Video Games / Tomato In The Mirror

People who aren't who they think they are in video games.

In a literal in-the-mirror moment at the end of The 7th Guest, Ego, the player character, is revealed to be Tad, the titular seventh guest.
The short interactive fiction 9:05 revolves around this concept. Hints to your real identity include the lack of a stereo or TV in the main room, and the broken lock on the front door. It turns out this isn't your house, that isn't your boss on the phone, and you stashed Hadley's body under the bed.
In the Japanese version of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, once all five endings are unlocked, the Omega Ending is unlocked, which reveals that the whole game was a simulation by Simon Orestes Cohen, and that the Player Character, Nemo, is an Artificial Intelligence that he created to destroy Abyssal Dision.
In AI: The Somnium Files, Player Character Date is an Amnesiac Hero who can't remember anything prior to six years ago, the same time as the serial killings he's investigating. He begins to suspect that he might be in this situation, but his boss and his Robot Buddy reassure him this isn't the case. This ultimately ends up being Zig-Zagged, as Date wasn't the real Serial Killer but ended up swapping bodies with the real one through a complex series of events, and the real killer would like his body back very much.
In AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, not only does Mizuki discover that her previously-inexplicable strength comes from genetic modifications, but she later discovers that she is actually a clone, with the Masked Woman being the "original" Mizuki.
In Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits, Kharg discovers that he is a human/demos hybrid.
This is alluded to in Arena.Xlsm, made in Microsoft Excel. After Kylem avenges Jake's death by killing his executioner, she says that the demons terrorize other people, but never bother her, as if they know she's now one of them. In one of the endings, she commits suicide, literally writing that she cannot bear to look at herself in the mirror, and that she's become what she hated.
Artery Gear: Fusion: Many Puppets are not aware they have become Puppetised and are no longer human. When an outside force finally makes them aware of this fact, they refuse to accept it.
One relatively early in Assassin's Creed III has the reveal that the Decoy Protagonist Haytham Kenway is actually a Templar, not an Assassin as Desmond et al thought. Desmond is naturally freaked out and extremely angry, given that Haytham is one of his ancestors.
Astra Hunter Zosma: In Aquila Arena, Zosma learns that the people that he helps are dead people who cannot pass on without having their wish granted. In Ophiuchus Obelisk, Nadir reveals that Zosma is as dead as all the other important characters in the tower. However, unlike the others, he can still recover his soul and return to the realm of the living.
Baldur's Gate:
- Baldur's Gate has the protagonist on the run, trying to figure out why everyone wants them dead. The discovery of a letter left by their adopted father reveals that they're a Bhaalspawn, a mortal offspring of the god of murder Bhaal, and destined to rain destruction on the world. This is reinforced (and in one case foreshadowed) when some of the Player Character's dreams has them looking in a reflective surface and seeing themselves with the same Black Eyes of Evil Bhaal had.
- In the sequel, Baldur's Gate II, the protagonist's childhood friend Imoen is eventually revealed to be a Bhaalspawn as well. The shock of this and the torture she'd been under briefly breaks her mind and she temporarily becomes an Empty Shell.
- In Baldur's Gate III, the Dark Urge is an Amnesiac Hero who suffers from an uncontrollable impulse that steers them towards murder and bloodshed, but cannot figure out why is it happening to them or how they can stop it. Upon the game's third act, they would soon discover that not only were they a Bhaalspawn much like Gorion’s Ward and Imoen from the previous games, but they were also responsible for the whole conspiracy surrounding the Cult of the Absolute and was originally one of its leaders before another Bhaalspawn, Orin the Red, usurped them and reduced the Dark Urge to a mere pawn for the Absolute by infecting them with a mind flayer tadpole.
Baten Kaitos Origins plays this in a really interesting and powerful manner: you're the tomato. Yes, you, the player...well, in a sense. That strange world that Sagi keeps getting sent to, where a bunch of people keep calling him Marno? That's you. You're actually playing the role of Marno's spirit, not a nameless Guardian Spirit...oh, and by the way, Marno is one-fifth of the Eldritch Abomination Malpercio. Yup, you're part of the dark god that helped ravage the world a millennium ago and is the final boss of the first, chronologically-second, Baten Kaitos. Don't you feel special?
BioShock
- A little over halfway through BioShock, the protagonist learns he's a genetically altered assassin, Andrew Ryan's secret love-child given Rapid Aging to maturity, and smuggled out of Rapture as a pawn in mobster Fontaine's complicated scheme to kill Ryan and take over the city.
- The Minerva's Den DLC from BioShock 2 ends with Alpha Series Sigma discovering that he is really Porter, who had been framed by Wahl and sent to Persephone, and the "Porter" who had been helping him was really the Thinker.
- BioShock Infinite utilizes this trope as well, considering that Comstock is really Booker DeWitt from an alternate timeline where he was baptized after the Battle of Wounded Knee and began his descent into darkness.
  - And the Burial at Sea DLC plays this trope completely straight, with the end of part 1 revealing that the "Booker" you've been playing as was actually a Comstock the whole time.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: Red knows the cyberhead on his body isn't his, as he's challenging DJ Cyber to get his original head, Faux, back. Near the end of each chapter, he has vivid hallucinations of his original self's life, including memories of whom he thinks is a stranger, until later chapters reveal he's not recalling Faux's memories at all: the memories are actually from the human head hiding within his cyberhead, whom also was the identity of the "stranger" he kept seeing. The memory he kept recalling was the night Faux killed him, and the decapitation that kicked off the plot was vengeance for it.
In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, this happens to Anonymous during the drama-filled seventh chapter. He and the rest of the party have been fighting dragons, living fragments of an ancient chaos god, that split into smaller forms when they're defeated. Finally, after a long and exhausting battle, the creatures have been whittled down to their smallest form...and they look just like him.
Braid
- The last level has Tim running a deadly gauntlet, with the Princess following above, disabling traps and opening doors. He reaches the end and rewinds time, revealing the truth: she was setting traps and closing doors, trying to keep him away from her.
- In the extra stories the player can follow when they go into levels and get to the end of the game reveals that the woman in the stories (or the princess) is a metaphor for the atomic bomb.
In Bug Fables, it's revealed in one sidequest that Leif, one of the members of Team Snakemouth, is not actually Leif, but merely a Cordyceps specimen that was created by sociopathic roach scientists in an attempt to create an immortal guardian, but they discarded it as a failure, and it eventually ended up possessing the real Leif's corpse, assimilating his memories and personality into itself. When he found out about it, he went into emotional breakdown, but then, thanks to his friends, he decided that, no matter what, even though he himself is not actually Leif, he became him and decided to continue living on in the name of the original Leif's legacy.
Brutal Orchestra has a twofer example, being a game about a dead man named Nowak who makes a Deal with the Devil with the oil-demon Bosch to get revenge on the man who killed him. Nowak comes across him, named in-game as This Pitiful Corpse, and it's not only revealed to actually be Nowak's still dying body as he's in a Dying Dream after a suicide attempt, but Bosch is also his own mind, or at least the intrusive negative thoughts he has. Sparing the dying man will get Nowak and Bosch to truly work together to make the time they have left meaningful.
In Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the Player Character nicknamed "Bell" is revealed to be an associate of Perseus that was nearly killed by one of his henchman early in the game. Found alive by Adler and the CIA, they decide to put them under the MKUltra program, planting fake memories to make them believe they were a Western agent so that they can uncover their secrets about Perseus. After the reveal, the player has the choice to either help the U.S. stop Perseus' plan to nuke all of Europe, or keep their loyalty to Perseus and betray the CIA.
In the campaign of Call of Duty: Black Ops, the player is encouraged to identify with the main protagonist, Mason, and almost all the missions take place from his POV. Throughout the game, you constantly see and interact with Reznov, one of the main characters from Call of Duty: World at War, as he encourages Mason to take out the three main villains at any cost. The player, who can only see what Mason observes, unless they are playing as Hudson, simply take Reznov's word for it, like Mason. However, there are subtle hints throughout the game that not all is as it appears, as no one else, minus the interrogator Hudson even acknowledges Reznov's presence. One even asks what is wrong with you. As it turns out in the big reveal, Reznov was never by your side. He had instead hijacked a brainwashing attempt on you in order to take revenge on the three main villains, hence his constant quote, "Dragovich, Kravchenko, Steiner. All must die", whenever he appears, and why only you acknowledge his presence. Indeed you were just simply following his commands.
In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Dracula is Killed Off for Real before the start of the game. Its main villain claims to be Dracula's reincarnation. He's not, the mysterious power possessed by the main character, Soma Cruz is Dracula's power, and Soma is Dracula reincarnated. Cue Enemy Within.
In Chaser, it's revealed at the very end of the game that "Chaser" is really Scott Stone, The Dragon to Big Bad Samuel Longwood. Stone killed the original Chaser before he could be interrogated, so Longwood used experimental technology to download Chaser's memories into Stone (who also underwent plastic surgery to look like Chaser) in order to infiltrate the Resistance. However, the process was screwed up due to an attack by Resistance commandos, resulting in Stone/Chaser having amnesia and only mixed-up partial memories from both of his identities.
City of Villains has a story arc where the player character uncovers clues that they are in fact robotic duplicates made by Nemesis. Subverted by the final mission, which explicitly states that the player character is the original, but the contact who sent them on the missions is the robotic duplicate (with the real one alive but captive).
- Another featured storyline, Pandora's Box, has a contact discover that they were a highly sophisticated Nemesis automaton the entire time. Confronting them after the reveal has them explain that they had no idea.
As if Konami can't stop recycling the plot enough, a similar theme appears in Neo Contra when protagonist Bill Rizer meet with the "real" Bill Rizer, a.k.a. Master Contra. The Big Bad reveals that both of you were part of a program called "Project C" in an effort to stop global warfare, and thus was cloned from the conscious of a legendary soldier. Considering how the game pokes fun at the Contra series and its sillier bits, it is probably an intentional jab at That Other Series From Konami.
Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient centers around an amnesiac teenage girl trying to escape a hospital that's been overrun by zombies. The True End of Chapter 1 ends with her being captured; her captor pulls up her shirt to reveal a gaping hole in her chest where her heart should be, implying that she's a "dead patient" herself.
At the end of Creeper World: Arc Eternal, Skars is revealed to be a projection of the Loki Imperator, the entity that originally ordered the Loki to construct the Arc, and thus set them on their path of omnicidal destruction. For extra fun, the game lets you choose between embracing it (which requires killing your own daughter) and rejecting it (thus betraying the Loki).
In Cube Escape: Seasons, it's clear from the start that you're not the most mentally stable person as there are notes on your bulletin board about you taking Prozac and going to Rusty Lake, a place for "mental health and fishing", but it's not until you finally open the grandfather clock and see yourself in its mirror that you realize that you're the shadowy being that was shown killing a woman earlier. And then the ending mind-screws you further by revealing that you were the killed woman all along too.
IN 'Exmortis', you are trying to escape a cabin when you have amnesia. You learn about a person trying to complete a ritual by killing a certain number of people. Eventually you realize you are the murderer.
In the Chinese game Cyber Manhunt, Van, another AI, reveals to the player character that they are an AI; in another twist, Van is revealed to be a human disguised as an AI in the "Hello World" DLC.
Discussed at length in Cyberpunk 2077. The Johnny Silverhand you meet in the game is not the real Johnny Silverhand, but an engramatic construct created by Arasaka's "Soulkiller" technology and stored on a biochip called "The Relic". V, similarly, was clinically dead after taking a bullet to the head while the Relic was inserted into their 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 Back from the Dead. However, because V was Only Mostly Dead, in addition to the Relic and their 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 they 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 their 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 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 A Dark Room, you're a regular Featureless Protagonist. As the game progresses, you start to wonder why you can wield six or more weapons simultaneously, and why the entire military attacks you on sight...until it's revealed that "wanderer" means alien, and you and your ragtag bunch of villagers are what's left of an invasion fleet. And those woodland creatures that you've been trapping for meat and skins? They're not animals—they're the fully sentient native species of the planet; you keep picking up scraps of cloth in your traps because you've been trapping the same fully clothed bipedal scavengers that you've been fighting during your supply runs.
Darkest Dungeon leads the player to believe that they're fighting an otherworldly Lovecraftian horror and its army of insane cultists and warped monsters. In reality, humanity is merely an extension of the creature they're fighting, errant flesh rebelling against the host body. At least, so the creature claims. There is evidence that it is lying.
In De Baron, you start out as a father on a quest to save his daughter who has been kidnapped by an evil Baron only to learn when you find her that you are the Baron who sexually abused her and are trapped in a never-ending cycle of reliving your sins.
In Detention, protagonist Fang Ray Shin is Dead to Begin With. When alive, she ruined the lives of basically every other character in the game in a misguided attempt to be with the school's counselor, Mr. Chang, who'd been serving as her Living Emotional Crutch. She took her own life in horror after seeing the consequences of her actions. The game is her wandering through an Ironic Hell/Purgatory that takes the form of a twisted version of her school, with reminders of her sin everywhere.
- In Detention's sequel Devotion (which does not share the plot or characters), the protagonist is the cause of all the problems in the game. He was once a successful screenwriter, but his success and family situation went downhill, which prompted him to become abusive and fall in with a cult. The reason his family vanished in the game is because his wife left him to hopefully become financially stable and get custody of their daughter, who the protagonist subjected to a dangerous religious ritual to cure her panic disorder, which ended up killing her.
Subverted in Deus Ex, in which protagonist JC Denton is informed that both he and his "brother" are actually artificial life forms. Rather than reacting with shock, angst, or an unconvincing identity crisis, JC calmly takes the revelation into stride, and remarks that he had considered the possibility in the past. His artificially constructed memories of the past, that is.
- One of the few discrepancies in Deus Ex is JC's history. In one version he was cloned and artificially aged, being about six months to a year old during the game. In the other, he was genetically engineered but was raised in Switzerland. Both of these versions are supported by information from characters who knew The Truth in the form of email archives, statements, and physical evidence within The Conspiracy. In the final area, JC first guns down the man who killed his father, then sees his cloning tank, and the one that is growing his younger sibling, Alex D. To address these issues the DX team created the Deus Ex Continuity Bible. Needless to say, the site contains massive spoilers.
The extent to which this trope applies in Digital Devil Saga is certainly arguable, but it probably applies when Serph realizes that he was created as a virtual AI doll version of someone who was experimenting on one of his comrades when she was two years old. Oh, and his spirit's still around and affecting him.
Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories
- It is heavily implied that Adell is actually a demon himself by birth. He'll keep saying he's human because he isn't told this in the main story, but it's pretty obvious to the player.
- Rozalin is actually the real overlord Zenon, reincarnating herself for fear of her own power. The Zenon that Adell was after and Rozalin thought was her father is actually an impostor who kidnapped a reincarnated Rozalin as a twisted form of revenge.
In Dragonsphere a character learns that he is not who he believed himself to be: specifically, the player character learns that he is not actually King Callah, but that he is a shapeshifter magically molded into Callah's appearance and given Callah's memories.
The premise of Ether One is that the player takes on the role of a "Restorer" who, working for the eponymous "Ether One" company, uses advanced technology to somehow project into the memories of a patient named Jean Fletcher, who is suffering from dementia, in the hopes of helping to piece together fragments of her memories while fighting back the progression of her disorder. Jean Fletcher died some time ago. The "Ether One" company does not exist, nor does the technology supposedly used by them. You are actually Jean's surviving husband, Thomas. The game is taking place in your mind, and the entire premise is Thomas's way of coping with the conventional treatment that he is receiving for his dementia while he tries to put his own memories back together.
Evil Islands: It's eventually revealed that Zak's identity is that of the mysterious Joon you've been looking for during the Suslanger arc.
With the prevalence of Institute Synth infiltrators in Fallout 4, the player is bound to run into at least a few that don't know they're actually Synths. While characters like the Coursers, Glory, random infiltrating Settlers and brahmin, and Mayor McDonough know their identities, some such as Danse, Amelia Stockton, Sturges, and Magnolia appear to have no idea. The reveal of Danse's nature is a plot point, but you won't know about the others unless you kill them and find the Synth Component on their dead bodies.
Fatal Frame:
- 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.
- 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.
Fate/EXTRA: Hakuno Kishinami wakes up with total amnesia then is dragged into a Holy Grail War and must fight to survive. It turns out they were actually an NPC character modelled after the real Hakuno who gained self-awareness due to an error.
Fate/Grand Order:
- Jeanne d'Arc Alter has all of Jeanne d'Arc's memories and thinks that she is the real Jeanne, or at least spawned from Jeanne's inner darkness and hatred of the people who burned her at the stake. However, it is pointed out several times that Jeanne has no inner darkness and bears the people who burned her no grudge. It turns out that Alter was created from Gilles de Rais' wishes and how he believed Jeanne was like. She doesn't take it well when she finds out.
- Since Erice Utsumi was summoned while she was still alive, she doesn't realize that she is now a Servant and thinks she is a human. It isn't until she accepts that she is a Servant that she is able to use her full powers and Noble Phantasm.
- Lostbelt Morgan le Fae killed Beryl Gut and replaced him with a clone containing all his memories. When he finds out he is a clone, he is only mildly surprised before deciding that he doesn't care.
- Sherlock Holmes discovers that he was actually summoned to be a Disciple of the Foreign God for her plans but had sealed away all memories of this prior to meeting the heroes so he wouldn't have to go against humanity. After his memories of said summoning were unsealed and understands why he was summoned once more after the initial shock of remembering, he opts to take a Heroic Sacrifice to prevent either the God's plans from using him as a pawn or having to fight against Chaldea.
- Miss Crane created a Terminal Unit, basically a copy of her, to pose as her for her plans. The Terminal Unit had no idea what she was and thought she was the real Miss Crane, and is heartbroken when Miss Crane takes control of her and sends her against her new friends. She ultimately sacrifices herself, but her memories transfer to Miss Crane and cause her to make a Heel–Face Turn.
- During the crossover with Fate/Samurai Remnant, we eventually learn that everyone in the event except for the Protagonist is actually dead and a Servant. Yui Shousetsu desperately says this is not true and tries to show the Command Spells on her arm to prove she is a Master, but her arm is blank as she just hallucinated she had Command Spells. To make matters worse for poor Yui, she is actually one of many clones created by the real Yui's Noble Phantasm.
Final Fantasy
- Final Fantasy VII: 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 Dr. Hojo for five years turning him into a "clone" or "copy" of the villain, Sephiroth, and has been acting under Sephiroth's Mind Control for the game so far^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 Sephiroth reveals this to Cloud, he doesn't take it well. At all. Even more confusingly, when he recovers from said Heroic BSoD, he realizes he was never a clone to begin with (what he really is, is quite complicated, but it involves the way the Super Soldiers are created, and how The Virus contains the genetic memories of those infected). However, when he finally regains his true memories, he finally develops into a fully fledged person.
- Final Fantasy X: Tidus discovers he isn't sent a thousand years into the future; the Zanarkand he grew up in - and, by extension, everyone in it - is part of a dream generated by the fayth.
- Final Fantasy XV: Prompto Argentum, one of Prince Noctis' retainers and friends, goes missing in Chapter 11. When he gets back, he reveals that he's one of the clones created by Chief Verstael Besithia of the Niflheim Empire for the express purpose of being daemonified and sublimated into a power source/processing unit for the Magitek Troopers. A Lucian break-in and abscondment is the only reason why he met with a different fate than the rest. In the main game, this comes across your standard Dark Secret Reveal, but Episode Prompto shows him going through the Tomato in the Mirror revelation.
- In Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin the protagonist Jack has made it his life's mission to kill Chaos. Then at the end of the second trailer he reveals his full name is Jack Garland.
- Final Fantasy XVI begins by recounting the Night of Flames that destroyed the life of protagonist Clive Rosfield. This includes the murder of his brother Joshua, the Dominant of the Phoenix, at the hands of a miraculous second Eikon of Fire: Ifrit. Clive spends the next thirteen years living for nothing but the chance at vengeance on whoever Ifrit's Dominant is. When he's rescued by Cidolfus Telamon and learns of a possible Dominant of Fire being sighted, Clive and Cid investigate, only to have a run-in with Benedikta Harman, Dominant of Garuda. Not only does Clive mysteriously steal a portion of Benedikta's power, his battle with Garuda sees him transform into Ifrit himself, revealing him as the second Dominant of Fire who killed Joshua.
  Cid: Oh, Clive. The ghost you were chasing. It was in you all along.
  - In the end, Joshua wasn't murdered after all; the Phoenix managed to revive him. And the dark hooded figure Clive chased for much of the early game was Joshua himself. These revelations only come after Clive sinks into despair upon learning what he is and Cid has to encourage him to continue tugging at strings that don't make sense—considering Cid could see Joshua as well, meaning for all they knew there was a third Dominant of Fire running around.
Fire Emblem: Awakening has lovingly prepared a double-whammy special tomato puree surprise for you. You, as the Avatar, are Val idar's child. Yes, the spawn of the madman who heads a Religion of Evil dedicated to the evil Dragon Grima; the same man who attempted to have your friends assassinated in cold blood in the middle of the night and the one who eventually helps Grima mind control you to attempt to murder your best friend (And quite possibly your husband, if your Avatar is female). That's the least of your worries. Have you ever wondered why your Avatar and your children are so stupidly strong? It's because you are the most perfect result of a Super Breeding Program by said Religion of Evil, designed to create a suitable vessel for their dragon master to possess. You are to have your body stolen for use by Grima. And Time Travel is involved in this game. And guess what? Nothing quite feels like a kick in the nuts like hearing the impending realization of your dark destiny coming from the mouth of your own body from a Bad Future where you were possessed by Grima, were Forced to Watch Grima kill your best friend/possible husband, and proceeded to lay waste to the world, bringing unmeasureable death and destruction to all that lives with you in the front seat. YIKES. Fortunately for everyone not from the Grimleal, you can and WILL Screw Destiny to prevent the present from turning into that ruined future.
In Folklore, your two protagonists are an amnesiac Mysterious Waif named Ellen and an Intrepid Reporter named Keats. Ellen naturally gets freaked out at first by the supernatural discoveries she makes, while Keats takes it all remarkably in stride, mostly because he dismisses a lot of it as unreal and simply plays along to get to the truth. Their being drawn to the same location and chain of events appears to be related only by the person who called them. In reality, Keats is a Halflife, ghost-like beings that the player has interacted with the entire game, which are created by the strong wish of a human - in this case, Ellen's childhood friend Herve, whose dying wish was to protect her. Keats looks human because his appearance is taken from a drawing Ellen made of what she thought Herve would look like when he grew up; he's a reporter only because Herve wanted to be one, and the magazine he writes for (which Herve was a fan of) went out of business in the late '80s. The "office" the player sees Keats in at the beginning of the game is in fact another realm in the Netherworld. And he's part of the story because the whole chain of events 17 years ago is what created him.
Genshin Impact: Throughout the Fontaine Archon Quests, one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the titular nation is why Fontainans, and only them, have their bodies dissolved into water after coming in contact with Primordial Seawater, as the prophecy about Fontaine being flooded, leaving only the Hydro Archon behind as Sole Survivor told so. In “Masquerade of the Guilty”, we finally learn the truth: it turns out that all Fontainans (including playable characters born there) are all descendants of a community of Oceanids who gained a human form, thanks to the previous Hydro Archon, Egeria, using the Primordial Seawater as a base. However, creating new lifeforms without Celestia’s consent, enraged the Heavenly Principles, so much so that they decided to punish them with said prophecy. Fortunately, thanks Focalors (the recent Hydro Archon)’s sacrificing herself by also destroying the Hydro Throne beyond repair, so she could give her powers to their rightful owner, Neuvillette (a.k.a. the recent reincarnation of The Hydro Sovereign), the latter uses them to turn all the Fontainans into full-fledged humans, saving them from being dissolved by the rising of Primordial Seawater levels, and thus averting the casualties of the prophecy in the process.
Ghost Trick: 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, since that was the only corpse he could see in the area when he woke up as a ghost. 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 since he can no longer hold on to that mental image of himself. He all but gives up hope on finding his identity until the man in red eventually reveals that Sissel was his pet cat. Major clues for this revelation include Sissel's limited understanding of human technology and complete inability to read, which was initially passed off as part of his Ghost Amnesia, but he actually never had that knowledge in the first place.
Glory of Heracles III revolves around three Amnesiac Heroes who were granted immortality as a ploy to avert The End of the World as We Know It. Except for the main character, who isn't one of Prometheus's three immortals. He's actually Lord Baor, a Villain with Good Publicity whose actions caused an ecological crisis that provoked the gods' desire to wipe out all humankind. He received his immortality from Hades when he was chosen to lead The Legions of Hell to kill them all.
Guilty Gear: Xrd -Revelator- reveals that Axl Low is basically a sentient bundle of time magic, with the power to hop between timelines and erase or rewrite them at will. And he can never return to his girlfriend Megumi because he already changed the world in a way that led to her timeline being erased. The knowledge hits Axl like a ton of bricks, throwing him into a deep depression.
Heavy Rain does this to the player regarding the identity of the killer. The killer is one of the player characters that you control and said character's thoughts do not directly allude to his deeds except in hindsight. You control the character under the assumption that his actions are to solve the mystery when in reality he's trying to find his Jack the Ripoff and collect and destroy any remaining evidence.
Hell Night: The player turns out to be the Dark Messiah, not only explaining why they were chased by the Cult, but also the kidnappings. And why the train was wrecked by the monster.
The first half of Hotline Miami is told through hazy flashbacks. It is revealed in the "Trauma" chapter that Jacket is actually lying comatose in the hospital, still alive, but endlessly replaying his mass-murdering sprees in his head. At least until he wakes up and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: Nimdok is given the task to find "The Lost Tribe". He finds a mirror, that shows anyone with absolute objectivity, and learns a horrific truth. He sold his Jewish parents out to the Nazis to perform his gruesome experiments, and realizes he himself is the Lost Tribe.
In Imperium Galactica, the Player Character is revealed to be an android created by The Empire as a last desperate attempt to restore its former glory and prevent the Dargslan Kingdom from conquering it.
Killer7: Thought the Killer 7 were Harman's split personalities? Nope. They're Garcian's.
The Kingdom Hearts series has several:
- In Kingdom Hearts, the protagonist Sora travels through the worlds attempting to find his friends Riku, who has joined the villains, and Kairi, who has lost her heart. He suspects that Riku did that to Kairi, despite the latter's denial. Then it's revealed in the Disc-One Final Dungeon that Kairi's heart has been residing inside Sora all along ever since the destruction of their homeworld, and opening up the final keyhole means that Sora will have to release both his and her hearts. It's foreshadowed since early in the game, what with Sora seeing Kairi's apparitions here and there, resulting from her heart resonating inside him.
- Kingdom Hearts II, Roxas starts seeing mysterious people that no one else seems to notice. He eventually discovers that the Twilight Town he's been living in is a fabrication, and that he himself is a "Nobody" of the main character, Sora.
- And then there's Xion in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, who realizes that she's never a Nobody; she's an imperfect replica of Sora created as a fail safe should Roxas ever fail in his part as Sora's Nobody. Her existence disrupts Sora's memory restoration, thus either she or Roxas has to die so the restoration can proceed. When the Big Bad forces her to absorb Roxas, she gets him to attack her so she can stop the Big Bad's Evil Plan.
Klonoa: Door to Phantomile: Klonoa learns he's actually a warrior from another dimension who was brought into Phantomile to save it from destruction. 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.
Knight Orc is a snarky Interactive Fiction game where you play an orc, trying to survive in a fantasy world where you're a weak, sword-fodder mook. You have to use cleverness and dirty tricks to survive encounters with the adventurers you meet. A third of the way through the game, a malfunction reveals that you're actually a robot orc in a virtual reality game — you're weak because the game is stacked in favor of the human customers.
Legacy of Kain
- Kain was originally led to believe that by killing the mythic Circle of Nine he could be released from his vampyric unlife, he eventually learns that he is, in fact, one of its members, the reincarnated guardian of the Pillar of Balance, and his liberation from vampirism may only come in death.
- Raziel's story is a long string. Over the course of the three games he appears in, he starts off as a re-resurrected vampire, only to find out that the vampires are a world-destroying evil that he must personally weed out. Then, it is revealed to him that he used to be a high-ranking Sarafan vampire hunter before he was a vampire. In Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, Time Travel hijinks lead to the discovery that the original vampires weren't so bad at all. Then he finds the last survivor of the original, ancient vampire race, the only one who can give him the answers he seeks, brutally and mercilessly slaughtered...by Raziel's own, past Sarafan self. Whom Raziel later KILLS along with his fellow Sarafan, indirectly preparing his own vampiric resurrection as well as his brethren's. As if this wasn't enough, just moments later, he comes to the startling realization that the symbiotic, semi-sentient, insane wraith blade that he's been carrying for two games is the future version of his own soul. Finally, he learns that he is the foretold messiah of the vampire race. No, wait — he's the messiah of the Hylden, whom he thought he's supposed to kill. No, wait, he's both at once. Turns out that the prophecies weren't all that clear on this.
- Gets better. In Legacy of Kain: Defiance, Raziel rips out Kain's heart, saying "I have found the Heart of Darkness!". Janos' heart, which was pulled from the vampire by Sarafan Raziel, was inside Kain all along. Kain was unaware of this fact.
Lenna's Inception: It turns out that the titular player character was the leader of the Archangels, and the true Final Boss of the world, whose power was taken by Delvin's glitching. Her memories of teaching students were actually her instructing her minions.
In Lufia & The Fortress of Doom there is a twist towards the end where it is revealed that Lufia is really Erim, the sinistral of death.
In Luminous Arc 3 Levi discovered that he is the clone of the man antagonist, the God but is said by his companion that the thing that matter is Levi's heart is human.
Vayne, the protagonist of Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis, is introduced as an amnesiac hermit living with his cat-like Mana Sulpher. And then Chapter 11 rolls around. Turns out Sulpher is just a normal cat. Vayne is his Mana, more specifically an artificial Mana of Wishes created by Sulpher's former owner. His powers make him a Reality Warper capable of granting any wish, his "father" created him to grant his own wish for death, and he's performed at least three resurrections throughout the plot without even realizing it. Vayne...doesn't take it well.
In Mass Effect 3 it's revealed in some old logs that took place before the second game, that Shepard was completely brain-dead when they were recovered by Cerberus, with one of the Lazarus Project scientists commenting that because of this, bringing Shepard back would be impossible. The fact that Shepard somehow was resurrected anyway, has them momentarily wonder aloud if s/he is the real one.
Shepard: Maybe I'm just some sort of high-tech VI who thinks s/he's Commander Shepard?
- It's implied, that Shepard is the real one, but 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.
- The "Citadel" DLC all but confirms that Shepard is real since Cerberus probably wouldn't have preferred a mere high-tech VI to their clone.
- There's an Easter Egg alluding to this in Mass Effect: the layout of the Council's room, where they'd deny the existence of the Reapers, strongly resembles the outline of a typical Reaper ship.
In Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, the show within a game Address Unknown ends like this: The protagonist, John Mirra, who spent the entire show looking for the murderers of his family, realizes that he himself was the killer after he sees the killer's face staring back at him in a bathroom mirror. This, incidentally, may mean the whole purpose of the show was to set up a truly terrible pun: the main character is named John Mirra, and he solves the mystery in the bathroom (as in, the john) by looking into the mirror...
- That show (and the finale described above) were a long homage to Twin Peaks.
Mega Man
- It was hinted at earlier in the Mega Man X series, but eventually confirmed by Mega Man X4, that Zero is in reality the creation of Greater-Scope Villain Dr. Wily, and progenitor of the Maverick Virus. Sigma's goal in Mega Man X5 is to awaken Zero's "true self", the bloodthirsty Maverick that almost killed Sigma (who back then was the leader of the Maverick Hunters), by infecting him with a more powerful strain of the virus so he can fulfill his original directive: destroy the world and kill X, his best friend. Eventually, Zero eventually comes to the conclusion that he must have been subconsciously spreading the virus inside him while he still walks the Earth, and decides (circa a Distant Finale in Mega Man X6) to go into stasis, and surrender his body so scientists can study his innate viral immunity in hopes that they will create a cure.
- Throughout Mega Man Zero 3, there have been hints dropped about Zero's body being inferior, leading to the reveal that the body he's in isn't the body he used to inhabit during the X series; it's a new model, and his REAL body is now under the control of Weil's puppet Omega. Zero, however, does not give a single robotic crap about these revelations. All he sees is an enemy who needs to be taken down.
Mega Man X: The heart is what counts. Not the body...
- This is echoed in Mega Man ZX Advent. Grey has spent enough time fighting for his life against Maverick Mechaniloids, Pseudoroids, five other Mega Men, and both Prometheus and Pandora that when he finally learned that he is actually Master Albert's backup body and Model A a recording of his data and powers, he stopped giving a damn about who he originally was. That one of the Mega Men in question was Aile certainly helped him stop caring about his predetermined identity, as she was the one who told him that ultimately he is the only one capable of deciding his destiny, regardless of his past or what anyone else says.
Metal Gear
- Metal Gear Solid:
  - Solid Snake goes into Shadow Moses Island to rescue two hostages, and stop terrorist leader Liquid Snake from launching a nuclear strike. The hostages he's meant to rescue keep having heart attacks, and Meryl claims he looks just like Liquid. Snake then discovers that both he and Liquid are clones of Big Boss, and that he's been used as a vector for the FOXDIE assassination virus.
  - Liquid has a second later of ketchupy goodness rendering himself a double tomato, though he never finds out personally. He knows he's a clone, but thinks that he's the inferior genetic specimen while Solid got all the good gene goo in the course of their creation.
- If anything, Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is an even bigger tomato than Snake. A former Child Soldier who suppresses his traumatic memories, he goes through all kinds of virtual reality training reenactments of Snake's best missions, and his mission in the Big Shell was modelled right from the Shadow Moses mission. His relationship to the game's Big Bad, Solidus Snake, closely resembles the one between Solid Snake and Big Boss, and the entire mission was meant to be an experiment to transform Raiden into the spitting image of Solid Snake himself as well as a social experiment in giving The Patriots control over all digital information. To say that Raiden was an Unwitting Pawn by this point would be a grand understatement.
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Big Boss wakes up from his nine-year coma only to escape a hospital under attack with the help of a mysterious man named Ishmael. In the secret ending, you discover that the character you have been playing is a Body Double of Big Boss, and his best soldier from MSF. Ishmael was the original Big Boss, who left in order to begin creation of Outer Heaven.
The indie game The Monster Within is about a detective getting hired by a young woman to look into a series of women murders involving the supernatural and specifically Lust. The game strongly hints on the detective being an Incubus who has killed women in the past by seducing them. The ending is a subversion. He never killed anyone, the woman that hired him did in an attempt to lure his demonic side back out so he would help her kill more people. It is left open what he does with this knowledge.
Mothered: You're not Liana, the little girl who is coming back from surgery. She has been Dead All Along, and you're playing as an experimental robot with her CORE inside of you, trying to effectively bring her back from life. And you're not the first by the time the game started. Tropes Are Tools in this instance as this reveal comes with several other shocking moments, like your mother expressing fear of you and the aforementioned Stable Time Loop. Ironically, the mirrors have been covered up with tape so you don't look into them and see your robotic shell.
NieR:
- The first time one plays through, it is a typical Eastern RPG. Fight the monstrous Shades, save your daughter, defeat The Shadowlord and Happy Ending ensues. But then, you start your second playthrough with the ability to understand the Black Speech of the Shades. Suddenly the entire tone of the game shifts. It turns out most of the Shades are innocent victims who are just trying to defend themselves, many of the game's antagonists are seriously provoked, and to them you are the monster. You're cutting them down, killing their children, invading their homes...You did this on your first playthrough too, but your limited perspective kept you from realizing.
- NieR: Automata does this almost as much as its predecessor. All of the typical mechanics you see in video games like respawning or upgrading your character only exist because you're playing as an android, and they can be taken away quite easily, such as when you lose the ability to respawn or fast travel in Route C after your base (and all your backup bodies) get blown up. But what really pushes into this trope is The Reveal; the entire mission the game is built around (defending the remnants of humanity from robotic alien invaders) is all a lie. Humanity went extinct centuries ago, and the entire war between the androids and alien machines is a front, used by their leadership to gather data and develop technology in the desperate hopes of becoming human themselves. Oh, and those evil alien robots you've been gleefully butchering? You were made with the same technology as them. You've been raised to hate and murder your own kin for no other reason than because Mission Control tells you that you have too. And to cap it all off, the game ends by subjecting you (not your character, you specifically) to a What You Are in the Dark moment; You can sacrifice your own save data to help out some other player with the Nintendo Hard Mini-Game Credits that let you see the ending, and chances are you only made it through those credits yourself because another player did the same for you. You don't have to make the sacrifice...but it would be awful nice.
Nobody Saves the World begins with "Nobody", the amnesiac and completely featureless (save for an Eyeless Face) 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, and right before the ending, you learn that The Calamity itself is only present because of Nostramagus willingly summoning it as a challenge.
In No Umbrellas Allowed, the protagonist gets washed ashore with a bandaged face 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 nightmares of the past he gets at the end of each week. After he removes his bandages, AVAC puts up Missing and Wanted Posters of four people who disappeared during the fire: three people who worked at CARI, and one who was suspected to be behind the fire. 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 former three missing people, and he has a bounty of at least 3,000V on his head. At the start of the following week, the Blackmailer reveals "Bob"'s true identity depending on the choices he's made and gives him a difficult decision to make by Friday: either to turn himself in to AVAC, reveal his identity only to his friend who had been looking for him since the fire, or continue hiding.
A similar literal example shows up just a few minutes into Obsidian. The reflective surface of the titular Obsidian structure reveals that the player is in fact, Lilah Kerlins, one of the creators of the Ceres Project. This can be even more jarring if you read all the info in her PDA first, and then heard Max screaming for help. After all, how else would the PDA have been able to pass you in on its retinal scan?
Onmyoji has Onigiri, the personification of the treasure sword owned by the Minamoto clan who dedicates himself to wiping out demons except he really isn't, as he later found out. He is actually a demon and had been tricked by his owner into mass-murdering his own kind all along. Naturally, he didn't take this well.
Overlord is about the reincarnation of an evil overlord seeking vengeance on the seven heroes that previously defeated him. One of said heroes is possessed by the spirit of the evil overlord. The Player Character is actually the eighth hero, who was left for dead by his former comrades.
Throughout >OBSERVER_, at certain points, Dan Lazarski has to evade a grotesque monster while exploring the minds of certain citizens. When he starts having hallucinations and flashbacks toward the end, one of these brings Dan to a literal blood-stained mirror, where he sees that Dan himself was the monster, coupled with his son Adam cursing him out over taking augmentations while letting Adam's mother die without augs. This is what Adam's AI self uses to convince Dan to join with him.
In Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, The Sumaru City in which Maya and company live in is one big mirror, the denizens of the city (except Tatsuya) are pretty much tomatoes. In the "real world" (what Joker calls "the Other Side"), Maya was killed with the Spear of Longinus in Innocent Sin by Maya Okamura, and in having that happen, the world is destroyed, with the exception of Sumaru City. Stricken with grief over her death, Tatsuya and his friends demanded Philemon to do something about it. Philemon agrees to bring her back, but in the alternate world where EP takes place, but with a price—everyone must forget Maya and the friendship they shared. Everyone gives up their memory, but during the process Tatsuya out and out refused to forget Maya and through sheer force of will he ends up in EP's Sumaru with all his memories intact, causing a paradox. The Maya in this world runs across him and feels a strange déjà vu vibe from him, as well as pain in her side, where she had been stabbed in Innocent Sin.
In Persona 4, Teddie realizes he was a Shadow all along. Unlike most examples, the main characters (save for said character) were not terribly surprised by this, and took it in-stride.
In Persona 5 Royal, Kasumi Yoshizawa had a sister who died of a traffic accident a month prior to your arrival. It turns out that this "Kasumi Yoshizawa" is Sumire Yoshizawa, the sister that she thought was dead, and Kasumi was the sister who died because she tried to save Sumire from nearly being ran over by traffic for a depressive fit of running away, something that elevated her already worse depression and zero self-esteem to borderline suicidal levels. As a last ditch attempt to halt the inevitable, her father pushed her to Takuto Maruki and she told him to turn her into Kasumi, because for her, if she isn't Kasumi, she should probably die. And even then, the extent of Maruki's actualization was only able to make her think that she is Kasumi; other people just saw Sumire being delusional. When Kasumi is shown that she is the tomato by a now-berserk Maruki, she doesn't take it well.
Phantasmagoria: 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.
The three main characters in Phantasmat are all dead from drowning when a dam burst and flooded the town, although none of them initially realises it. The protagonist gradually reveals their pasts to them:
- The girl: Convinced she was to marry her (philandering) lover in a secret wedding, she drowned while waiting for him in the church tower.
- The hotel owner: A violent criminal who strangled the hotel's previous owner in order to 'retire' as the new owner. He drowned while attempting to hide stolen money by burying it.
- The old woman: As the mayor's wife, she was envious of her husband's wealth and standing. She killed him by poisoning, then regretted it and drowned while mourning at his grave in the cemetery.
Continuing this, Phantasmat: Cruicible Peak has all people you meet that died in an avalanche that destroyed the town:
- Greta: Got a call to skedaddle but gathered so many belongings and her car swerved on the icy road, slamming against a shop front and trapping her inside.
- Peter: Died waiting for a letter from his divorced wife and kids and died at the post office.
- Schultz: Was skiing down he mountains and died at the bottom of the hill when the avalanche hit.
- Otto: A man who had an...obsession with fire who would trigger a humongous explosion that not only created the avalanche but killing him with it.
Phantom Dust has the amnesic main character searching for clues of his and everyone else's lost memories in the post-apocalyptic, ghoul-filled world. It is revealed to him by his friend, Edgar, that the protagonist, along with everyone else in the world save Edgar, are fabrications created by Edgar from the dust to help him overcome his loneliness when he returned from space to find Earth a complete, lifeless wasteland. When the protagonist beats the final boss it is further revealed that the Edgar you've known throughout the game is himself a fabrication, having been created by the original Edgar to watch over things after his death.
In [PROTOTYPE], Alex Mercer had extremely mixed feelings when he discovered that he was the Blacklight Virus, while the REAL Alex was the person who released it on New York and was its first meal. Especially since the real Alex was worse than the virus itself.
Alex Mercer: I'm not human. The revelation...it freed me. It killed me. I'm not human. *uneasy chuckle* Alex is just the role I play. Part of me was relieved...and part of me died. Just another disguise, right? So ingrained...so real...even I believe it.
Reah: Face the Unknown ends with a disturbing explanation from the phantom alchemist who accompanied you throughout the whole game. Instead of being a journalist who was brought to Reah by soldiers to investigate a portal, you are some kind of explorer being tested on Reah by the alchemist - who is actually the planet's AI that built everything you saw. And this wasn't the only time you've gone through; Everyone's seen you before, but you have no memory of this. And to make things worse, he wants you to try it all again for as many times as he sees fit. There's no other ending or alternate path to completing the game.
Resident Evil 5: In a flashback set a few years before the events of the game, Albert Wesker discovers that he is just another one of Umbrella's old experiments — Project W.
Albert Wesker: Are you saying I was...manufactured?
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil Village are a departure from the series' normal formula of zombie-related fare, inundating you with enemies infected by or even formed from a powerful mold-like substance. Why the lack of zombies? Well, the beginning of Village's climax reveals that at the start of Biohazard, the main character Ethan was not knocked out after the intro segment as players (and Ethan himself) had assumed, but in fact killed — and revived by that same mold substance, which had been inside him ever since, lending him incredible resilience and the ability to recover from heavy injury with basic first aid. In other words, he's the zombie — and has been pretty much the whole time.
The promotional material for Resonance tells the player straight away that at least one of the four Player Characters is not trustworthy, leaving the player to speculate out of the gate who it might be. A bit into the game, Detective Bennett drops a letter that implicates him as the traitor, but at the The Reveal, it turns that it was a Red Herring, and that it is actually Eddings.
Sacred Earth - Alternative: Right before the Final Boss fight, it turns out the protagonist is actually a replica of the real Konoe, who made a Face–Heel Turn and decided to destroy the world in order to bring back her family.
Second Sight: It turns out that the main character isn't a lab escapee having flashbacks to a time just before it all went wrong, he's in that time and having precognitive visions on the verge of a Bad Future. One of the very few surprise twists where the character turns out to be himself.
Shadow of the Colossus: 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 Wham Episode.
Aleph of Shin Megami Tensei II appears to be an Amnesiac Hero helped along by the rest of The Team, who knew him before he lost his memories. Except the five heroes consists of Artificial Humans created as adults two years before the start of the game, and Aleph was abducted before he could be implanted with Fake Memories; he doesn't have amnesia, he never had any memories to begin with. Anyone who claims to have known him before is either lying or has Fake Memories.
Silent Hill
- Tomato-In-The-Mirror reveals have become a staple of the franchise since Silent Hill 2, in which James realizes that he killed his wife. The game starts with the player character receiving a letter from his wife, who has been dead for two years, telling him to come to an abandoned monster infested town to find her, which you must explore. This is all typical video game stuff designed to move the plot along, because in real life this guy would have serious problems. That's because he does. Turns out his wife only died a few weeks ago, because he murdered her, and the whole game is a karmic beatdown he well deserves. The player and character discover this at the same time, leading to horror for both alike.
- Especially prevalent, and beautifully done, in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. The basic premise of the game centers on the main character Harry Mason searching for his lost daughter Cheryl after a car accident. The bulk of the game is a mix of exploration and action (in the form of running your ass off from the demented creatures chasing you,) with bouts of psychotherapy interposed between segments. The obvious conclusion (considering Harry can't seem to die) is that in the narrative of the game follows Harry recounting his traumatic experiences to his therapist. However, in the course of the adventure through the town, you eventually find yourself at the office of a psychologist, and you go inside to discover the therapy sessions were happening concurrently with the gameplay. The patient turns out to actually be Harry's daughter, who is now somewhere in her 20s, and the Harry Mason the player has been playing is simply a delusion in Cheryl's mind. As the game eloquently puts it, you're 'not even a ghost'. And depending on your interpretation, it's ambiguous as to whether everything in the game was in Cheryl's mind or if her delusions were simply being physically manifested in the real town.
  - What's especially notable about this example are the endings as they technically are not "endings" whatsoever in the typical fashion. The story will always end with Cheryl leaving the session and meeting up with her mother before fading to black. So what do the "endings" dictate? Harry's character. That's right...your actions are determining the kind of person Harry was before his death, as either a good man who divorced his wife but assured his daughter that they both still loved her, a weak man dominated by his wife entirely, an alcoholic, or an adulterer. Think about that the next time you decide to glance at that lacy underwear in the department store...
In Slayers (SNES), 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. The game then helpfully provides a naming screen so you can tell them apart.
The protagonist of SOMA realises he is not Toronto native and human Simon Jarrett when he stumbles across a mirror and sees that he is in fact the consciousness of the long-dead Simon Jarrett, uploaded into a body consisting of someone else's corpse fused to a diving suit with structure gel.
Sonic the Hedgehog:
- In Team Dark's ending in Sonic Heroes, Rouge discovers hundreds upon hundreds of copies of Shadow in tubes identical to the one he was in at the start of the game. It matters little, though — once he's over the shock, he decides that original or not, he's still the Shadow the Hedgehog. This is followed up on in one of the multiple endings of Shadow the Hedgehog, with Eggman admitting that Shadow is one of the copies. He gets through it instantly, kills Eggman and takes over the world.
- In the canon ending of Shadow the Hedgehog, Eggman tells Shadow he is the original, and he found him after he fell to earth and put him into a capsule to let him heal.
- The same canon ending also has a completely separate Tomato in the Mirror twist: Shadow was created from Black Doom's blood, making him at least partially a Black Arm himself.
The big Tomato Surprise in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters revolves around the titular creatures - extradimensional entities cast between worlds by the various gods. The notable one out of them - and the one that applies to this trope the most - is Revya, a Drazilian shell injected with the soul of Median's dead son after 200 years of nurturing by Haephnes as her and Virtuous' part in the Gambit Pileup. Human!Layna gives you the breakdown once you cross over to Drazil proper.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl: You wake up at the start of the game with no memories and a single note in your PDA saying "Kill Strelok. Turns out you were captured and brainwashed by C-Consciousness and given the objective to kill Strelok, C-Consciousness having thought you had actually escaped when your original foray into the power plant failed. You were Strelok all along. This turns out to be an odd example of the antagonists being brought down (at least, if you pick that ending) by their own competence.
The Glitch in Starbound can be prone to this. They are robots built (by unknown and disappeared precursors) to simulate organic beings, and employ a lot of tech to help them believe the lie(needing food, getting sick, drowning in water, only healing damage if they're bandaged and treated medically...) and prevent them from seeing things they shouldn't (their own mechanical appearances, for one). If the illusion fails for just a moment, they can become aware of their true nature, and break free from the simulation completely. (Unfortunately, the simulation doesn't like having rogues going around mucking things up...)
Star Ocean: Till the End of Time: The entire universe that Fayt and everyone else inhabits is an MMORPG created for the amusement of 4D beings, called the Eternal Sphere. And the creator of the game has decreed that all "bad" data must be deleted as he felt that the Eternal Sphere's inhabitants have grown to be too sentient, with technology that almost matches that of the "real" 4D dimension.
Star Wars Legends:
- In Knights of the Old Republic, the protagonist is revealed to be the "late" Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Revan.
- Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: The Jedi masters explain to you that you are a hole in the Force that feeds of the life energy of everyone you come into contact with/kill.
- The Force Unleashed II is all about Galen Marek aka Starkiller trying to find out whether or not he's the original Starkiller or a clone. Turns out, he never does get an answer.
For a good portion of Stray (2022), we are led to believe that the cat's Robot Buddy 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 Heroic BSoD, rendering them unable to translate the robots' speech for the cat's benefit until they make it to Zbaltazar.
In the original Japanese version of Street Fighter 2010 (not the American localization that claims the protagonist is Ken Masters), Kevin Straker is one of the very "Parasites" he was sent to destroy. It was all part of Dr. Jose's master plan to use him to conquer the universe...which promptly fails when Kevin kills him.
Ending 6 of Subject plays the trope straighter than most: your character literally opens their eyes to discover that they're up against a mirror, and they have been turned into a non-human monster with horrific teeth and other mutations. This drives them to kill anyone the company responsible for this sends inside the house.
In Super Robot Wars: Endless Frontier it's revealed that Haken Browning is W00, a genetically engineered human made by a project which tried to create the perfect soldier. It causes some worries, but it's fairly short-term. He's in a group consisting of a smart-mouthed android with a split personality, a second android with cat-ears and like-wise split personality, a 2000+ year old pettanko oni princess, another princess who's as top-heavy as her sword and a Chinese fox-spirit who cracks more sexually slanted jokes than you can shake a sword-cane at. And the other guy was in a group even crazier than this one.
The Cybran Campaign of Supreme Commander. Dr. Brackman, creator of the Symbionts, calls all Symbionts "his children" and refers to the player as "my boy". The debriefing at the end of the campaign reveals that he's being literal about the son thing - you are his clone.
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World features Emil, a cowardly teen who is given the ability to channel incredible power from the dormant spirit Ratatosk in order to protect Marta, who seeks to awaken the spirit himself from the core she carries and restore his power. Over the course of the game, Emil's recollection of certain major events is spotty, and many people in his hometown of Palmacosta, from which he left six months prior, know his name but don't recognize his face, much to his annoyance. Eventually it comes to light that Emil has not been channeling Ratatosk's power; he himself is Ratatosk, and the moments when he gains power to fight are him using his true abilities. Contrary to everyone's belief, Ratatosk had been awake for months, but was incredibly weak. In order to hide his true identity as he recovered, he created a fake persona using the appearance of a boy he'd killed named Aster. The fake was designed to quickly fill in the gaps of its memory; during the mass murder in Palmacosta six months prior, a women named Lana, blinded by her injuries, mistook Ratatosk for her son, Emil, and so the false persona came to believe it was Emil. No one in Palmacosta recognizes him because while there was once an Emil Castagnier there, this one looks completely different. The real Emil is implied to be dead, murdered at the same time as his parents. Furthermore, the core Marta has is a fake, designed to make her a target for those who seek to kill Ratatosk before he regains his full power.
Tales of the Abyss gives us Luke fon Fabre, a spoiled rich kid who's been shut-in at his mansion for seven years until the start of the story due to a kidnapping incident which shocked him into losing his memory. He soon goes on to find out that he's supposed to be the world's savior, and continues to give everyone grief about how special he is. Cue the traditional Tales series megatwist, where he discovers that he's suddenly become a mass murderer, his beloved sword instructor set him up, all his friends are tired of his crap and to top it all off, he's the clone of the REAL Luke fon Fabre, who's been spending the last seven years trying to stop Van by working on the inside.
In the flash game "Trapped" you believe you are Benjamin Greunbaum, the owner of the hotel you're in which is under siege by a group of robbers. This impression is based on finding a wallet with that name in it. Turns out, you're actually Dan Mcneally, the guy in charge of the robbers, hit with a sudden and unexplained case of amnesia. Greunbaum is in the ventilation shaft...well, his body anyway.
- The sequel "Escape" has Dialla told that she was once the leader of the Armored Gamses, the very gang she and her partner were trying to take down. Also she and Dan were a couple.
In the Genocide route of Undertale, the Final Boss mentions the Anomaly. From what he tells us about this Anomaly, it's very clear that the Anomaly is YOU, the 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 Vagrant Story, Ashley Riot, begins the game believing that he once had a wife and son who were murdered by thugs during a family picnic, but 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. It's ultimately left ambiguous as to which version of Ashley's backstory is correct.
Warframe: Seemingly nobody — In-Universe or out — knows what the Tenno are. Captain Vor calls them Energy Beings, various Infested entities call them their "own flesh", and Codex entries mention terrible accidents that exposed people to the Void and gave them uncontrolled powers. In The Second Dream, a Wham Episode, 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.
The old PC Adventure Game Waxworks (1992) has the player trying to undo a family curse that has caused every set of twin boys to have one good and one evil son. After traveling through time Quantum Leap style to four other similar sets of twins, you finally go back to the witch that cursed your ancestors to begin with and kill her. Then you finally rescue your brother, only to learn that you were the Evil Twin the entire time.
The ending of The Whispered World reveals that the world of Silence is a sort of dream realm between life and death, and that Sadwick is a persona created by the mind of a comatose boy named Noah. When Sadwick realizes this, he "ends the world" by waking up as Noah in the real world.
- In the sequel, Silence: The Whispered World 2, 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.
the white chamber ends with the revelation that Sarah has murdered her entire crew. At this point, her ending fate is already sealed by in-game choices.
WitchSpring
- In the first game and its remake, Pieberry was once under the impression that she is a witch and only later finds out that she is a deity with the moniker of witch being a demonization brought on by humans. She isn't just any other deity either but also a daughter for the Temple Lord Elysion.
- In the third game, Eirudy was also under the same impression that she is a witch and only later corrects her mistake as she meets those who lived when the deities still lived alongside humanity. This is taken a step further in that she was also a Doll herself created by her grandmother to house the magic power of the previous Temple Lords and only became a flesh and blood deity when they successfully transferred said magic into her.
Wild ARMs
- In Wild ARMs, Rudy has his arm severed and when his friends try to heal him they discover that he is not human, but an Artificial Human created as a weapon, and his body is biologically similar to the demons they are fighting.
- Something similar happens to Jet of Wild ARMs 3 when he finds out he is not actually Dr. Enduro's son, but actually an Artificial Human created to interface with the Yggdrasil System.
The World Ends with You Around Day Five, you find out everyone playing the Reapers' Game is dead and trying for a new chance at life.
100 years prior to the start of World of Final Fantasy, The Demon Dyad had caused trouble in Grymoire. And they did it by having the Dyad Servants lay waste to the land. Near the end of the game, it is revealed that Reynn and Lann were the Demon Dyad. And their lost Mirages were the Dyad Servants. Due to their inability to keep their Mirages in check, they just let them do whatever they want, however they please.
Xeno series:
- Xenogears: Fei finds out that his father is really the new body of Grahf, and also Wiseman is his father as well. Not only that, but he also discovers that he is the Omnicidal Maniac ID, while his current amnesiac personality was artificially made after he committed a genocide. Then he discovers or should we say remember that he became crazy because his mother was Miang and made a lot of gruesome and painful experiments on him. Then, we learn that Grahf and Fei are actually the same person, in two different bodies, and that 500 years ago, he was the lover of the game's world equivalent of the pope who made a Heroic Sacrifice for him, causing Lacan (Fei's name at the time) to become the immortal Grahf while his original personality kept reincarnating. If this was not enough, Fei later learns that he is the ancestor of every inhabitant of the world, which he was not supposed to be, that free will exists thanks to him, and that he created his soul mate 10,000 years ago as a child because he felt he needed protection while he was linked to The Wave Existence, which gave him the power to wish his feelings into reality, and that all of it makes him basically The Antichrist, except that here, The Antichrist is the ''good'' guy.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 1 reveals that Shulk is the Soul Jar of Zanza, the soul of the Bionis and original wielder of the Monado. Not only that, but Shulk was also dead this entire time, with only Zanza's soul sustaining his body. He ends up being restored by Meyneth, the soul of the Mechonis, in her final moments.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has it overlapping with Tomato Surprise, with the revelation in Chapter 5 that the player character is a robot, which nobody else in the party is surprised at because they are also robots, as are all the other humans you've met. Everyone else is aware of this fact, but due to the player's Laser-Guided Amnesia and the robots being designed to mimic human bodies, you were not. What makes this also a Tomato Surprise is that none of the other characters mention the fact with more than vague hints until after the reveal, even the people whose jobs involve repairing the citizens. Also, nobody uses the "Overdrive" ability, which is a function of the robot bodies, until after you learn about it.
Yummy Breakfast: Susan spends the whole game thinking she's just a normal girl who can't get full, until she suddenly remembers that she's a flesh-eating monster.
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox: 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.

Tomato In The Mirror / Video Games

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