The Mole / Video Games

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• In Alpha Prime there is Coral Snake. Your first hint of them being the Mole is while watching a report from the villain requesting permission to terminate them because he no longer trusts them, and he later warns you not to trust them. The latter half of the game deals with the main characters accusing each other, finally leading the hero to wonder if the villain made up Coral Snake to turn the heroes against each other. He didn't. Coral Snake turns out to be Livia, who was working for the villain's superiors the whole time. Though she probably didn't have nice plans for the villain either.
• In Alpha Protocol, Mina is a mole for the NSA, tasked with looking into the Alpha Protocol operation and bringing it down. Parker is Halbech's mole within Alpha Protocol, Omen Deng is a Deep Cover Agent for Taiwan, Surkov is Halbech's real arms supplier in Russia, Scarlet is the assassin sent to kill President Sung, and it's heavily implied that Steven Heck was the one who set up the assassination plot in the first place. Plus there's all the traitors within the organizations you fight who are willing to sell you intel on their friends.
• In Among Us, there can be up to three Impostors, who are to blend in with the crew and pretend to run tasks. While they can sabotage equipment, they can also fix it subsequently, in order to gain trust with the crewmates.
• In Anachronox, the first person who joins your party, Grumpos is The Mole and has the symbol of the Dark Servents under his beard but it is not revealed until the final cutscene when he activates The Fountain Spiral to free the Dark Servents. The player generally suspects nothing, the only foreshadowing is when he refuses to go to Limbus, a planet which has experience with the Dark Servents and so would recognise him, but since he plays it as being afraid because of the place's reputation, it's not telling.
• In Arcanum the Mole is immediately (and unnecessarily) lampshaded by The Lancer as soon as he offers to join. If you gather the right information to convince the leader of the entire organization to do a Heel–Face Turn, then he confesses and asks to remain in your party, otherwise he invites you to an ambush ("There's something I must tell you, but you must come alone! Otherwise the information will be lost forever!")
• ARMA 2 had CDF officer Nikola Nikitin, whose treachery gets Razor Team captured. And after Miles trusts Nikitin enough to get them into this mess, Lopotev shoots Miles.
• Assassin's Creed
  • Lucy Stillman in Assassin's Creed is an employee of Abstergo Industries, an organization run by the Templars It's revealed at the end of the first game that she's actually an Assassin who was protecting Desmond the whole time, and helps him escape Abstergo at the beginning of the second game. The third game in the series, Brotherhood, drops some hints that she may actually be a double agent working for the Templars after all. The DLC pack for Revelations, "The Lost Archives", gives more background confirming that Lucy had done a Face–Heel Turn from undercover agent pretending to work for the Templars while secretly working for the Assassins, to Double Agent helping Desmond escape and feeding info back to the Templars, as a result of feeling like she had been abandoned by the Assassins She was the mole feeding the info that resulted in many of the Assassin teams being compromised mentioned in e-mails in Brotherhood. This is why Juno forced Desmond to stab her at the end of Brotherhood.
  • In Assassin's Creed III, William and Desmond discuss the fact that despite being all about subterfuge and working from the shadows, the Assassins themselves are absolutely terrible as moles due to the fact that their agents are either too weak-willed to resist defection or they're too strong-willed to avoid exposing themselves.
  • In Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the evidence seems to point La Volpe towards Machiavelli being the mole, but it really is some one-eyed thief briefly glimpsed in the first Sequence.
  • In "The Lost Archives" DLC of Assassin's Creed: Revelations, it's revealed that Lucy Stillman was a Templar sleeper agent since before the original Assassins Creed.
• Baten Kaitos is an interesting case in that the mole is the main character, and you don't know until the second disc. He goes on to become The Dragon for a while until his defeat at the hands of his former friends, and then performs a genuine Heel–Face Turn.
• Baldur's Gate II
  • Yoshimo is forced to spy on you due to a curse Irenicus put on him. Interestingly enough if you kick him out of the party before you visit Spellhold and then visit him when you're done he'll die as soon as you come near him.
  • During the Underdark episode, if you choose to spare Solaufein when Phaere wants him dead, he'll reveal that he's a follower of Elistrae, one of the few good-aligned deities of the drow pantheon, and is struggling to find redemption for his people.
• Black Closet starts off with one of your student council members being a traitor, sabotaging your efforts to maintain order at the Academy. The game determines which character is the traitor at random, and each potential traitor has their own motivation for acting as a mole:
  • Althea does it because she wanted to see if she could, likening her treasonous actions to seeing what it would take to see a house of cards fall over.
  • Vonne makes cryptic remarks about how "you can't see what's in front of your face." Since you've been spending time with her to determine her loyalties, there's the implication that she's betraying you out of frustration stemming from your failure to pick up on her feelings for you.
  • Rowan does it because, coming from more humble, poorer origins than you or the other classmates, she's jealous of how everyone else at the school has so much while she has so little, as well as resentment over being viewed as a "charity case".
  • Thaïs does it because she believes her older sister, Althea, would be a better student council president than you. She also reveals she had been planning to betray Althea, anyway, because she was jealous of how much more popular Althea was and wanted to see her humbled.
  • Mallory does it because she hates attending this school, viewing it as being filled with rich and "snooty" girls who are always mean, with your underhanded methods at keeping order and maintaining the school's reputation seemingly confirming this. If she sabotaged you and sunk the school's reputation, her parents would have to withdraw her from the school.
• In BlazBlue, Makoto Nanaya starts out as an Intelligence operative for the Novis Orbis Librarium, but upon discovering the Awful Truth about her best friend Noel, works as one for Sector Seven.
• In Blue Dragon, Nene reveals that Zola was working for him all along...until it turns out that she at some point made a Heel–Face Turn and only pretended to be on his side so she could get close and kill him.
• Angel in Borderlands 2 is revealed to be a spy for Hyperion when the player plugs Wilhelm's power core into Sanctuary's defense systems and she uses it to lower the shields. She spends the next few chapters trying to apologize and convince the player that she's still their ally.
• Scias from Breath of Fire IV. Though to be fair, he never was supposed to be on their side in the first place - apparently the party sort of forgot that he was the guard assigned to keep an eye on them. Fortunately, Scias takes his orders literally. He was told to keep an eye on them, not to stop them from leaving the castle. He points this out to his employer, who, annoyed, has to agree that Scias fulfilled his contract. At which point Scias gives the money back when he has a case of Becoming the Mask.
• Call of Duty
  • In Modern Warfare 2, Joseph Allen becomes one in Makarov's organization for the CIA. It doesn't end well.
  • In Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Farid is one in Cordis Die for the CIA. It doesn't end well.
• In Carmen Sandiego: Math Detective, you are the mole in the game's opening, infiltrating a VILE headquarters to learn about Carmen's latest scheme. However, you are exposed almost immediately and have to seal yourself in the room where Carmen's latest theft device is kept, using it as the Hub Level.
  Carmen Sandiego: Well, well well. It seems we have an unexpected guest. Or should I say, an uninvited pest. Get the ACME Infiltrator!
• Celestial Hearts: After the midpoint of the game, Achilles reveals that he was working for the witch, Silnastra, all along and was working for the Graveharts in order to spy on Lilith.
• Nox from Child of Light. When first encountered, she uses the pseudonym "Norah" and appears to care about her stepsister Aurora and fights alongside her, guiding Aurora to the Magic Mirror that would take her home... but instead it leads Aurora to the Big Bad Umbra, who reveals she married Aurora's father so she could kill his daughter, as Aurora's mother banished Umbra's mother from Lemuria long ago. At this point, "Norah" reveals her real name and status as one of Umbra's daughters, and declares that she never considered Aurora family. It gets worse: it is heavily implied that Nox is responsible for the death of Genovefa's parents and the rest of her race that leaves her as the Last of Her Kind, as the ogre that ate them said he was guarding the door to the Temple of the Sun, where Nox resides after betraying Aurora.
• Schwartz in Code of Princess. After hearing that the fallen angel Distille was on the verge of being brought back he defected to the Distron Army (which was lead by her in her human guise as Queen Distiny) with the intention of stopping her and destroying them from within. Unfortunately for him, Distiny eventually caught on to what he was doing and had him brainwashed into fighting for her army as Liongate.
• The major subplot of the first Crusader game was that there was evidently a mole at the Resistance base. The character—and, in some cases, the player—didn't find out it was Major Vargas until one of the last missions of the game, at which point the damage had been done.
• The currently unplayable Darkspore uses a heroic version of this trope; Jinx joined the Nocturni Legion with the intention of betraying them horribly once she was of a high enough rank among them.
• Xian Mei of Dead Island is...something along these lines. A mole for Chinese special forces spying on the island, throughout the games she evolves from a freaked survivor to hardened warrior to the point it's hinted that she's always been this way. Before the outbreak, she worked as a handler for an assassin recovering information, and last we see of her she's lost any interest in a possible cure, seeking instead to destroy any possibility of the virus spreading.
• Deus Ex, being a pastiche of conspiracy theories, has a large number of moles, starting with the mole paramilitary group UNATCO, working for MJ12 and tycoon Bob Page working for himself. On a more personal level there's Harley Filben, working for the NSF UNATCO - or, more accurately: the Illuminati MJ12 and Morgan Everett's mechanic, who places a bomb on Jock's helicopter.
• In Diablo III, Adria turns out to be the high priestess of Diablo, with whom she conceived Leah for the sole purpose of being Diablo's vessel to be reborn as the Prime Evil.
• In Dissidia Final Fantasy, Golbez turns out to be working for Cosmos, and serves as a Stealth Mentor to a few of the heroes. Kuja was also one of these with a similar role in the prequel, but Kefka found out and loaded him up with malicious Fake Memories to get him to knock it off for the events of the original.
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the Iron Bull is supposed to infiltrate the Inquisition on behalf of the Qunari's Ben-Hassrath. Subverted in that he straight up tells the Inquisitor that's what he's supposed to do as he figures they're too competent not to figure it out on their own, and this way he can act as an unofficial liaison between the Inquisition and the Qunari.
• In Duel Savior Destiny it becomes clear early on that the forces of Ruin have some sort of agent inside the academy, though their identity isn't uncovered until some time later. The mole, Downy Reed, almost acts offended when accused of being a traitor. After all, to be a traitor requires being on your side in the first place.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Morrowind: The game seems to love this trope.
    • Sjoring Hard-Heart, leader of the Fighters Guild, is actually a Camonna Tong agent, and two of the sub-leaders are his assistants. He's leading the Tong's war on the Imperial import Thieves' Guild. You can either help him eradicate the Thieves Guild or help the second-in-command of the Fighter's Guild expose and eliminate him.
    • One Mages Guild quest requires you to root out a potential Telvanni spy: It's Tiram Gadar, Archmage Trebonius' personal assistant. Other instances include a quest for House Hlaalu has you delivering new orders to their spy watching the Redoran: Bivale Teneran, the high-class tailor in Ald'ruhn. And even though one doesn't formally come up in the Thieves Guild questline, you can find a few Thieves Guild members deep undercover at the Camonna Tong HQ, the Dren Plantation.
    • You can temporarily be this — the Tribunal Temple is a joinable faction, and there is a period in the Main Quest where you work with the Nerevarine Cult (which is persecuted by the Temple) and the Dissident Priests (a dissident faction of the Temple) without that being known to the Temple mainstream (once it becomes known, you can't join or use the Temple's services, but you're not actually expelled). You can't actually do any Mole-ish things... unless you get to the highest Temple rank (Patriarch — you're still outranked by the Archcanon and Vivec himself, which is why you can be suspended later on) in time for a specific quest, where you can use that rank to simply walk right into the Temple's high-security prison.
  • In Oblivion, several of the random citizens in Cyrodiil are actually Mythic Dawn cultists. Usually, you won't discover this until your actions make the Mythic Dawn faction sufficiently mad at you that they start to attack you on sight, although you may find this out ahead of time - say, if you burgle their house and find a set of cultist robes, or if they get attacked by something and blow their cover by summoning their trademark armor.
  • In Skyrim, the Forsworn (a group of Reachmen terrorists) are revealed to have agents living among the population of major cities within or near the Reach who act as spies and assassins.
• One side quest in Fallout: New Vegas involves exposing a Legion double agent posing as an NCR captain.
• Reeve, aka Cait Sith in Final Fantasy VII, though he's in the middle of a Heel–Face Turn when it's revealed.
• Finding Light: In the ending, it turns out that Zamas created Gi as an offshoot of himself to spy on humanity, and Gi becomes one with Zamas again in the ending in order to transfer his new knowledge to the latter.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Katarina, real name Reese, from Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem is a spy assigned to assassinate Marth. However, she can be convinced to defect later on.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, Leila serves as a mole to spy on the Black Fang. Ephidel knows and has Jaffar kill her for it.
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance reveals rather early on that there is a mole in the player's party, but who they are is ambiguous. Potential candidates include Volke and Nasir, based on the timing of the reveal, and Sothe, based on the timing of his appearance and his seemingly-flimsy excuse for stowing away on the ship, but when Soren confronts Nasir over the possibility during a mid-game conversation, Nasir basically shrugs him off and implies that Soren is hiding something. It turns out to have been Nasir all along, but the game does a really good job of making it ambiguous as to who the real one is: to the extent that you may not be using either of the playable units under suspicion until it all clears up for fear of them backstabbing you mid-chapter. It doesn't help that Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones had exactly that happen, so people who played that game knew that the developers weren't above such trickery.
  • This becomes a plot point on every path in Fire Emblem Fates, with varying levels:
    • In Birthright, it turns out that The Mole is done twice - first with Zola who is taken as a captive, but legitimately wants what's best for Corrin, even begging Garon to spare their life. After Zola is removed from the equation, however, it's revealed much later that Takumi is this trope unintentionally.
    • Corrin and Azura are suspected of being this in Conquest, but they eventually earn Garon and Iago's respect.
    • In Revelation, an important plot point in the game's third act is the fact that Scarlet is killed upon entry to Valla, and the group is constantly bombarded by ambushes and traps. As it turns out, there are two, Anthony and Gunter. The former was made as one and the latter is possessed by Anankos, and he even kills Scarlet while attempting to take Corrin's life.
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Tomas, the elderly librarian, and Monica, the "other" girl you rescue at the end of Chapter 6 are actually agents of the cult known as "those who slither in the dark".
• In the HD remake of Flashback, Ian, the scientist in New Washington supposedly helping Conrad regain his memories, is later revealed to be one of the Morph aliens.
• Front Mission loves this trope. Most of the PMO are ignorant of what goes on in Sakata Industries, being on the outside looking in. But there are those Moles who are well aware of such things, including President Koichi Sakata himself!
  • It is unclear which group Colonel Olson fits in.
  • Chairman Reiji Sakata, suspected as being a bad guy, turns out to be a heroic mole who finally reveals his position upon learning that his own son is behind most of the evil.
  • The Big Bad Driscoll is The Mole and Smug Snake who joyously torments anyone and everyone who knows the truth.
• Galaxy Angel: In the third game, Eternal Lovers, Wein turns out to actually be a Val-Fasc agent in disguise, sent to infiltrate the Elsior by pretending to be Lushati's brother, and successfully sabotages Tact's romantic partner by driving a wedge between them on top of stealing Unit #7 with the Chrono Break Cannon and using them against the heroes. However, his obsession with learning about human hearts, coupled with him apparently getting too much into his role as Lushati's brother, led him to pull a Heel–Face Turn when his superiors order Lushati to be executed, and he ends up bringing her back to the Elsior, albeit at the cost of his own life.
• GrimGrimoire has two. Margarita for the Archmage Calvaros, and Bartido for another nation.
• Half-Life 2: Barney Calhoun is one for the Resistance, working undercover as a Civil Protection officer. Also, Doctor Judith Mossman betrays Black Mesa East to the Combine. Turns out, she was working primarily for herself and begins to help the Resistance more.
• The first Heavy Gear video game has Lieutenant Jennifer Brockton, who is, in fact, an AST agent posing as a member of the CNCS's 67th Regiment, and is the one responsible for murdering Colonel Arthur Janus' son, Henry. She becomes the game's Final Boss in the last level.
• Just Cause 4: Subverted: Rico floats the idea when Black Hand forces start popping up in places they shouldn't unless they knew about his plans but, no, it just turns out that their intelligence branch is clever enough to figure out that if an internationally renowned terrorist has stolen one of the things someone who intends to hit a specific high-value target needs, he's probably coming after other things someone with that goal in mind would need.
• An interpretation of Iwazaru in Killer7.
• After three games of questioning whose side Ash Crimson is on, The King of Fighters XIII eventually reveals him to be this for Those Of The Past. His ultimate plan is to earn Big Bad Saiki's trust until the moment he can stab him in the back and erase him from existence via a Temporal Paradox (even at the cost of his own existence due to Saiki being his distant ancestor.)
• Knight Bewitched 2: When the Cult of Drakon intercepts the party at Spore Marsh, they believe someone within Deepforge is feeding information to the cult. The traitor turns out to be Hermes, who is actually Lissandra's brother. Played with in that he always planned to take the Vulcan Stone from her so he can use it to restore her sanity, but at the cost of his own.
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has not one, but two moles: Eiji Mitamura and Chitose Fujinomiya. Mitamura is in on Palekana's plot to find and "erase" Lani, a young girl with a legitimate claim to the organization over the usurper Bryce Fairchild, and played Kasuga like a fiddle, Obfuscating Disability to play on his sympathies for the wheelchair-bound in order to help him find his mother Akane — and with her, Lani — for Bryce. As for Chitose: the Seiryu Clan, who is working with Palekana and whom Mitamura also has an in with, is blackmailing her into using her VTuber channel, Tatara Hisoka, to slander Kasuga, putting him in a position for his former associate and current Seiryu Clan captain, Sawashiro, to go to Hawaii and seek out Akane; then later outing Kiryu's survival. Chitose, at the very least, vows to make amends for her betrayal.
• Jansen Friedh of Lost Odyssey starts off the game as The Mole, but is very bad at it, probably as a result of just not caring that much about his employer's instructions. Not surprisingly, he quickly discovers that he likes Kaim and Seth a lot more than he likes his boss.
• Lufia:
  • In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, Iris is actually Erim, the Sinistral of Death. In the remake, Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, she has Become the Mask in New Game Plus.
  • In Lufia: The Legend Returns, it's Seena, though she only wants to put an end to the Sinistrals for good.
• In Lunar: The Silver Star, Nash eventually turns out to be a traitor who was working for Ghaleon, helping him spy on your every move. And depending on the version you played, Nash either turns out to be a double mole or has a Sex–Face Turn after the actions of another party member, Mia.
• Ghaleon from Lunar: Eternal Blue really seems to enjoy egging on the heroes... but that's because he secretly thinks they're the only hope against his boss, the Big Bad.
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance sees a subplot where the heroes suspect that the Black Widow is really a mole for Doctor Doom, only for Nick Fury to reveal that she was working on an off-the-books operations to get back some plans Doom stole—and The Stinger to reveal that Widow is indeed working against S.H.I.E.L.D..
• Mass Effect:
  • In the Mass Effect 2 DLC, Lair of the Shadow Broker there's Tela Vasir, an Asari spectre who acts as the mole to the Shadow Broker. Ironically she provides a boss fight that is arguably even tougher than the fight with the Broker himself
  • In Mass Effect 3, Udina becomes this.
  • Maya Brooks is revealed to be a Cerberus spy near the end of the Citadel Downloadable Content.
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne: Detective Valerie Winterson, Max's colleague at his NYPD precinct, is in league with the Big Bad Friend Vladimir Lem and attempts to kill Max at the end of the second act.
• Mega Man 7: Bass/Forte only sought to steal the armor parts intended for Mega/Rock Man. The antagonism (nothing more than mere rivalry) of this Mole, however, becomes more openly displayed from then on. He's also just an occasional Punch-Clock Villain, and the rivalry is put aside several times in many a temporary truce between the two as they unite against common menaces. Their final truce is implicitly permanent in Mega Man 10.
• Mega Man X4's Double initially introduces himself to X during the Maverick Hunters' conflict with their sister organization Repliforce as a rookie Maverick Hunter. He is small, clumsy and chubby, and seems pretty harmless. He presents X the 8 Repliforce bosses and acts every bit X's ally, even pleading with him to not go fight Repliforce's Colonel. However, once X has taken care of them and heads to their space station Final Weapon, Double receives a transmission from Sigma to stop the Hunters from reaching Final Weapon at all costs, right in the middle of being teased by some of the Reploids in X's unit who were gearing up to follow X into space. He then proceeds to transform into his TRUE form... An ass-kicking demonic-looking bot with laser blades on the back of his hands. Turns out he is actually semi-made of liquid metal a-la T-1000, and able to change between his real form and a smaller innocent looking one. He then proceeds to slaughter every single one of the Hunters in the Hangar in probably the most graphic scene ever put in a Mega Man game. He then goes to Final Weapon himself, and intercepts X in his small form, bursting out laughing, claiming both the Hunters and Repliforce as idiots. He transforms, much to X's shock, as he had trusted his new ally, and attacks him. After he is defeated, he reveals had been sent as a spy from the very beginning to keep an eye on X.
  • X8 has Lumine as this as well as the Big Bad. Even the original Maverick Mole, Sigma, is demoted to being a mere minion of Lumine.
  • Between the Red Alert incident and the Elf Wars, whether Dr. Weil's life was a Mole life or a Face–Heel Turn is never made clear.
• Heartless in MegaMan Star Force 3. She was pretending to be King's right hand woman but was really a former colleague of Kelvin Stelar and was using Dealer's resources to try to contact him. "Heartless", unsurprisingly, is not even her real name.
• Metal Gear has too many to count.
  • Ocelot deserves a mention here though, seeing he betrays someone in every single game.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
    • EVA, who was actually a spy for the Chinese. Due to Big Boss' amazing pheromones, she is eventually converted to his side and is extremely loyal, but that's later. As it turns out, it wasn't the Big Boss' pheromones that converted EVA, but the Boss'.
    • The Boss's defection turns out to have been a ruse intended to allow Snake the opportunity to steal the Philosophers' Legacy to the United States, which went horribly awry thanks to Colonel Volgin using an American weapon and aircraft she supplied to nuke his own countrymen. And in the non-canonical Snake's Revenge, Jennifer helps you while working with Big Boss from the inside.
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Paz and Kaz are revealed to be spies for Cipher, with the former presumed killed in the final battle against Zeke.
• Metroid: Other M: Apparently the Deleter aka James Pierce, although the evil thereof may just be false propaganda by the true Mole, "Melissa Bergman".
• In Middle-earth: Shadow of War, it is possible to create moles of your own to infiltrate enemy fortresses by sending in your brainwashed Orcs to gain positions under the local Overlord. This can result in a Fortress Battle where all of the defenses are being sabotaged by your operatives.
• Mirror's Edge:
  • Cpt. Miller seems to be in league with the Icarus conspiracy (or, at least, in their pocket) but actually has his own agenda and assists Faith in the final level.
  • Celeste Wilson turns out to working with Project Icarus, a joint operation between the CPF and Pirandello-Kruger that is training cops in the art of Le Parkour to bring down the Runners, and she is also the assassin of mayoral candidate Robert Pope.
• In Mission: Impossible for the N64 and PS1, Ethan is framed for being Max's mole in the CIA halfway through the game, then later it is revealed that the real mole is Phelps, as in the movie.
• Nancy Drew: In Danger By Design, Nancy finds evidence that a Frenchwoman thought to have been a WWII collaborator was actually covertly working to preserve and conceal some of France's artistic treasures.
• In Neverwinter Nights, Desther Indelayne served under Lord Nasher Alagondar when Neverwinter was infested by the Wailing Death. He has the complete trust of the elven cleric Fenthick Moss and was rather suspicious of the player character's motives. After the 4 Waterdhavian reagents are recovered and a cure was created, Desther and his false Helmite priests steal the cure, revealing that they are serving the cult of the Old Ones who were behind the Wailing Death.
• No Umbrellas Allowed:
  • At the start of Week 2, Merry Ki gives you a blacklist of people to be arrested by AVAC. One of them is Seon Gong, their newest member, and Merry suspects that she has an ulterior motive for working for them because he can't find anything about her background. It's revealed that she's a Fixerain fugitive from one of the affected cities, and she gets exposed and exiled for her undercover activity.
  • It's revealed at the end of Week 5 that the Amnesiac Hero is actually Jisu Cha depending on your choices, who was secretly making the cure for Fixer during his tenure at CARI. He lost his files in the fire and is wanted by AVAC for making "illegal drugs".
• Octopath Traveler II: Throné is led to believe that Scaracci sold the Blacksnakes out to Diamante, hence why their earlier heist failed. This is subverted when Pirro reveals that Mother and Father told Scaracci, Throné, and Pirro that one of the other two of them was a traitor. This was done to pit the three of them against each other, and make the one that comes out on top their successor.
• Reiko from Onechanbara 2. She's an agent of an organization that joins Aya in her attempt to rescue her half-sister, Saki. Turns out said organization is evil, and she tagged along so that when Aya defeated the villain that had kidnapped Saki, Reiko could eat her heart and gain Baneful Blood powers. However, since this game only came out in Japan and the PAL territories, most US players only know this from the summary of the previous games included in the guides and manuals for the US-released Onechanbara games.
• In Perfect Dark Zero, Chandra is secretly working for Zhang Li, which she reveals after killing Dr. Carroll. She herself is killed by Zhang at the end of the game to gain her life force.
• Persona:
  • In Persona 3, Ikutsuki, who was The Mentor to the S.E.E.S. team, turns out to have been pulling their strings. Defeating the Bosses of each month, which he claimed would end the Dark Hour, instead brought about the end of the world as they knew it.
  • Persona 5 opens with the police stating that someone within the Thieves sold you out, leading to your capture and interrogation. It's Sixth Ranger party member Goro Akechi, who's revealed to actually be The Dragon for the bad guys. In a further twist, the path to the good ending reveals that you and the rest of the Thieves knew he was the traitor the entire time, and that you deliberately let him sell you out as part of a plan to fake your death.

• Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy:
  • Early in the game, following up on a plot thread touched upon in "Miracle Mask", Simon Bloom is outed as Targent's mole in Scotland Yard.
  • Near the end, Emmy herself is revealed to have been a mole for Targent all along. OUCH.
• Psychonauts 2: An important plot line throughout the game is the adults trying to find the whereabouts of the mole in the Psychonauts, because only somebody within headquarters would have known how to kidnap Truman Zanotto. It's eventually discovered that the mail clerk Nick Johnsmith was the one behind Truman's kidnapping, and that "Nick Johnsmith" isn't even his real name at all! In truth, his real name is Gristol Malik, and his reason for infiltrating the Psychonauts was to find and "resurrect" his childhood hero Maligula back to his home country of Grulovia so she could help him return to his rightful position as the Gzar of the country.
• In Radia Senki Reimeihen, Saria turns out to be not only a spy for Nova but his own daughter. She ultimately makes a Heel–Face Turn, leading to Redemption Equals Death.
• Jenkins is this in Red Faction: Guerrilla. He's a variation of this though, in that he's not really with the EDF, but is simply batshit insane.
  • In the first game, Hendrix is one of these for the player and the titular Red Faction. He works as Ultor's security technician but secretly helps the Faction by providing them with information and hacking into Ultor's security systems.
• In Renegade Ops, Natasha, the scientist you've been charged with protecting for the first seven missions, turns out to be working for the same faction as Inferno. Furthermore, she's actually Inferno's superior, sent down by her organization to watch over him after one screw-up too many.
• Rescue on Fractalus! has aliens sometimes disguise themselves as human pilots, trying to trick you into "rescuing" them, only to kill you when you let your guard down.
• Albert Wesker from Resident Evil. Since being outed and subsequently "killed off", he returned as a superhuman, badass villain.
• Rise of the Third Power: One of the Cirinthian royal retainers, Phillip, is a spy for Arkadya. He uses his position to frame the party for assassinating the Cirinthian royal family, allowing him to become the acting regent.
• Rival Schools has three moles: Kyosuke Kagami in the first one, Yurika Kirishima and Momo Karuizawa in the second. Two of them (Kyosuke and Yurika), however, end up having changes of heart and befriend the people they targeted if you play the Story Modes involving the schools they infiltrate. Momo only has her Heel–Face Turn when the boss she loves and does her evil acts for tells her "You Have Failed Me!" and is saved from him by her targets.
• Romancing SaGa Red Mage, who really is Spite; one of the Minions of Saruin; but if you saw Red Mages' clothes, the golden buckles on his front and the red coat with blueish-green hue on it is a dead give away since that quest is late in the game and you may have already fought Strife and Scorn who have a similar design other than Spite who took a human form.
• In Sakura Wars (2019), Anastasia Palma, a member of the Imperial Combat Revue's Flower Division, turns out to be a subordinate of Genan Sotetsu and Yasha when she steals the Amamiya Kunisada for Genan at the end of chapter 6. However, Anastasia does pull a Heel–Face Turn after Yasha no longer deems her useful, and helps the Flower Division foil Genan's plans for good.
• The plot of the Sam & Max: Freelance Police episode "The Mole, The Mob and the Meatball" was for Sam and Max to find a mole who infiltrated ed E. Bear's Mafia Free Playland and Casino. Turns out the mole was an actual mole and he switched sides as the new Don.
• Done in Secret of the Stars, where it turns out that the Big Bad's Dragon has been working with the heroes all along to stop the Big Bad, and not so he can take over himself.
• Shining Force 2 had a blind, injured boy named Oddler who the party takes around with them for part of the game, and later turns out to be a greater devil named Odd Eye. Interestingly, he is a redeemable evil, as he sacrifices himself to pave the way to the Final Boss after the party defeats him in battle.
• Valentine of Skullgirls only works for Marie because her life is at stake if she resists Marie's orders. In the ending to her story mode, she ends up betraying Marie, and wishes to become the next Skullgirl only because she wants Painwheel to kill her to make up for what she's done.
• Sleeping Dogs (2012):
  • The main plot revolves around the protagonist Wei Shen being an undercover policeman within the Sun On Yee, but so deep undercover that at one point his handler voices suspicions that he'd "gone native", not least since he'd ended up killing to "prove" that he's not an undercover, and by that point had killed many, many more. Even the player is given doubt just where Wei's loyalties lie, given how well Wei fits in as a rising star in the Sun On Yee.
  • A minor subplot has a minor character reveal his belief that Wei is a cop... except this guy is himself a police informant.
• In StarCraft Brood War, Samir Duran helps the Terran forces at the early missions of the campaign. Halfway through the game, he manipulates the Terran Commander Gerard Dugalle that his childhood friend, Vice-Admiral Alexei Stukov was a traitor to the United Earth Directorate. Dugalle then gives Duran the mission to kill Stukov, after which Duran reveals himself as the real traitor and works with Sarah Kerrigan. Then the trope is fulfilled again when Duran betrays Kerrigan at a critical hour, later revealing himself as "a servant of a far greater power"
• Star Shift Rebellion: The ORC's Echo Base is compromised by the traitorous Sampson, allowing the ESA to kill most of the troops there.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Knights of the Old Republic:
    • While you could act like a typical Sith student in the academy on Korriban, for light-siders, it's often much more satisfying to quietly sabotage the Sith's every action from the inside out (for example, knocking out the Mandalorian prisoner at his request instead of torturing him, letting the rebellious students escape, calming a self-destructive droid instead of scrapping it, etc.), and still get the prestige that you would've gotten if you had actually been evil.
    • Alternatively, the ultimate in "destroy from within" consists of befriending Assistant Headmistress Yuthura and letting her walk back to the Light Side. After taking out Uthar, the rest of the academy destroys itself infighting upon discovering there's no one in charge.
  • In the Imperial Agent story of Star Wars: The Old Republic you spend the second act acting as a Republic Intelligence (called the SIS) mole inside Imperial Intelligence as part of an Imperial Intelligence plot to take down a particular team of SIS agents. And then things get complicated...
  • In the Onslaught expansion of The Old Republic, players have the option to betray their home faction and become this for the opposing side.
• Crimson Viper of Street Fighter IV appears to be one of S.I.N.'s Punch Clock Villains, but in actuality, it's hinted several times that she's actually an undercover CIA agent. This is outright stated in her profile for Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
• In Strife it's revealed about mid-way through the game that Macil has a piece of the Sigil. He must be dealt with to finish the game but when you do so determines which ending you receive.
• Sanchez, of Suikoden, turns out to be a traitor. He pledges allegiance immediately when discovered, and, despite his hand in some horrific events from Odessa's death to sabotaging the Resistance's raid on the Empire's most important fortress, the hero doesn't execute him on the spot. He does spend the rest of his life in a prison though. Really, you should have known: he has a face portrait and hangs around you, but is not one of the 108 warriors.
• Super Robot Wars
  • Super Robot Wars: Original Generation has a variation on this. He's really in with the good guys, but he's mentally programmed by the bad guys so that he can't do anything that directly goes against them. So he made a female clone of himself that doesn't have the programming before he activated.
  • The sequel does this with a twist. The Shadow Mirrors send Lamia Loveless, a robot created by the Mad Scientist Lemon Browning, to act as a mole to spy on Kyosuke Nanbu. The player knows she's a mole right off the bat, and the drama is that Lamia is becoming self-aware, and wonders if what she is doing is right.
  • In a twist for Super Robot Wars BX, Senchou isn't an agent working for the CIA. Instead, he's hired by the Vist Foundation.
  • In Shin Super Robot Wars, Nanai is more than a little uneasy about Neo Zeon's alliance with the Ze Balmary Empire, and Char admits that one mistake and all of mankind could become the Balmarians' playthings. He's willing to take that risk given that it will take time to assimilate the Balmarians' tech: he needs mankind to sit still until then. Nanai is willing to go along with this so long as Char loves her and helps keep construction of the Angel Halo on schedule.
• Leon Magnus in Tales of Destiny is technically a mole, but since he was officially put in the group to keep an eye on them, it's not a secret to anyone.
  • In Tales of Symphonia, there are no less than three people spying from within the party at various points. First you have Kratos, who betrays you in the fake ending. Next, you have the Big Bad himself, who uses his true form as a young boy to appear innocent and gain the party's trust, although at least he isn't an official party member. And finally, you have Zelos, who was spying on your party for both the Big Bad and La Résistance.
  • Subverted with Raine early in the game as well. Early on she laughs maniacally when exploring a ruin and even drools over an Exsphere complete with flat, psychotic eyes. It's revealed quite quickly (and Played for Laughs) that she's not evil, just really into ancient ruins.
  • We also have Raven from Tales of Vesperia, although he switches sides shortly after this is revealed.
  • Anise from Tales of the Abyss. However, after it is revealed that she is leaking information on the party's actions to the enemy, it is never brought up again.
  • Innes from Tales of Hearts, though like Raven, she quickly pulls a Heel–Face Turn in the same scene she's revealed to be this.
  • There's also Ricardo from Tales of Innocence. To be fair, he does have his own reasons, and doesn't take it well upon finding out what the Grigoris are about to do to the party. Man, the Tales series just loves this trope.
  • Alvin from Tales of Xillia. Unlike some of the other examples, he keeps playing both sides long after he's found out for the first time, only giving up on his ways towards the end of the game.
  • The Tales Series loves this trope so much, along with party member betrayal, that fans were legitimately shocked that Tales of Zestiria never had anyone turncoat on you or be revealed to be working for the Big Bad. Its prequel, Tales of Berseria, makes it seem like Magilou will be the traitor due to her suspicious behavior and an early game incident where she sold out Velvet to avoid interrogation. The real traitor turns out to be her Malak, Bienfu, who was forced to leak info on the party due to Melchior's Geas.
• In Team Fortress 2, this is the point of the Spy. You disguise as a member of the enemy team, infiltrate headquarters, act like an ally... and then stab your "teammates" in the back as soon as you get the chance.
• In the True Mastermind Edition of Time Crisis 5, it is revealed that the traitor and Big Bad of the game is Robert Baxter, who had sold out the VSSE to terrorist organizations around the world.
• A few examples occur in Vanguard Bandits. The game is clear that some are moles from the start, so the main question becomes who are they working for or when are they going to betray you. Or are they gonna betray you?
• In Wild ARMs 2, Antenora, Vinsfield's lover, turns out to have joined him to get revenge because he killed her parents. She goes about getting this revenge by making him love her, and then having the heroes kill her so that he'd be griefstricken by her death.
• WinBack: Covert Operations: Your squad leader, who happens to be the brother of the Big Bad that was offed by The Dragon turned traitor himself. Before the penultimate battle, he reveals that he sabotaged the helicopter, causing it to explode and faking his death, and that he killed the two teammates you found in the fridge.
• Wing Commander has several of them:
  • Zachary "Jazz" Colson, in Wing Commander II
  • From the manual for Wing Commander: Privateer, the story of a station destroyed by Retros involves one, named Furstenburg, that shut down the station's defenses at a critical moment, allowing the Retros to attack unimpeded.
  • Ralgha "Hobbes" nar Hhallas, in Wing Commander III
• Wolfenstein (2009) has this happen twice! The first is expected, the second isn't.
• In World of Warcraft, the Cataclysm expansion reveals that formerly relatively minor NPC Archbishop Benedictus is, and always has been, a fanatical member of the Twilight's Hammer cult that has been spying on Stormwind.
• In XCOM 2, the members of the Council of Nations from XCOM: Enemy Unknown have all pledged their loyalty to the alien-backed regime that now rules Earth, with one exception - the former Spokesman for the Council. Now known as the Informant, he uses his high-level connections to the ADVENT Coalition to give you tip-offs about Resistance figures who need rescue or evacuation, or alien collaborators to capture or eliminate. He's also the one to tip you off to the aliens' "Avatar Project" at the start of the campaign and warns you when the aliens' plans are accelerating at the end of it.
• Lapis Roman from Xenosaga appears to the player at first as a no-nonsense and brutally efficient Galaxy Federation officer who arrests all the playable characters. Later, during her "interrogation" of the prisoners, she reveals that she's working for the good guys, and helps them devise an escape plan and a way to clear their names.

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