Halo 3: ODST is practically built around this trope. You begin the game several hours after the battle has been lost, having been knocked unconscious during the opening cutscene. Much of the game is spent searching for clues as to what happened that day, whereupon you play flashback levels from the perspective of one of your team-mates.
  • Halo: Reach begins with a shot of Noble Six's damaged helmet lying on a devastated Reach. The shot quickly transitions to their POV of holding the same, undamaged helmet, and them putting it on as they arrive on Reach a month earlier. The rest of the game shows the fall of Reach to the Covenant from Six's perspective, ending in their death and on the same shot as the opening.
• Heavenly Sword begins with Nariko facing down King Bohan's entire army with the title sword, which tries to kill her at the end of the scene before it flashes back to how she got to this point.
• In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, that opening trailer is the final battle of the individual character stories with some scenes added, and the rest of the game is showing how things led to that battle.
• In Knack II, the opening chapter shows Knack defending Newhaven from a robot rampage, and the next twelves chapters take place 6 months earlier before returning to the opening in the second part of Chapter 13.
• The Last Airbender has this happen after the first chapter. Zuko narrates about what happened to him and Aang that led to his ship getting blown up.
• The Left 4 Dead tie-in comic for The Sacrifice begins with Bill severely wounded and surrounded by three Tanks. Just as said Tanks charge at him, the comic cuts to one week earlier and eventually reveals how Bill ended up in his situation after he and the other Survivors were taken into military custody at the end of Blood Harvest.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero opens with Lloyd and the team entering the base where the organization responsible for most of the crimes they resolved is located and prepare to put an end to it, with the story shifting back to the start of Lloyd's arrival in Crossbell and following the events leading up. However, it is revealed in the sequel that the introduction was the lead-in to a Bad Future where the team was killed by the Big Bad, causing Kea to have a Traumatic Superpower Awakening to move time back to the beginning. In the process, making alterations that would allow Estelle and Joshua, along with Renne to rescue them at the right moment.
• The Longest Five Minutes starts out with your party staring face-to-face with the Demon King, but The Hero suddenly comes down with a case of Easy Amnesia at the worst possible time. The majority of the game is told through flashbacks consisting of mini-quests that cover the length of The Hero's Journey while his teammates try desperately to get him to remember everything he's fighting for.
• Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure opens with a cutscene immediately before the final boss fight. The rest of the game is a flashback.
• Max Payne:
  • The first game opens this way, with Max completing a shot with a sniper rifle in the opening cinematic, and then flashing back to the Back Story, eventually starting the gameplay somewhere in the middle.
  • The second game, The Fall of Max Payne, opens the same way, with an injured Max laying with Mona on the floor of a mansion with police moving in, and then flashing back to how they ended up there. Which, in turn, opens with a wounded Max trying to escape from a hospital, and then flashes back to how he ended up there for all of Part I and Part II.
  • The third game opens with a Match Cut from Max's new apartment to the airport hangar from the final mission. Before we find out who the mutilated guy on the ground is, the game flashes back to the beginning of the story.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty begins with Solid Snake as the narrator reminiscing of the events of the Tanker chapter.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots shows Snake at a graveyard (the same one from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater) in its main menu, about to kill himself. The scene is partially explained part of the way through the game, but is not fully shown until the epilogue, where Snake cannot bring himself to commit suicide, and Big Boss, having previously been thought to be dead, shows up to explain the events of the game, and to tie up any remaining loose ends in the series.
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War begins with a brief recap of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor that can be effectively summarized as "Talion, dead wife, dead son, Celebrimbor, new Ring".
• Midnight Fight Express starts with Babyface being interrogated by Agents Smithman and McCloon about the events of the game leading up to his arrest, with the game finally catching up at Mission 37.
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge opens with Guybrush dangling from a rope over a deep, dark pit, while hanging onto a treasure chest. Love interest Elaine Marley slides down on another rope and asks how Guybrush got himself into this mess. Has the advantage that at the one point in the game where's it's theoretically possible for Guybrush to die, the game returns to this scene for Elaine to point out the incongruity and you get to go back for another go.
• Octopath Traveler: Each party member besides your chosen hero is encountered in the middle of their first chapter. Recruiting them will give you the option to go through the beginning of their story until you reach the point where they're about to enter an area with Random Encounters, which is when your party first meets them.
• Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee begins with Abe tied up and looking miserable, a voice over delivered by Abe explains the situation he's in and proceeds to explain how he got there which makes up the entire game. Fortunately, by the end, he rescues enough of his fellow Mudokons for them to repay the favor, save him, and take down his employer once and for all.
• Persona:
  • In Persona 3, the FES epilogue "The Answer" begins with an unexplained but fierce battle between Akihiko and Aigis, while Metis and Ken are seen fighting in the background. Much of the subsequent game is Aigis recounting the events that led up to what she obliquely calls "the incident".
  • Persona 5 begins in the middle of a heist which ends with the Protagonist, a Phantom Thief, being captured by the police, because one of his allies sold him out. The police then drug him and rough him up before public prosecutor Sae Niijima comes in and begins interrogating the Protagonist. The calendar then moves back 6 months as the Protagonist recounts how he and his friends got their powers and became the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, occasionally cutting back to the interrogation months later before eventually catching up. Getting a Nonstandard Game Over by failing to complete story dungeons on time is explained as the Protagonist's mind being too addled by the drugs to give a proper retelling, but when Sae steps out to let the Protagonist recover, he's assassinated.
• Pitfall: The Lost Expedition opens up with you fighting against the demon jaguar, the semifinal boss, 500 years in the past, only to wind up pinned and about to get your head bitten off, while Pitfall Harry says "They say that when a giant demon jaguar is about to terminate your existence, your life flashes before your eyes..." The movie then pauses before flashing back to twenty-four hours previous, in present-day 1935, and the game up until you reach the demon jaguar is buildup to that point.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opens as The Prince relates his story to Farah, and takes place almost entirely in the flashback thus framed. Each time you die, The Prince says something like, "That didn't happen," or "Wait, let me go over that part again." The same words the Prince first uttered at The Sands of Time are also the last words he says at the end of The Two Thrones, making the entire Sands of Time Trilogy a how-we-got-here story.
• [PROTOTYPE] opens with Alex Mercer rampaging through Manhattan, with no explanation why. After killing a military commander in Times Square, we cut to a scene on a rooftop where Mercer and a shadowy behind the scenes person are having a discussion about how things led up to the present (New York being a total hellscape). We then flashback to the start of the outbreak and move forward.
• The Punisher: Basically the entire game up until the final level is this. All the levels are a series of flashbacks told by Frank to Detective Martin Soap and Lieutenant Molly Von Richtofen in an interrogation room in Ryker's Island Prison.
• Chapter 1 of Rakenzarn Frontier Story is Makoto narrating his life thus far, how he ended up in the dungeon he started the Prologue in and how he escaped from the boss at the end.
• Resident Evil 6: Leon's campaign mode begins with him and Helena trying to survive the catastrophe in China. The prologue stops right before the final battle against Simmons while the rest of the chapters show how they got up to that point.
• In Romancing SaGa 2, the bard is retelling the tale of your empire in the pub of said imperial city. The Emperor you chose at the beginning of the game is in the same room, speaks to the bard at the end of the game and reminisces of all the allies and classes the player has met and recruited based on what events were cleared.
• Sacrifice: The entire story is a flashback, told by Eldred after he rescues Mithras from the ruined world shown in the intro. Notable in that the game has a branching storyline, but the outcome is set: No matter which god you serve, the world's going to end up a wreck. Similar to Prince of Persia above, the narrator comments "Now where was I... ah yes." when loading or "Of course, that's not what really happened." when restarting. He's also at one point interrupted by Mithras demanding that he explain something else about the Big Bad.
• Saints Row IV opens to a person in full-body armor sitting upon a throne. That scene is from the ending, after the Boss kills Zinyak and takes over his empire.
• Sam & Max:
  • Done to great comedic effect in Sam & Max: Night of the Raving Dead. Sam and Max are in a deathtrap with spikes closing in on them. Max states "I can't even remember how we got here!" and Sam calmly narrates the story that the player is about to see. When the player eventually reaches the deathtrap, Sam says just as calmly "Oh, drat. I was so busy telling the story, I forgot to come up with an escape plan!" at which point the trap closes, killing them both. Fortunately, they come back as zombies and are thus able to thwart the schemes of Big Bad Jurgen.
  • Played with in Sam & Max 301: The Penal Zone, when Max uses the future-vision goggles to see how he and Sam are going to defeat General Skunkape. Skunkape then subverts it by using the goggles to discover their plan and promptly throw a spanner in the works.
  • Sam & Max 302: The Tomb of Sammun-Mak uses this as a game mechanic. You find the skeletons of your ancestors in the basement of your building together with some movie reels that contain the story of what happened to them. You can play the reels out of order to get hints on what happened further along in the story and then you go back to an earlier reel to play out the story as it happened. The final reel is one big How We Got Here since you have to explain how you solved all the other reels in order to progress.
• Twisted in the game Second Sight, where you play as John Vattic, waking up in the hospital with the sudden power of telepathy. Periodically throughout the game, you suffer flashbacks to an adventure you had in Russia, where you were acting as a paranormal specialist (with a strong disbelief in psychic powers). The twist is that flashbacks are usually triggered by discovering something that triggers your memory, but (really quite minor spoiler) after what happens in the flashback doesn't match the information you received, (i.e. some one you knew supposedly dying in Russia), the information changes to reflect your memory (same example- the person's records listing them as alive, now). And then, of course, (major spoiler:) he later discovers that his list of psychic powers actually includes precognition, and that all the events from waking up in the hospital on are actually a possible future that he is foretelling will happen if he doesn't change it, and his supposed flashbacks are the actual events as they unfold.
• The prologue of the Serious Sam 4 places the player in the middle of the Tunguska Offensive, a massive war between the Earth Defense Force and Mental's Horde in front of a gigantic portal built by the latter in the Siberian countryside. The player gets to briefly push back against the invaders with Sam Stone's full arsenal of weapons unlocked, before an unknown villain suddenly arrives and knocks Sam out cold. This entire sequence takes place right before the Final Boss fight and the rest of the game shows how Sam got to this point, as well as who this villain is.
• Shadow Guardian begins with your hero, Jason Call, waking up in the villain Dr. Novik's lab. The rest of the game, save for the final stage, is told in flashbacks on how you got yourself into this mess.
• Slender: The Arrival: Throughout the game, the player (aka Lauren) finds letters from CR to Kate talking about both characters' growing conditions. Towards the end, it's revealed that Kate was turned into one of Slender's proxy and CR committed suicide by setting himself on fire.
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves follows the series tradition of a setup/prologue level, though in this case, it's the huge caper that will make Sly's career and recover his family fortune. At the end of the prologue, Sly is caught by the Big Bad's ultimate monster; the opening cutscene and the first six main levels are his life flashing before his eyes, as he assembles his ultimate team of thieving experts for the vault job. The final level opens on the same scene, as Sly's strength starts to fail him, but the gameplay picks up with Carmelita riding to the rescue.
• Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric starts with Sonic being blasted by Lyric's forces, falling down a pit and being covered by rocks as his friends watch. The game then flashes back some time before then to show how that situation came about.
• The opening of Spec Ops: The Line features a helicopter chase that ends with the player's helo getting hit and a cut to black. You replay it at the end of Chapter 12, where it's lampshaded by Walker.
  Walker: We did this already!
• Spider-Man: Web of Shadows starts with New York shown to be completely overrun with monstrous symbiotes creatures, while Spider Man desperately searches for Mary Jane. But before he can reconcile with her, he is absorbed by a humanoid figure, with the story shifting back four days explaining the events leading up to it.
• Spongebob's Atlantis Squarepantis, based on the episode of the same name, opens with Plankton rampaging through Atlantis in a tank before reaching the Palace where the gang is. Spongebob and Patrick then reminisce how they ended up in this mess until that point. Even said word-for-word by Patrick when the game returns to that point.
• The first level of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron follows Bumblebee as the Ark departs Cybertron, before the Decepticon warship attacks, leading him on a quest through the Ark, ultimately ending with Bumblebee Taking the Bullet for Optimus. The second mission then cuts back to a week prior, with the game going through the events leading up to the Autobots launching the Ark, with the final level occurring concurrently to the first level following Soundwave, Jetfire, Bruticus and Jazz before reaching the end of the first level from Optimus and Megatron's perspective, before finishing with a final fight.
• Treasures Of The Aegean: The game begins with Marie and James being held at gunpoint by a mysterious woman. Some banter is exchanged, and then the scene cuts to black right as the gunwoman fires. Then it flashes back several hours to when the island appeared off the Santorini Coast at 7:05 AM.
• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves begins with Nathan Drake, bleeding out from his stomach, barely holding on to a train car that's hanging precariously over the edge of a cliff in a snowy mountain range, and the game uses the opportunity to teach you how to climb stuff. The game then flashes back and forth between that point and four months prior when everything started, and eventually sticks you back four months ago and goes from there. You get back to the hanging train car about halfway through the game. And then you have to climb it again, with Nate complaining about all the spoilery stuff you wouldn't have known about at first, such as Chloe refusing to be rescued from Lazarevic and how his "hero" efforts aren't appreciated and how he is just sick of climbing shit...
  • Also, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End begins with Nathan and Sam facing the stormy waters while chased by the enemies on boat. The gameplay starts out controlling Nathan steering the boat and shooting at the enemy until crashing on shore. Unlike Uncharted 2, you don't have to do the same thing again once you get to this point of the game which skips to getting marooned with Nate and Sam getting separated.
• In the remake of Wild ARMs, the first two minutes is about a group of people with a giant structure and a reunion of sorts. The rest of the game then tells how events happened. Thankfully, they don't spoil Zed being a party member, although it does spoil Rudy's left hand.
• The Wind Road begins with you falling hundreds of miles into the spirit realm. You spend a whole level in there, and after completing the stage you get the next stage, "7 Days ago". The gameplay catches up with the intro somewhere in the middle.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The opening of the game turns out to be an example of this. Initially, we see Noah, Lanz, Eunie, and Joran as children running through the town square during the Queen's centennial, before time freezes around Noah and he witnesses a planet moments away from colliding with his world. When Origin is reset at the end of the game and allows for the worlds of the Bionis and Alrest avoid colliding with each other, we see in the The Stinger Noah once again staring at the oncoming planet before things seemingly return to normal, meaning the events of 3 happened within that single instant. Noah seemingly remains none the wiser...until he hears the sound of Mio's flute and walks away in its direction, implying that the worlds are still connected. Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed confirms that both worlds successfully merged in its own post-credits scene, meaning the Bionis and Alrest are now one world again.

• The Kiwami remake of Yakuza has a variation of this. In the original version, Nishikiyama is only briefly shown as one of Kiryu's closest friends before he becomes a ruthless, ambitious crime boss a decade later. Kiwami adds extra cutscenes after most of the chapters, showing his slow downfall for his personal life and subsequent ascension within the Tojo Clan in detail.
  • Chapter 1 of both versions spend most of the time showing what Kiryu was up to the night of Sohei Dojima's murder, and the circumstances that led to his arrest and imprisonment.