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Wizards: What makes you think we're Wizards?
Simon: When I move my mouse pointer over you, it says "Wizards".

This is when the way an in-game menu or other interface element is constructed gives away details about the rest of the game. It may be some unexplained question marks instead of a menu item, a few suspiciously blank spots in a circle menu, or any number of other forms.

Like many meta-expectations, this is an interesting form of Spoiler, because it generally gives something closer to hints or foreshadowing rather than actual details. You can see the Your Princess Is in Another Castle! moment coming when you've got half your equipment missing, but you still won't know exactly when or why it happens.

This is common in the tutorial and early sections, where the game is still gradually introducing new mechanics, and the player shouldn't be messing with them beforehand.

Some game companies have a deliberate policy of this, so that people who have rented the game can imagine all the "wonderful prizes" yet to be unlocked and buy the game.

Many "Achievement System" lists will give things away about the game to come; for example, the names of certain bosses, levels, etc. However, others may avert this by leaving any story-related achievements hidden until they're achieved or only giving them vague descriptions like "Defeat the Final Boss," or even just replacing spoiler names/locations/etc. with "???".

In games where characters' names (or lack thereof) are revealed in the dialog box or by selecting them, the player can learn people's names before the player's character does, and one can use this to determine which characters will be important. This, too is sometimes averted by hiding the name or showing a generic description until your character learns who the person is.

Visual Novels where character portraits are shown whenever someone is speaking may exclude certain characters from having portraits, so if you see a character speak but not get a portrait, they will likely not get much importance to the story. In a similar vein, some VNs with character voices may have character-specific voice volume options. If a voiced character is part of the "other characters" volume setting, don't expect them to be very important either. Conversely, in these types of games, if a seemingly-unimportant character gets a face and/or a dedicated voice volume control, you know they'll play a much bigger role later on.

Nintendo Hard variations of this spoiler may indicate entire unlockable worlds and characters with multiple rows of question marks against an empty template throughout the majority of gameplay. If there's one persistent '?' blank spoiler page that just doesn't seem to want to reveal its secrets and stays hidden throughout practically the entire game to the point of frustration, it's the menu interface version of Empty Room Psych, and that Your Princess Is in Another Castle! moment for players just might escalate into a case of Guide Dang It!

See also Equipment Spoiler, Missing Secret, Disc-One Final Dungeon and Spoiled by the Format. Can easily lead to Your Princess Is in Another Castle!. A Tech Tree can be especially prone to this. Occasionally overlaps with Spoiled by the Manual. 100% Completion and Sidequests can actually create subversions or aversions of this, by making it so that finishing the main game/storyline doesn't also fill up a mission roster or what-have-you.

Because this trope deals with spoilers, reader beware!


Video Game Examples:

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    Action 
  • Devil May Cry:
    • The HD Collection introduced an Achievement System for the first three games, but these also include unhidden spoilers such as the names of the bosses, or the existence of unlockables and extras such as additional weapons or alternate playable characters.
    • Devil May Cry 4: The rankings page shows how many missions there are in the game and which ones you get to control Dante in.
    • Devil May Cry 5:
      • The game deliberately tries to avert this thanks to a setting in the options menu. Due to the limited online co-op, players can turn off costumes and other aspects of the game that would spoil what happens in the story if one player happens to be further along than another. However, this trope is played straight from a certain perspective; the menu text warns you that this setting will NOT help with weapons that have been acquired. So for example, if one player has the Devil Sword Dante, the other co-op player who hasn't heard of it will still have that info spoiled for them.
      • Opening Nero's button configuration reveals that two actions in the list are suspiciously labeled as "(UNUSED)". Once he has re-acquired his lost demonic powers, they are properly labeled in the button configuration. The player can then reassign the two new actions as there is no longer any purpose in keeping the old button assignments.
      • Once you gain access to the Mission Menu when playing as Dante, the Equipment section on the lower-right corner of the screen already has empty slots in the weapon loadout, hinting that Dante will acquire at least 4 melee weapons and 4 ranged weapons by the end of the story.
      • The DLC store allows you to pay two bucks to unlock Vergil's EX color instantly, spoiling their appearance in the game. After the Special Edition was released, the main menu would also display the "Unleash Vergil" option for those who haven't purchased the DLC that makes said character playable.
    • DmC: Devil May Cry: The Definitive Edition includes a DLC named Vergil's Downfall, which you will see before starting the main game, and the trophy for beating said DLC is called "Our souls are at odds brother". Guess who ends up an enemy at the end.
  • God of War:
    • The tutorials in Ragnarok refer to all of Atreus' abilities as Companion abilities, which, after God of War (2018) simply called them Atreus abilities, may tip savvy players off that he is not the only partner character in the game this time around. Similarly, the fact that Atreus' skill tree starts with only a few abilities offset to the left implies that he'll be a playable character.
    • Ragnarok also has a persistent little spoiler you'll probably only catch after The Reveal: The name of the Norse god of war is Týr, with an accent over the 'y', and whenever Týr is the subject of discussion, the subtitles spell it correctly. But when said character actually speaks, the dialogue is labeled as coming from 'Tyr', with no accent. As it turns out, Tyr is not Týr; it's Odin impersonating him. When the real Týr shows up in the postgame, his dialogue is attributed to 'Týr'.
  • In Hard Edge, you start out with only two playable characters, Alex and Michelle. However, in the menu, you can easily press L or R enough times to get a sneak peek at the silhouettes and names of the two additional playable characters, Burns and Rachel, long before you actually encounter them in the game.
  • Defied in True Lies. The secret weapon — flamethrower — occupies the same slot in the interface as the basic pistol, unlike regular weapons which each has its own slot.
  • In Zombies Ate My Neighbors, most of the enemies are well-known classic movie monsters, with their well-known weaknesses (as well as a Logical Weakness where applicable). The thing is that you can scroll through all of the possible items and weapons right from the start, revealing whom you might be fighting later. Most notable is the crucifix, which, naturally, is quite handy against vampires, but they don't start appearing until about halfway through the game.

    Action-Adventure 
  • ANNO: Mutationem:
    • On the Skill Tree, there are several selectable upgrades that are initially blank with no description, hinting they will become a major factor once unlocked.
    • While making her way to the Walter Raleigh, Ann is approached by a suspicious man, which the subtitles unveil his name as K, making it blatant he's a higher-up of The Consortium.
  • The Legend of Zelda series typically has inventory screens with each slot reserved for a specific item, and by the end of the game the player will have acquired most of them.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:
      • Such a big inventory screen, with such huge spaces for items and equipment, should tell you that even after you get all three Pendants and the Master Sword, there's still a ton of game left.
      • And if that didn't clue you in, the sheer scope of the map should do the same. Especially the Dark World map, which you can first sneak a peek at when you take the portal on Death Mountain. There's no way all of that landscape is going unused...
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has the outlines of the sage's medallions already in the inventory-screen, long before the player even learns about them. The exception is the Triforce's outline, as the Triforce itself is unobtainable.
    • Oracle of Ages and Seasons: This trend drove fans nuts in both games. With every item found, there were still two empty item slots. It was actually because equipping an item moves it from your inventory to the equip slot, so these two empty spaces were for whatever two items you had equipped.note 
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: While the inventory menu plays it straight, the game's overworld features a notable aversion. The fish that marks the area of the Great Sea the Tower of the Gods is located in won't appear until after the Tower has risen from the sea.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess avoided this by using a Ring Menu for Link's inventory items, while keeping key items (including sword and armor) displayed on a more traditional "Quest Status" screen.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has you pursuing the Ghost Ship after Tetra is kidnapped. When you finally catch up to it, you may be quick to realize that only half of the sea map had been revealed up to that point.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks has the Sand Temple show up on your Rail Map from the first time you visit the Ocean Realm, making it mighty suspicious you haven’t gone there even after “supposedly” stopping Malladus’s resurrection.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Unlike in Ocarina of Time, whose Quest Status menu teased the possibility of getting the Triforce even though it wasn't possible, in this game you actually do get the Triforce this time. However, to prevent spoilers, its slot on the Quest Status screen doesn't show up until you find the first piece. And it actually replaces the slot for another MacGuffin that has long since served its purpose.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
      • Every single NPC in the game is named in their dialogue window or their name over their head if you've spoken to them once before, except for disguised Yiga Clan enemies who are always just "Traveler." This only helps you if it's an NPC you've spoken to in the past, because both tells don't become apparent until after you first talk to the character, at which point it's too late to avoid the attack if they're a Yiga.
      • Once you get the Camera rune, you can detect the presence of the game's Ambushing Enemies — Decayed Guardians pretending to be inert husks, Lizalfos blending in with the background, and buried Octoroks — by pointing the camera at them. The ones that will attack are labeled. Similarly, the upgraded Stasis rune will also highlight enemies from a distance when used, as they're just as susceptible to being frozen by it as non-hidden ones, while wearing the Champion's Tunic will display their health bears above them.
      • The Stasis rune can be used to detect which flower is just a generic flower versus a collectible material.
    • Hyrule Warriors: During Cia's Tale, in her efforts to recruit Volga, she ends up being joined by Wizzro. The moment he appears on the map, you get his character intro cutscene, which only happens for enemy commanders; sure enough, Cia is "betrayed by evil jewelry" as soon as she's in position to fight Volga himself.
    • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity: One mission has the player escort a knight who eventually turns out to be a Yiga assassin. Keen-eyed players may notice that unlike other knight NPCs, this knight cannot be healed by Mipha and the enemy never attacks him.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: In addition to the returning examples from Breath of the Wild, there's one regarding one of the Main Quests, "Find Princess Zelda". You may notice that even after retrieving the Master Sword and learning Zelda is the Light Dragon, which is what she meant by her request to Link to "find [her]", the Main Quest isn't marked as done, nor does her Character Profile get updated to reflect this. This hints that her Light Dragon form will be reversed at some point.
  • Avoided in Kid Icarus: Uprising with Palutena's Treasure Hunt, styled in a similar way to the challenges in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The 120 individual challenges censor the names of potential spoilers until you've reached that point. (e.g. Defeat ??? using the ???) And then it goes one further: With only one exception, it only features challenges related to the first 9 chapters, supposedly the entirety of the game, so it will seem to be near completion by the time you reach the "final boss".The exception?  There's actually a second batch of challenges called Viridi's Treasure Hunt, which doesn't even appear until you meet her in the story. There's also a third set that won't appear until you've beaten the game, but there are no spoilers to hide at that point.
  • You can tell the Disc-One Final Dungeon of Ōkami just from the fact that you don't have all the brush techniques yet, but if that didn't tip you off, the fact that your equipment screen looks so empty is likely to. For reference, there are three types of weapon available: reflectors, rosaries, and glaives. Completing said Disc-One Final Dungeon nets you your first glaive... out of five.
  • Cave Story: One level requires you to find and return Jenka's five missing dogs. But the space between Jenka and the door, where the dogs sit once you return them, only has room for four dogs. Sure enough, when you return with the fifth dog, you find something bad has happened in your absence, and the other dogs are missing again.
  • Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku:
    • In Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku II, using the Scouter on characters shows their stats and information about them. Characters you can play as get question marks for their stats, revealing to the player that in addition to Gohan, who is your starting character, you'll also be able to play as Piccolo, Vegeta, Trunks, Goku, and Hercule.
    • Buu's Fury has the scouter commit an even more amusing mistake by spoiling the Supreme Kai and Kibito's identities before they're actually revealed.
  • By the point in Bastion where you are told there is one last core to collect, the map is barely half full.
  • La-Mulana spoils the existence of the Hell Temple's treasure, the Skimpy Swimsuit, in its Steam achievement list.
  • La-Mulana 2 has the rooster-like Fjalar enemies. Though they begin showing up in Heaven's Labyrinth half-way through the game, their Ruins Encyclopedia entry lists them under Spiral Hell. Given the similar name to the first game's Hell Temple and the giant stone fists the Fjalar use to attack greatly resemble a Running Gag Kaizo Trap in said area, it's likely to spoil The Twist that Spiral Hell is Hell Temple.
  • Metroid:
    • Metroid: Zero Mission flubs on a major spoiler point when it states the certain power-ups are incompatible with your current suit. A simple one-word omission would have defeated an otherwise dead give-away, though they could never have completely taken away from the fact that they wouldn't give you powerups that you could never use...
    • Metroid Prime accidentally does this a lot. On the map of the first game, the legend outright stated the names of the weapons, as certain weapons were required to open certain doors. For example, the key on the map outright stated that red doors, which you don't even see in the game until very late, are opened by the Plasma Beam. The sequels (and remake) fix this slightly, by having the legend say that certain colors are "???," but that still gives a hint at what the later weapons are.
    • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes:
      • The HUD's bar-shaped meters for the Light and Dark Beams each have four dimmed-out sections when those weapons are first acquired, hinting at the existence of Beam Ammo Expansions.
      • The game's Scan Data also calls a certain boss "Dark Samus 1", indicating further encounters. It also plays with this trope a bit, since the scans have changed a bit. Enemies in the same group will share a group percent, which shows how many scans there are in the group. Scanning Dark Samus 1 gives you 25% of the Dark Samus scans, which suggests that you fight Dark Samus 4 times, except that you only fight Dark Samus three times; "Dark Samus 3" and "Dark Samus 4" come from the same battle, with the later scan being a certain special attack.
      • The game's world map also has the Dark World function grayed out but not fully invisible, which spoils the player early that they are going to travel to another dimension. Granted, it's less than an hour before the player gets to go there.
    • Metroid: Samus Returns also has suspicious expansions and a very suspicious Teleport Station on the escape route you're expected to leave the game with. Also, some expansions are behind crystalline barriers that none of Samus' weapons can breach. Isn't the Metroid Queen supposed to be the final boss? Nope; this time it's Ridley!
    • Metroid Fusion:
      • A small example of this, though it will be obvious to those who've played prior installments of the series, can be seen when the player collects Power Bomb upgrades (notably on the Main Deck, before releasing the Etecoons and Dachoras) before they can actually use them, or are even made aware that they can download the research data for the Power Bomb to begin with. Compare this to Super Metroid, where Power Bombs can be used immediately upon acquisition.
      • While it requires completion of Metroid Prime, connecting both Fusion and Prime with a Game Boy Advance Transfer Cable and a GameCube when the latter has been completed once not only unlocks Samus' Fusion Suit for use, but also unlocks the "Unnamed Suit", the suit Samus acquires at the very end of Fusion when she absorbs the SA-X during the final battle. This occurs regardless of whether the player has played Fusion or not.
    • Both averted and played straight in Metroid Dread. The Samus screen's menus seem very small, but unlike in past games, where abilities that stack get individual spots on the menu, in this title any stacked upgrades outright replace the original's position. As such, items like the Spin Boost and Plasma Beam appear that are just enough to leave the player wondering if that's all they're getting, only to have them replaced in the menu by the Space Jump and the Wave Beam. That said, Adam does mention around the first time you enter a water-logged zone that finding the Space Jump would be useful, which may be just enough for players to wise up once they find the Spin Boost.
  • In Beyond Good & Evil, you can see Pey'j's Jet Boots in his inventory before he introduces them to Jade.
  • In Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, after fighting the Abyssal Guardian, a quick look at his bestiary page makes it obvious that he will return as a Degraded Boss.
  • Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order:
    • As soon as you meet BD-1, going into the character customization menu shows the droid hanging on Cal's back, spoiling that he will become a permanent companion long before you find out at the end of the first proper mission on Bogano.
    • Walking into the tunnel right below the Mantis as soon as you land on Bogano for the first time has Cal exclaim that a sphere located inside a locked room has the exact same sphere and socket from Zeffo. You don't find out that you need to head to the planet Zeffo in the first place until you find the Vault on Bogano and learn where you need to go next from Cordova.
    • The image of the Full House achievement not only spoils the fact that you recruit a companion who looks suspiciously like the Nightsister you encounter just after arriving on Dathomir, but that there is an additional animal companion you can also acquire. Both of these companions require you to get further into the game (and in one case, get a required Force upgrade) before you can get either of them.
    • If you duly scan all the enemies you encounter, halfway through the game you will realize that there is a final unused spot in the Imperial enemy databank, beyond even the Ninth and Second Sister. Given that bosses are usually placed at the end and given that they seem to be ranked in terms of power, this missing entry forbodes ill. It is reserved for none other than Darth Vader, whom you encounter during the final mission.
    • The Databank entries for quests might get ahead of themselves, such as one telling you that Cal's captors are the Haxion Brood well before Cal figures it out for himself.
  • Hollow Knight: The Hunter's Journal gives away many of the upcoming battles, in that it only gives you the full entry once you've beaten an enemy enough times - including for bosses. For example, it spoils that you fight Hornet twice.
  • In Ys Origin, Toal goes through almost exactly the same sequence of bosses as Yunica and Hugo, but when you reach the final boss there's still a slot left in the bestiary.
  • In Killer7, Channels 9, 10, and 11 are just added as a reference to a certain type of TV. However, this leads to a very hard to figure out one: Whenever you can select Harman while on his channel, he says, "Ah, Garcian... how long has it been?" If you go to the Blood channel quickly, he still says it since no sub menus or voices can be shown there. Same goes for Channel 11 and Channel 10... but it stops at Channel 9. This foreshadows killer8, where there is someone who takes Channel 9 as his own.
  • In Hard Edge, the player can easily reveal the other two playable characters (Rachel and Burns) just by cycling through the characters with the shoulder buttons, complete with their silhouettes and names.
  • Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes: Selecting the main quest marker on the war map usually prompts you to save before displaying the next cutscene. However, the main quest for Azure Gleam Chapter 10 doesn't do this, going straight to the cutscene before changing the location of your real mission objective when the enemy mounts a surprise attack. Taking a closer look at the "enemy level" should also be a clue that something is off—the real main quest's enemies are always one or two levels higher than all of the other side quests, while the fake main quest has them at about the same level.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night zig-zags this, the map completion percentage goes up to 200% in order to hide Richter being the Disc-One Final Boss, but if you check the beastiary before fighting Richter there's clearly dozens of monsters still missing.
  • Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings:
    • Buru opts to not reveal its name and it's mentioned in-story later... despite it being shown in the dialogue box and the quest's info.
    • Gun doesn't learn who Elen is until very much later despite the game showing his name in his first appearance.
  • The graveyard in Alundra has a certain amount of plots, that are filled up one by one, allowing you to estimate, how much more tragedy is still ahead. Subverted when you realize, that destiny has been changed and the dying is far from over at that point.

    Adventure Games 
  • In Another Code, four of the (otherwise unlabeled) icons on your menu become selectable very early on in the game. However, the final icon's purpose only becomes clear at the climax.
  • In the NES/GBC version of Déjà Vu (1985), the game-over screen displayed when the player character dies note  is a picture of the character's gravestone, which has his name written on it. However, the player character doesn't know his name at the beginning of the game, and the player isn't supposed to know what it is before the character remembers it.
  • Harnessed to great effect by Gravity Bone. As you make your way through the second mission, you obtain several items which are set to keys 1, 2, and 4 on your keyboard. There is no item 3. Your character is killed before the end of the second mission.
  • Invoked in the first Simon the Sorcerer game. You can locate a group of wizards at a bar using this method, and address them by their title. When they ask you how you knew they were wizards... see the page quote.
  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent pops up instructional messages at appropriate times during the game. Some involve how to avoid getting attacked by monsters, which most players take as a sign that a confrontation is mere moments away. Sometimes, they're even correct. This game is known for milking anticipation for all it's worth, and this trope is no exception.
  • Minecraft: Story Mode: The image on the episode select screen for Episode 4 gives away the notion that in Episode 3, the Formidi-Bomb doesn't defeat the Wither Storm.
  • Poptropica: Older islands had maps, which showed everywhere on the island, including places you haven't visited yet. While they're marked with question marks, it still shows where you can get to a room you haven't been to yet.
  • A soft form of the trope happens in Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: during loading screens, various trivia facts about the game's setting and characters appear. While a few of them are generic and appear in any chapter, a few of them are specific to the current chapter: this means that characters and places may be mentioned by a loading screen trivia before their proper debut.

    Card Games 
  • Shadowverse: When you face Eris in many of the other characters' storylines in the Steam version, you may notice that her portrait isn't animating. This indicates that the player is facing a doppelganger instead of the "real" Eris.
  • In Slay the Spire it quickly becomes apparent that the "Awakened One" isn't going to die when it runs out of health, on account of the fact that it says "This enemy hasn't awakened yet..." if your mouse hovers over it.

    Fighting Games 
  • BlazBlue makes a point of defying this trope:
    • BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger: Until you beat the True End in Story Mode, the credits list Hakumen and Nu-13's voice actors as '???'. They both share voice actors with other playable characters, and not listing this helps prevent the player from guessing that Hakumen is Jin Kisaragi's Alternate Self and that Noel and Nu-13 are both clones from the same source.
    • The ending of Continuum Shift reveals that the Imperator Librarius, leader of the repressive NOL and de facto ruler of the world is Saya, Ragna and Jin's long-lost sister. Her dialogue boxes in the CS ending and throughout BlazBlue: Chronophantasma are marked 'Imperator', averting both this trope and the option of lying to the player - marking them accurately would give away that Saya isn't in the driving seat anymore.
  • In Guilty Gear -STRIVE-, the in-game encyclopedia uses "she/her" pronouns when addressing Bridget. As she was previously introduced as a boy character, this spoils her Arcade Mode, which is dedicated to her Coming-Out Story as a transgender woman.
  • In versions of Street Fighter II starting from Super Street Fighter II Turbo, you'll notice if you've been playing particularly well that M. Bison's portrait is not only blank, but also has no name. He gets subjected to a Shun Goku Satsu before you're supposed to fight him, and Akuma takes the spot of your final opponent.
  • Soulcalibur IV was released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and, like SCII, each platform had its own Guest Fighter, this time from the Star Wars universe: Darth Vader for PS3 and Yoda for the Xbox (and Starkiller for both). Many people figured that they would release the other system's character as DLC, but Namco didn't confirm nor deny. The suspense (if there was any) was ruined when the game had a single suspiciously empty square on the character select screen once everything was unlocked.
  • In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's "World of Light" adventure mode, the story is presented as having to defeat Galeem, who is posted at the very top of the map. After exploring the world and winning the many battles around, you're finally able to reach and challenge the being to battle. ...Now, if only you weren't still missing nearly half of the fighters...

    First-Person Shooters 
  • Half-Life 2 and its episodes show some of their story achievements but hide others - for instance, in Episode 2, "obtain the Muscle Car" is shown, but "survive the White Forest Inn ambush" is hidden.
  • BioShock:
    • The Bathysphere menu spoils the number of levels, and the fact that you have more tonic slots than you can actually unlock before the confrontation with Ryan may tip one off as well. On the other hand, your wallet displays 4 digits, which seems to imply that there is some way to increase the maximum amount of money you can hold from $500. This is not the case, however. The extra digit seems to just be a UI relic. Also, ammo descriptions at vending machines tell you that certain ammo types are good for certain enemies, even before you've encountered those enemies.
    • After you kill Ryan, Atlas will start a dramatic monologue where he reveals that he's actually the thought-to-be dead Frank Fontaine. It's all very suspenseful... unless you have subtitles turned on in which case an entire paragraph of dialogue will be displayed before he's finished talking, spoiling his big reveal several moments before he actually says it.
  • BioShock 2:
    • More linearity/no train menu prevents that from spoiling, but every train station has a little chart of the route, with each stop clearly denoted by a dot. (Even the prison Persephone, whose very existence is supposed to be known to just a handful of Rapture's citizens and which doesn't even have a train station). Also, Persephone's name is spoiled if you look at the enemy profile of the Alpha Series, which are first encountered in the area immediately before it.
    • As Delta and Eleanor head up the elevator right after the final battle, the achievement "Heading To The Surface" pops up on-screen. Players can immediately pause the game and read the achievement, which reads, "Head to the surface on the side of Sinclair's escape pod", thus spoiling the surprise a few seconds later when the explosives detonate.
  • BioShock Infinite: later in the game, Elizabeth gets kidnapped, and nothing can tell you for sure that this character is gonna survive and come back into the story. Nothing except an ill-placed on-screen hint: when walking before a locked door, the game outright tells you: "Elizabeth Busy - Can't Lockpick".
  • In Halo 3: ODST, "Data leak on sub-level 9" (from the loading screen) hints towards the ending.
  • The weapon menus in Red Faction: Guerrilla and Wolfenstein.
  • Borderlands spoils the existence of Eridian weaponry, which is supposed to be late game equipment because it has its separate skill on your character's stat window.
  • Borderlands 2:
    • There's a subtle example based on mission postings: for the sake of none of the sidequests being Permanently Missable from advancing the main quest, Roland, who dies during the main storyline is the only NPC in Sanctuary who never gives you a sidequest in person (the one he does give you is a recording). It's also a tip-off that you'll get Lilith back safe and sound from Handsome Jack, and Brick and Mordecai don't end up dying after their ship goes down in the final mission.
    • This one requires a little digging into the menu for Badass Ranks, effectively completing optional challenges to acquire points that can be spent for stat increases. A common recurring challenge is Cult of the Vault, where you are tasked to find a variety of usually well-hidden symbols, and because it is a running tally challenge, you can go back various areas to look for them at your leisure. It's quite telling that Control Core Angel has no Cult of the Vault challenges listed, nor do any enemies drop gear, but no surprise either given what happens there.
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! has a pretty subtle example in the Claptastic Voyage DLC. So you've chased down 5H4D0W-TP to The Cortex and defeated him for good, reclaiming the H-Source once and for all. With 5H4D0W-TP's interference gone, Handsome Jack is finally able to contact you again and extract you from Claptrap's code, bringing you back to Deck 13.5. There's just one problem: didn't the game render the area name as Deck 13 1/2 before? Of course, the twist gets revealed almost immediately, so it's only Five-Second Foreshadowing, unlike most examples on this page.
  • Far Cry 2 has an in-game map with most towns being labelled with vaguely African names and other buildings labelled as "cattle ranch." Except for twisting path through impassable mountains leading to a valley named The Heart of Darkness. Considering that the game was widely known before release as a kind of video game Spiritual Successor to Heart of Darkness and/or Apocalypse Now it's not as much of a spoiler as one might imagine.
  • The mission update tips in Far Cry 3 contain more information than Jason Brody could conceivably know, such as tips that tell you to find a hidden entrance in a location you have just entered. After Keith tells Jason that Riley is dead, the Handbook doesn't add Riley's entry into it.
  • The Jurassic Park arcade Rail Shooter game concludes with a battle against two T. rexes while the player is riding on the back of a vehicle. When you beat the final T. rex down to a third of his health, the creature flees and the vehicle continues driving towards the gate, leading people to assume the game is finished... but the T. rex's health bar is still present on-screen, spoiling his eventual reappearance.
  • In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, your PDA will list "contacts" who you can talk to nearby. Near the end of the game, in the part of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant you can only enter if you find the decoder, this list will include someone called "C-Consciousness representative" before you're introduced to said character.
  • In The Darkness, the pause menu shows the eponymous evil twizzlers three chapters before you get them.
  • The PC version of Unreal Tournament 3. If you're watching the installer, it shows you the names of the files being copied to your system. Now this includes the cinematics of the campaign. The name of one particular cinematic? Malcom Betrayal.
  • Doom:
    • ZDoom, a source port for Doom, includes an option to mark the exit on the automap with a different colour. This makes it easy to recognize fake exit switches ahead of time.
    • ZDoom's minimap also shows teleporters, which reveals hidden teleporter traps and also inadvertently shows the correct route across the torch platform puzzle in Map30 of TNT: Evilution (where otherwise you have to memorise the line of coloured torches in the previous corridor and walk the platforms in the same order).
    • Similarly, in some source ports the total monster population can be displayed onscreen. If it seems you've already cleaned out the level, but there's still 100 monsters unaccounted for, something's up.
  • One of the achievements in The Original Strife: Veteran Edition (a digital re-release of Strife) originally had a description that outright spoiled the fact that you have to defeat Macil. Even better? The achievement's name is "Trust No One". Current Steam and GOG Galaxy version avert this by hiding the achievement description until it's actually gained in-game.

    Idle Games 
  • Kittens Game spoils you that blueprints will become craftable because they are listed in the crafting menu long before you discover their crafting recipe.

    MMORPGs 
  • Most World of Warcraft achievements don't bother with obscuring spoiler objectives. One exception is the achievement for the Trial of the Crusader raid, which hides the name of the final boss, only showing it as "Complete the Trial of the Crusader". The final boss is Anub'arak, after the Lich King breaks the floor of the Coliseum and makes you fall into the Nerubian tunnels below it. Later, even this was spoiled by the raid-lock system, which names the bosses that have and have not been defeated this week. By then, though, raid leaders generally insisted on either giving all first-timers a Walkthrough or having them watch one on YouTube, making a Late-Arrival Spoiler inevitable anyway.
    • When you start a new worgen character in Gilneas, you can immediately zoom out the world map to the Eastern Kingdoms and notice that the hover text for the Gilneas zone says "Ruins of Gilneas" instead. This points to two things: one, that your homeland isn't going to survive intact very long; and two, for the more tech-savvy players, it shows that the version of Gilneas you start in is actually an instance isolated from the main world. Even worse, when inspecting the Ruins of Gilneas map, you can immediately notice that a significant chunk of land in the southwest is missing, foreshadowing that it will be sunk by the Cataclysm during the worgen intro storyline.
    • Since Cataclysm all players now have access to a dungeon journal which gives a name, portrait, short section of biography text, ability list and some tactical information for every boss in a new dungeon or raid as soon as it is released. The betrayal of Archbishop Benedictus in the Hour of Twilight dungeon is not exactly hard to predict when you already have a screen full of information up to and including a list of all the spells that he is going to zap you with.
    • Quests used to be bad about this because they followed a very rigid format. If the quest text told you to kill an NPC, but the quest objective said "confronted 0/1" instead of "killed 0/1", you knew they would get away. Quests might tell you find someone missing but the objective would tell you it was a corpse you would find. One quest of Sven's Revenge gave you clues to a person's identity, but that person showed up on the map as a quest completed icon. Since Legion, this has improved, with a more flexible format: new objectives can come up that were not visible before, so you may find an NPC, only for them to become hostile, and the quest changes to "kill NPC".
    • In "Dagger in the Dark", which, like other scenarios, has a series of objectives you need to complete, displays the final objective- killing the Kor'kron assassins even before Rak'gor Bloodrazor tries to kill Vol'jin.
    • In Legion, the "Followers" tab on your scouting map shows all of the Champions you can recruit for your Order Hall, not just the ones you already have. This makes it practically impossible to be surprised by who you recruit, even though some of these characters were very obviously intended to be twists.
    • Sometimes even the exploration achievements can spoil. In Highmountain, one of the areas players have to find is called "Feltotem". Given that one of the tribes in Highmountain are the Bloodtotem, no one is surprised when they join the Burning Legion.
    • The "Subtitles spoil the reveal" happens twice in Dragonflight when characters reveal themselves. First with Sabellion, who at least doesn't say a single line before introducing himself. However, much more blatant in the Azure Span wherein a simulacrum of Sindragosa appears... but before she reveals herself, she says several lines which the subtitles attribute to "Sindragosa".
  • In EverQuest, every zone of the last few expansions has a "Hunter" achievement which basically lists every "named" or boss mob in the zone. Is "Lord Bob" a quest person, normal trash mob or named (special loot dropping) monster? If he's on the "Hunter" list, you have the answer.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic has a lot of this.
    • Get a codex entry for a character in your storyline and it has likes/dislikes? They're going to join you. See a level-capped character going around with a certain title? Tells you flat out the end results of certain plot-points.
    • Targeting Darth Zash when you meet up with her at the end of Chapter One of the Inquisitor story shows her true face in her portrait, spoiling The Reveal.
    • A codex entry for the Smuggler near the end of Act 1 spoils The Reveal that Nok Drayen is still alive, and his treasure is more than it seems.
  • In RuneScape, most quest-specific equipment can't be traded or purchased on the Grand Exchange specifically to prevent this happening, or the players cheating their way through the quests by buying Mac Guffins. However, you can still find Barrows equipment on the Exchange for the quest-specific Barrows wights Akrisae and Linza, and get spoiled that those characters will die.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • A major player in one of the side quest chains (specifically, Fray of the Dark Knight job quests) is eventually revealed to be your Enemy Without. Accordingly, this character's gender is "coincidentally" the same as yours — even if you use a Fantasia potion to change genders mid-questline, or go through it on a different-gender alt. Luckily, this probably won't happen by accident, since Fantasias cost real money and the game's mechanics discourage Alt-itis. But it's still possible.
    • In the A Realm Reborn chapters of the game, you can't progress any further beyond patch 2.4 content until you defeated the hard mode versions of Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda. Now why would you be forced to tackle content that has almost no bearing on the main story? This is due to the NPC that gives the quest vanishes by the time you gain the ability to enter Ishgard (the start of the 3.0 Heavensward content). Since the primals you have to fight again are also linked to the relic quest lines, losing out on the whole thing due to the quest giver vanishing would screw the player over. Ergo, you have to do the side content anyway so that you are not screwing yourself over by making other content gone forever. This later gets subverted, however, in patch 4.4: A Realm Reborn's extreme trials aren't required for the main quest, and Urianger will still be in the Waking Sands to hand them out even after his soul gets transported to a parallel dimension.
    • At the end of the main story in 4.3's "Under the Moonlight", some cut scenes play out with one of them showing the supporting protagonist inside a ship that gets shot down while the other shows the player character having a conversation with the other characters. After the cut scene with the ship crash, the screen fades to black and then you get a pop up text telling you to get ready for an instanced battle. This caught many players off guard since the duty pop up always occur when something is going on with their character. It turns out that the battle involves Alphinaud and you get to control him as an actual playable character.
    • In patch 4.2's "Rise of a New Sun" story, it reveals that Zenos is Not Quite Dead. His text box gives away a very subtle hint that something is not quite right where the game only shows his first name rather than his entire name. 4.3 reveals that Zenos's body was taken over by an Ascian while Zenos himself took over someone else's body.
    • The menu that displays all of your job's abilities will show you everything you will learn as you level up and complete job quests, ruining the surprise of what new skills you will obtain. The skills learned in Heavensward were hidden until you actually learned them, but by the next expansion, it was changed to be displayed with everything else. Quest rewards (which can also include job skills) will also reveal what you can earn upon completion of the quest. Certain quests avoid the trope by having the item icon as a gift box with only "???" appearing if you try to see what the item is.
    • Shadowbringers takes great strides to hide various parts of its map. For one, the map of Norvrandt can't be viewed at all until the player first makes their way there, and even after arriving there the sixth zone, The Tempest, has every point of interest replaced by question marks, including the zone's aetheryte. Furthermore, most references to the sixth zone elsewhere (such as achievements, where to acquire the orchestrion roll for that zone, hunt locations, and so on) are similarly obscured. The latter half of the zone, Amaurot, goes even further - its points of interest and aetheryte don't even appear on the map at all until you get there for the first time.
    • This trope is played straight, however, with the final dungeon of Shadowbringers' Main Quest, Amaurot; the dungeon drops the orchestrion roll for the song that plays within, and thus the dungeon is listed by name in the orchestrion log.
    • In most instanced content with a party, the moment the last remaining player is knocked out, the screen immediately fades to black and the fight resets. In the fight against Ultimate Bahamut, his Terraflare attack will kill everyone, even if you use the tank's strongest Limit Break. The screen doesn't fade and you're informed that Phoenix's cry cuts through your desperation. Phoenix itself appears and revives the whole party and fills up the Limit Break gauge to the full three bars.
    • In 3.5, completing the MSQ to that point earned you the title "Palpaymo's Final Witness". The title completely spoiled the death of the named character and it was impossible to avoid since many players used that title in their displayed title preference. The developers admitted that the title name was a mistake on their part and the next patch changed it to simply "The Final Witness" to avoid spoilers.
    • The MSQ in 5.3 discusses the character Azim, who had played a major role in the distant past and they were friends with Emet-Selch. Like with Fray, Azim's gender matches the player character's and it changes if you change your character's gender, signifying that Azim was the player character in their past life.
    • Upon reaching the fourth zone of Endwalker players may notice that the region name is "Sea of Stars" instead of something more specific to the current zone. Checking the Fishing Log confirms that there's a second zone under that header, but also hints at another spoiler: the last remaining zone is listed below Sea of Stars and separate from any previous region, implying either that the region is itself a spoiler or we're going somewhere more remote than literal outer space. Similarly, checking the gathering log shows items that are clearly not obtainable anywhere else.
      • At the beginning of Endwalker, the player must perform two different tasks in different parts of the world - an arc in Sharlayan and another in Thavnair. No player was fooled for a second that they would were done with either zones at the level 80-81 questline - as not only was about half the map of Sharlayan inaccessible, but Thavnair had multiple maps that the player could not visit yet. Just like Eulmore, Radz-at-Han's aetheryte also could not be attuned to until the plot said so - meaning players easily knew that they were not yet done.
  • In Guild Wars 2, players are free to enter any map regardless of their story progress, so this can happen a lot from talking to scouts, reading the descriptions of renown hearts or events, or simply listening to NPC chatter. So, for example, in the core game, every level 60 or so area reveals that the three Orders of Tyria eventually join to become the Pact; in the Heart of Thorns expansion, you can explore Tarir before meeting the Exalted or head to Rata Novus before ever hearing its name; and in the recent Path of Fire expansion, exploring the Elon Riverlands spoils that Vlast, Aurene's brother and Glint's first son, dies. There's one particular instance that tries to avoid this: in Bloodtide Coast, a Risen Commander spawns and taunts you over the death of your Order mentor only if you've completed the Battle for Claw Island on that character. However, it's still possible to see another player trigger their appearance, and the event's name spells out that it's a fight to avenge your mentor's death. Achievement names and descriptions are a mixed bag - some are as vague as possible, or even outright hidden until you complete them - though again, one attempt to hide a spoiler in a Living World episode still ironically ends up doing the opposite. To wit, it is described only as "Follow your foe's tracks deeper into the volcano", but the associated story step is named In Pursuit of a God, revealing just who was impersonating Lazarus the Dire.

    Platform Games 
  • The later Jak and Daxter games have your health in the form of little green dots around a circle. Starting with Jak 3, once the existence of Heart Containers is established you can calculate how many more you're likely to get based on how much of the circle it covers. Similarly, even if you were just handed a Jak 3 disc without a case and had missed the entire second game, you could easily guess that you eventually access Light Eco powers when you see that only half the Yin Yang symbol in your HUD fills up with purple when you collect the dark stuff.
  • The Ratchet & Clank games tend to do this too, if you look deeply enough into the menus.
    • The Skill Point lists tell you which planet each is found on, effectively spoiling every level in the game and making it easy to see Your Princess Is in Another Castle! moments coming.
    • A particularly egregious example from Up Your Arsenal: It's pretty obvious a certain character isn't really dead when you know you'll later visit a place called Qwark's Hideout. Another possible one from that game is "Crash Site," even if exactly what crashed may not be immediately obvious.
    • There's also arena challenges such as "Defeat all enemies using only the Rift Inducer", which appear long before said weapons are available.
    • In the Aquatos Sewers, there are icons for Gadgetron vendors floating out in the middle of nowhere, making it clear that there's more of the sewers to explore than you can see. Well, at least until you get the Map-O-Matic.
    • The Monsterpedia in Going Commando lists the home planet of each enemy; when it's not the world you first encounter them on, you know you'll probably be visiting it later on. Examples include all the Thugs-4-Less members being from Snivelak which you go to when you storm their base to rescue someone very late in the game, and all MegaCorp robots listing Yeedil, it's the location of MegaCorp's headquarters and The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Subverted with some though, such as the B2-Brawler's home planet Cerebella, which has yet to make an appearance in the series.
    • In Ratchet: Deadlocked, the stats menu gives you information about what you've done in the game. This includes kills with weapons (which are named in the menu, which means you know you'll get an Epic Flail, a shield launcher, and a gun that deploys turrets) and enemies killed (which spoils that you'll be fighting robot ghosts and robot zombie ghosts at some point).
    • In Ratchet & Clank (2016), the loading screen sometimes gives hints for weapons that aren't available yet.
  • The challenge achievement for beating the game in both Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 say "Whomp Wily!", despite the plotlines of both leading you to believe otherwise.
    • Throughout the franchise, the menu screens almost always have exactly enough room for every weapon and item in the game. When you get one Sub-Tank, for instance, you can see where the Sub-Tanks appear on the menu, how much more room there is, and therefore how many more Sub-Tanks are in the game (generally a total of four).
    • The Navi Mode included in Rockman Complete Works and Mega Man Anniversary Collection doesn't even try to hide the fact that Cossack isn't the true Big Bad of Mega Man 4.
  • Iji spoils the existence of the Komato from level one as their weapons are an upgradable stat. Interestingly, a thorough search of Sector 1 reveals that there's an in-universe reason for this, as the scientists who gave Iji her Nanofield left logbooks behind, and one of them mentions "that other species [the Tasen] keep referring to".
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • In New Super Mario Bros., you can scroll through and view the entirety of the current world, no matter which levels you've unlocked.note 
    • There are more than 6 worlds in New Super Mario Bros. 2, but this too is spoiled by the world map screen.
    • In Super Mario Galaxy 2, one can see how many galaxies there are in a world from the grand world map. If one looks at World S before getting 240 stars, they might be confused by the world still having a locked galaxy left...
    • Super Mario 3D World has a few of these.
      • When Miiverse was still active, you could replay a level with Ghost Miis. You may notice some of them spinning in midair. This spoils the fact that Rosalina is a playable character.
      • Similarly, even non-spoiler labeled Miiverse messages could serve as this thanks to the stamps. Not only can people use them freely without spoiler warnings, but you can see the outlines of the stamps, and a lot of them are really easy to make out. A lot of them depict Rosalina, and then you have the fact that Meowser, the Final Boss, is a stamp. Yeah, they really should've auto-spoilered that one.
      • The list of levels will show exactly how many levels there are in a world that you haven't completed yet.
  • In Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, in the controls menu the 3rd option you can change is for the jet pack. Take 3 guesses as to how you beat Clockwerk.
  • Jumper Two's unlockables menu blatantly spoils the existence of "secret" levels. Chances are that you will see said menu long before finishing the last sector (one requirement for secret stage 1. The other is getting total record time below certain threshold).
  • Psychonauts:
    • The game presents all the minds you can enter as doors, and you can see all the minds you get to enter from the start of the game. This becomes very noticeable right before you unlock the Meat Circus: you've passed the Point of No Return and are in the middle of an epic battle against the Big Bad... while having the nagging thought of "Wasn't there another door out there?"
    • Right from the beginning, you can see a silhouette of a brain jar with a question mark on the inventory screen. You don't find out you have to collect the campers' brains until you get to the asylum.
  • Psychonauts 2:
    • The subtitles identify one of the flashback voices in Cruller's Correspondence as Young Gristol. This character simply having a name already gives away that they're going to be important, but the fact that their name is prefixed with "Young" implies that we'll meet a grown-up version of them at some point.
    • The summary of the game's final level in Razputin's notebook minutely explains two plot twists that are unveiled right after the level's first room (more specifically, that the mind Raz and Lili just entered is not Truman Zanotto's, but Nick Johnsmith's; and that Nick Johnsmith's real identity is that of the Big Bad himself, Gristol Malik). Unfortunately for some players that were too curious for their own good, this summary can be read while still in said first room. The game effectively spoiled series-defining plot twists by itself.
    • In PSI King's Sensorium, if you smack around Tasty, Sniffles, and Audie O., their voice lines are displayed as belonging to Compton, Cassie, and Bob, revealing that this mind belongs to one of the Psychic Six. Additionally, since we already know where Ford and Otto are, along with it clearly not belonging to the three already mentioned, that leaves only one member that the mind could possibly belong to...
  • Kirby:
    • The most ridiculous case of this probably comes from Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. Beating a level will allow the player the chance to play a minigame where they can collect randomized enemy info cards for the game's Monster Compendium. This includes even enemies and bosses you haven't met yet, and it's entirely possible for one to end up knowing about the spoiler-tastic True Final Boss as early as the first stage, if they get (un)lucky enough.
    • In Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, when facing off against what appears to be Meta Knight, his name is ? ? ?. No surprise when it turns out to be an imposter.
    • Kirby's Return to Dream Land: After beating the Grand Doomer, Kirby would have collected all five of the Lor Starcutter's parts. People who go for 100% Completion would noticed that only 84 of the 120 Energy Spheres have been collected- suggesting that there are more worlds. Even people on a casual run might be tipped off by the fact that the world select screen takes the time to specify that Kirby lives on Planet Popstar. Although this one is diffused a bit since Magolor often mentions wanting to take you to visit his home once the Lor Starcutter is repaired, implying that said home contains more levels.
    • In Kirby: Triple Deluxe, obtaining all of the Sun Stones rewards you with a keychain depicting the Big Bad, who is kept a big secret until the very end. It is possible to obtain said keychain before encountering the character in question. Masked Dedede and Dark Meta Knight also appear as keychains, and surely enough, the former appears as the Pre-Final Boss, while the latter shows up as the Final Boss of Dededetour. note  Kirby: Planet Robobot does something similar, but more competently; you can get a sticker of the game's main villain by collecting all the Code Cubes, but you'll already know what he looks like (his face is plastered on walls throughout the final area), and his existence is made clear beforehand. Meanwhile, Star Dream, the actual final boss, does not make any appearance until you defeat the aforementioned big bad.
    • Starting with Kirby's Return to Dream Land, all future games will hide the timer in The Arena and The True Arena when fighting the Final Boss's last phase. During The True Arena in Kirby: Triple Deluxe and Kirby: Planet Robobot, this hints that there's an extra phase exclusive to the mode.
  • Sonic Rush Adventure is one of those games where the conditions for fighting the True Final Boss involves beating the game. As such, the end credits will flat-out tell you who the secret main villain is.
  • When you save your game in Blender Bros, it shows you which planets you've beaten and which you haven't. The fact that your Player Headquarters planet is listed as one of the planets you have or haven't beaten, it sort of gives away the twist that your base is the final world.
  • Completing the Kong Temple levels with all Puzzle Pieces in Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze will unlock its own image gallery separate from the worlds they're placed in. By going into the gallery early on in the game, you'll see that the gallery is represented by the Mysterious Relics all placed together, each with a symbol representing a world. This will give you a hint that there will be a total of seven worlds in the game to beat even though you haven't collected all the Mysterious Relics yet.
  • Shantae and the Seven Sirens lets you use the eponymous character's trademark belly dancing to use powers acquired from the other half-genies she encounters and rescues over the course of the game. The problem: you meet five other half-genies, but only have four ability slots. Sure enough, you eventually find out one of the girls you met was Rottytops in disguise.
  • An odd example for the reveal of the Big Bad of Stinkoman 20X6- long before the game's last level was revealed due to Development Hell, his identity was revealed by the website's Game Select menu. As suspected, he turned out to be the 20X6 version of Coach Z, though the game was kind enough to hide his name: Z-Sabre.

    Puzzle Games 
  • In Bendy and the Ink Machine, there's an audio log that uses subtitles instead of the normal transcript. This is because the tape is blank. What Henry hears is really Bertrum Piedmont speaking.
  • A minor example in the English version of Catherine. The two main female characters, Catherine and Katherine, have the same name with different spellings. At one point, Vincent gets a call from someone named Steve who accuses him of stealing Catherine from him. Vincent spends some time trying to puzzle out exactly what he meant, since Steve only says the name out loud and both girls claim not to know anyone by that name, but the subtitles make it clear that he's talking about Catherine.
  • A subversion in Covert Front 2: Station on the Horizon: By the time you reach a fuse box with three resistor slots, you should have picked up two resistors, which appear in your inventory as "Resistor 1" and "Resistor 3". There is no Resistor 2, instead you have to use a random piece of wire in the remaining slot.
  • Seen in the collector's editions of the Detectives United series, where a Collection Sidequest has you searching for scraps of photographs throughout the games. Finding these scraps assembles full images, which may be installed as screen savers if desired; but the images can be viewed at any time by going to the correct menu, even if what's depicted in them hasn't been seen in the game yet.
  • Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows: Checking the save menu will show the % of bunnies captured (not counting babies), and still having about 35% after completing all main Bunburrows should raise an eyebrow.
  • In Portal, the new game menu appears to spoil the number of levels. Then you find out that the entire second half of the game doesn't show up on said menu. And if you don't know the expected runtime of Portal 2, the moment where you defeat GLaDOS and Wheatley seems to be about to free you before then betraying you feels roughly the same point where you win the former game - you have no reason to suspect you've not just completed the second game... and then the laughing starts ...
  • Portal 2 truncates the name of the last chapter ("The Part Where He Kills You") in the New Game menu for spoiler reasons. The achievements reveal the full title, but are worded vaguely enough that if you haven't reached a certain point in the game, you won't know who "he" means. Used to be played straight in earlier Source games like Half-Life 2, as described above.
    • Much lesser example - If you play with Closed Captioning off, you don't learn Wheatley's name until the Core Transfer. If you play with them on, it's seen at the very start of the game.
  • In Portal Stories: Mel this is downplayed in the subtitles when Virgil is pretending to be Cave Johnson. They say "Cave Johnson" until he comes clean so that you don't know who it really is; but they are also a different colour from the real Cave's subtitles.
  • Professor Layton:
    • Professor Layton and the Curious Village:
      • The game spoils the reveal of Flora in the description of a mystery you solve quite a bit earlier.
      • As soon as you have enough picarats, you can unlock bonuses such as character profiles, a Sound Test and image and cutscene galleries, and thus learn about most major plot twists a lot earlier than intended. The second game onwards would fix this by making those bonuses require obtaining enough picarats and beating the game.
    • Subverted in Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. The mysteries panel gradually fills up with "SOLVED" markers as the game reaches a climax... only for three of the mysteries that were thought "solved" early on in the game to be re-solved, this time with "The Whole Story". The game series mostly plays this straight, as while a few mysteries of secondary importance might be solved early on, most are solved near the end. Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy uses this trick too.
  • The Talos Principle: A great many puzzles have names that directly hint at the respective puzzle's solution. Actually facilitating said solution is another matter, but paying attention to the name when entering a new area is never a bad idea regardless.
  • If you quit Uncle Albert's Mysterious Island before finishing the game and read the credits, you get spoiled that Tom, who was an important character in the previous two games, is in the game, despite him only appearing at the very end and serving as a Plot Twist.
  • The Witness: After a while you figure out that if a mechanism moves verrrry slowly, it means there's an environmental puzzle nearby that can only be solved while the mechanism is in motion (which would be difficult to solve if the mechanism was moving at a more normal speed).

    Racing Games 
  • Not so much a spoiler as a slightly premature reveal, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed informs you of the "stickers" (achievements) you've just unlocked in an event after telling you how many XP you earned for your character and such. But the achievements themselves are triggered the second the race is finished, complete with pop-ups in the corner of the screen. Apparently there's no way to delay them. One sticker does, however, spoil that NiGHTS and Reala are playable characters.
  • Need for Speed: Underground spoils the identity of a mystery racer by showing it in the race leaderboard. In the Underground mode, after you defeat Eddie in the (supposed) final event, a cutscene will trigger where a black Nissan 350Z that you've already seen in previous cutscenes challenges you, leading to the actual final event. Right after the animation of the two cars getting before the start line, you will see the name of Melissa in the leaderboard. With a little guessing, you can figure out that's the girl that was along Eddie in two of the earliest cutscenes.

    Real-Time Strategy 
  • StarCraft II:
    • The game has achievements for each set of missions: the Mar Sara missions, the Hanson missions, the Tosh missions, the Horner missions, the Artifact missions, the Zeratul missions - and the Final missions, so named to avoid revealing that the last missions take place on Char. Also, the achievements don't mention that you can betray both Hanson and Tosh (separately) in their storylines or the nature of Zeratul's missions. They kind of blew it on hiding whose side Warfield and Valerian end up on, though.
    • You could look at the achievements before the game came out, and stuff like "Kill the Odin before it gets sent at Raynor" is very unsubtle. There's also achievements mentioning the Hyperion. Stukov too, and some might not even understand how he could show up, but in the actual game does have a Stop Poking Me! to explain that.note 
    • In Legacy of the Void, you can view the mission achievements on the launch screen. As a result, for example, on a mission where you send Artanis alone into a temple, you can see an achievement for killing a certain number of units with banelings. Combined with the trailers, it is easy to guess that you are going to fight alongside Kerrigan. The army assembly panel also shows three buttons for every unit you have available when you unlock it, thus spoiling that you'll have more variants for your units than just Aiur or Nerazim (even if what those other options are, or even that there's two additional Protoss factions that'll help Artanis, with every tier lacking an option from one of the four factions, is obscured).
  • In Brütal Legend, entering the multiplayer menu plays a tutorial cutscene which spoils Ophelia turning villainous. Less blatantly, there's the empty unit and solo slots.
  • Played with in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II. You can get armor plating equipment that is listed as only able to be equipped by "Dreadnought," well before you gain access to a Dreadnought. Unlike the other squads, it doesn't tell the Dreadnought's name, Davian Thule, your commanding officer and Player Character of the Space Marines in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. However, Thule is severely wounded shortly before you start getting the Dreadnought equipment, so anyone with a reasonable knowledge of 40k lore can easily figure out what's going to happen to him.
  • In Age of Mythology's campaign, during one of the earlier scenarios, Gargarensis is visible in an inaccessible portion of the map. Clicking on him, as with everything else in the game, brings up a description, which includes a description of his and Poseidon's plans, which are not revealed until about the halfway point of the campaign.
    • Age of Empires III had a similar case with Crazy Horse, while you can click on him and view his description in the fourth mission of The Warchiefs Expansion's Act II, his description is actually for his role in the final mission, spoiling not only that mission but the biggest twist of the campaign. (Namely what side you'll be taking in the end)
  • In Ground Control 2, you have to salvage the remains of a convoy transporting something apparently valuable, with briefing featuring lines about nobody knowing what it contains. Selecting "cargo" shows you "Prisoner Transport", making its content quite obvious.
  • Pikmin 2: Downplayed. The total number of treasures available in the game (201) is not revealed in any way until after you pay the debt of 10000 Pokos, by then you may have collected about half of them already.
  • Warlords Battlecry: In the first game, in one mission the little girl you're supposed to protect runs off on her own into a valley swarming with monsters. The first part of the mission tasks you with finding her, except the mission objective actually tells you to "discover" her. Hint: In English the word "discover" is very rarely used in reference to living people.
  • Halo Wars: During the events of the first game, Sergeant Forge sacrifices himself so that the Spirit of Fire can escape the Forerunner Shield World, thus a logical absence in the sequel. That is, until you see some of the cards usable during the Blitz mode Beta which have the Leader Restriction set to Forge himself, like his trademark Grizzly tank.
  • Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon, allows you to play as the Ironclads in the skirmish mode, if you do this before completing the mission 10 in the campaign it will spoil The Reveal that the Ironclads are Procyon ships.
  • In Colobot, the game comes with an in-game encyclopedia concerning all objects, units and programming functions you can find in the game — including ones that you aren't going to encounter until the very last levels.
  • Stellaris:
    • There are many modifiers that affect your ships' performance against the various Endgame Crises. Most of them can be seen and even attained long before the crises actually show up in the lategame.
    • Empires with the "Lost Colony" origin can easily find their original homeworld by opening the species tab and clicking on their "Go to Homeworld" icon.

    Roguelike 
  • The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth features The Lost. The Lost was initially supposed to be a secret character, so his unlock method in the base game is extremely difficult and requires much trial and error. He was obviously intended by Edmund McMillen to remain secret for months, if not years. Needless to say, Edmund was not pleased when dataminers discovered and unearthed The Lost within weeks of the game's release, despite the fanbase being almost as fast to discover the secret in its entirely through brute force. How did both dataminers and legitimate players know that there is at all a character who is hard to unlock and whose existence is kept secret ingame? Unlocking him gets you a Steam achievement, which is not hidden in any way. Later DLC for the game avoided this, either by patching in secret characters and their achievements after the fact, by revealing all the secret characters at launch, or by hiding the alternate "Tainted" versions of characters on a separate menu that doesn't appear until you unlock them.
  • In the Darkest Dungeon's DLC Crimson Court, there is a boss known as the Fanatic that will randomly appear in the dungeon if one of your heroes in the team is infected with the Crimson Curse. If he decides to appear in the dungeon that you are going on an expedition, the loading screen will shows an illustration of him like other bosses, instead of the background of the dungeon.
    • Likewise, if you have Colour of Madness active, the Thing from the Stars will randomly appear within dungeons. Which one? Why, the one with its face right next to the missions, of course. Both this and the Fanatic are deliberate, so that you don't go into some of the hardest fights in the game completely unprepared.
  • In Dicey Dungeons, the last challenge listed in both the Steam Achievements and the Challenges section in-game requires you to defeat Lady Luck herself, spoiling the final episode.
  • When used, three particular scrolls in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup bring up an item select submenu. If the player has not yet identified these scrolls, it will be obvious that it is one of those three.
  • Elona:
    • Uncursed items are much more common than blessed or cursed items. If you pick up many food items of the same type (usually from a fruit tree), they'll split up among three separate spaces in your inventory. The one with the largest number of items is almost certainly the uncursed one.
    • By default, you lack any information about newly-found equipment, including its material. However, pressing 'e' to open the "eat" menu can potentially tell you the equipment's material: if the equipment shows up in the list of food, its material is Raw. Unfortunately, Raw is the weakest material, and having the Sense Quality skill gives you a chance to automatically know an item's material, so this isn't that useful.
  • Hades:
    • Depending on your point of view, Hades both does and doesn't do this with the last keepsake if you really think about it. You can get all but one keepsake before you get the ending, but how do you get it? You might think the last locked keepsake belongs to Hades, but that doesn't seem to be the case because unlike everyone else, he doesn't give you a keepsake when you gift him a Nectar for the first time, and you can't give him any more, so that rules out every NPC you can encounter. After you get to the ending, however, Persephone will move back into the underworld, and you can gift her a Nectar for her keepsake. Now you don't have any locked slots in the keepsake list. Mystery solved, right? But if you check the Codex, Hades' affinity is locked at 1 heart, so surely there must be something else? Well, once you continue to play the game, you'll eventually gain his favor and be able to gift him more Nectars, which unlocks the truly hidden square that you couldn't even hover over before right next to that old locked one, and the second time you gift a Nectar to Hades, he'll give you his keepsake.
    • Played straight with the existence of the character Demeter. You're not meant to discover her existence until you met the final boss, but you will notice in-game Codex has entries for her Duo boons, hinting there's a god you haven't met yet.
  • Gem identification in NetHack boils down to collecting all available gems. For each color, the game will inexplicably split your gems automatically into two or more separate inventory slots of otherwise identical gems. Statistically, the largest pile is the one with worthless coloured glass.
  • Nuclear Throne has a few Steam achievements, namely "Throne Sitter", "Advanced Sitter" and "The Struggle Continues", which show that the titular Throne is actually a hostile boss. Oddly enough, the first of these achievements is redundant because the "Rogue Unlocked" achievement is earned in the same manner and has a more vague description.
  • Rogue Legacy spoils one of its big twists in one of the Steam achievement descriptions: "Mock the traitor." Now you know that somebody's not quite right. (Although just finishing the tutorial explains as much and more.)
  • Sunless Sea's system to determine which actions you can take and which cannot be done can quickly turn into this. Sure, telling you you need at least one candle to explore the darkness or one Strange Catch to actually cook it is good, but telling you you should have more than three crewmembers to attempt some seemingly innocuous action? Yeah, that'll go well, no deaths involved at all. It also occasionally spoils certain Officer stories and their routes, telling you you shouldn't have any of the possible variants of the same officer to proceed, when you didn't even know those variants existed.

    Role-Playing Games 
  • Baldur's Gate:
    • Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn:
      • At the beginning of the game you meet a clone of the Big Bad former love. If you right-click her, she says the same phrase as the original, giving a hint about their origins.
      • A minor case: the only characters with a portrait in dialogue boxes that do not join your party are the Big Bad, The Dragon, and one in the penultimate chapter. Therefore, whenever you talk to a character who shows a portrait, you can be sure that first or later (s)he will be recruitable - and conversely that characters without won't be recruitable, even if they are recurring names from the first game such as Quayle or Xzar. More relevant with Edwin, who initially is only a quest giver, even a bit hostile, and who could otherwise be expected to end the same as Xzar if you already met the latter.
      • After the Enhanced Edition updated the first game with the engine of the second, this trope came to bg1 too. In the original game you could ask to some rare plausible characters to join you, only to be rejected, but now there is no surprise. It is mostly blatant with the new companion Dorn, who will dismiss you until you later reach a specific map and he becomes recruitable.
      • The same thing could happen with the only new companion of Throne of Bhaal. This character is a former enemy of one of your adventures and such appearance at the beginning of the story is a great Plot Twist. It is not initially hinted that you can recruit this character at the end of the dialogue screen, except for the presence of a portrait and for the game sprite model being that of a normal character rather than a dedicated one as it previously was.
      • However, the same expansion pack zig-zags this issue. All your major enemies show a portrait, in part subverting the trope (you might expect to possibly recruit one later, considering that you start with a former enemy asking to join you). On the other side, this in part puts it online again as there are no new recruitable characters beyond the aforementioned one, so whenever you meet someone who has a portrait you can be sure that you will later fight him/her.
    • Baldur's Gate III:
      • The half-elf cleric Shadowheart is initially quite cagey about which of the many gods she worships and will only open up to you after you spend enough time with her... or you can open her status screen and scroll down to the "tags" subheading. Patch 7 just flat-out moves this info to the top of her character sheet.
      • Early on in the game, you meet a sweet old lady selling potions and herbs at the local refugee camp. While she's very knowledgeable, she seems like nothing more than a sweet old potion-brewer. Except for the fact that she's a level 5 NPC with 112 HP, 18 Strength and 16 Constitution at a point in the game where the party is likely at level 2 or 3. To make it even more obvious, if you examine her she is listed as a Fey as opposed to a Human.
      • These oversights are largely fixed in the full release of the game, however during an optional fight with Ethel, there's a point where she will teleport her hostage out of their cage and copy their appearance, forcing you into a game of Spot the Imposter. However, even in her illusionary form, Ethel has more hit points than her hostage does, and if she happens to pull this trick while concentrating on a spell, the interface will reveal which of the two hostages is still concentrating on the spell, thus foiling the ruse.
      • In a lesser example, Astarion, the elven rogue, doesn’t divulge much about himself or his past at first. You can wait until it comes about naturally, or you can try to cross running water with him, at which point he’ll start taking damage. Mouse over the status effect on his portrait, and it’ll say that running water eats away at vampiric flesh. This is only a lesser example because, while the character keeps his vampirism a secret from the party at first, the pallor, red eyes, fangs and neck scars make it easy enough to figure out.
      • This is partly alleviated in the full release, as the developers decided to expand the benefits Astarion gained from the tadpole to include crossing running water.
      • Astarion also claims to be a magistrate when met. The menu clearly displays his character background as Charlatan. Although in that case both are true: Astarion was a magistrate in his life, but that was two centuries ago and he has been forced to live in squalor since, only keeping the aristocratic facade as a lure for victims to give to his vampiric master.
      • In Act III, the player becomes the target of Orin the Red, a bloodthirsty Changeling and Bhaalspawn who takes to stalking you by disguising herself as various NPCs. While her disguises are perfect, she is always displayed as level 12 with a "Legendary Resistance" buff, even when she's impersonating noncombatants or your own lower level party members.
      • The fact that there are traps in an area tends to be given away by the on-screen dice rolls and display of "Failed a Spot Check".
      • The setting has many gods, but only six are actually talked about in various loading screens: Shar, Selûne, Mrykul, Bhaal, Bane, and Jergal. The first two are key figures in Shadowheart's questline from the start of the game to the very end, so they're not really a surprise, but the next three (collectively known as "The Dead Three") are the ones behind the Absolute and the last one turns out to have been Withers.
      • From early in Act 1, there is talk of a mysterious and valuable artifact called the Nightsong. The nature of this artifact as a person, namely Selune's daughter, is not revealed until you meet her...unless you have Shadowheart with you, as most players will, and go to get the Spear of Night as Shar has told her to. The description of said weapon says it can be used to kill Nightsong.
  • Dragon Quest:
    • Dragon Quest II: In Wellgarth there is one shop that has a blank spot in the list of wares, and townspeople speaking of the Jailer's Key being sold at a shop. Hmmm...
    • In the Game Boy Color, Super Famicom, and mobile phone versions of Dragon Quest III, defeating Baramos yields 65536 experience points for the party, indicating that he is not the final boss.
    • In the Playstation version of Dragon Quest VII appears to send the players to the Very Definitely Final Dungeon where they fight the lord of darkness Orgodemir, complete with final boss music. Except... it's the end of Disc one.
    • Dragon Quest VIII has a Disc-One Final Dungeon that does very convincing impression of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon...if not for the fact that half of the world map isn't accessible yet.
    • The existence of secret playable classes may start to become obvious in Dragon Quest IX when weapon types no member of your party can equip start appearing.
    • Dragon Quest XI has a few. There being multiple different weapon categories spoils that you don't have everyone yet when you have the seven characters featured in the intro movie and nobody has the ability to use Axes (nor have you found any yet). Another one is within the Bestiary, as sorting it alphabetically before the Disc-One Final Dungeon shows that there are pages and pages of ????? between "Very Devil" and "Vince", an alarmingly small portion of the alphabet for so many enemies (they're "Vicious" enemies). Hidden Trophies in the PS4 version are all story-related. When you go to confront the villain at Yggdrasil, there are still very many hidden trophies, so either the game has a huge Playable Epilogue, or that final battle is a lot less final than you think.
    • Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and The Blight Below: The in-game manual tells you point-blank who will eventually join the party and in what order.
  • Etrian Odyssey:
    • If you exchange Guild Cards, some of the games' Guild Cards have the background of the highest stratum the player has reached. This can, for example, give away that the sixth stratum of Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth is set in space.
    • Sometimes the reward for a sidequest can reveal that there's more to the quest than meets the eye. You might be asked to look for a missing child or investigate some strange phenomenon, with the reward being a lot of ental (usually around 30,000). Almost always, a quest with such a steep reward means that the seemingly-simple quest is really a Superboss quest in disguise.
    • Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan: The final floors of most of the dungeons have large swathes of untouched territory that can't be accessed. At the time. Before entering the final dungeon, the guild takes a secret pass through these unexplored areas to gain access.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy has this by the nature of its Vancian Magic system. The player can immediately tell that there are eight levels of magic, even when they only have access to the first-level spells at the beginning of the game. The menu also spoils that there are Prestige Classes by the fact that even the dedicated white/black mages cannot learn the highest levels of magic in their non-prestige form.
    • In the GBA remake of Final Fantasy II, most major non-party NPCs have portraits... and the Dark Knight's portrait is obviously a darkened version of Leon's. The PSP remake improves this somewhat: the Dark Knight now wears a helmet, but the rest of his armor and his pose are still identical to Leon's.
    • Final Fantasy IV:
      • Exclusive to the 3D versions, when you unlock the Music box from Jammingway, some of the song titles will reveal characters and texts that you won't meet until later in the game. There's also some additional descriptive text courtesy of Edward. Some of his descriptions outright state where the songs will play. For example, ''Red Wings - Short Version':' while it plays for the fight against the Dark Knight, Edward mentions that it plays in the final dungeon.
      • Not so much an Interface Spoiler as Interface Foreshadowing, but Tellah is seeking out the Meteor spell to take revenge on Golbez. He finally gets it, and supposedly even has access to it in Random Encounters, but a quick check of the menu reveals that he does not and will never have enough MP to actually cast it, thus explaining why, when he eventually does cast it later on, it's at the cost of his own life.
      • Another comes when Baigan joins the party. That brings the party total to six, which is more than there's even room for on the menu screen, so it's no surprise when he turns out to be a monster plotting an ambush. This is even more obvious in later versions of the game: in the Game Boy Advance version, every playable character has their Character Portrait appear onscreen when they speak. The fact that Baigan lacks a portrait is a dead giveaway that he's not playable. In the Nintendo DS remake, Baigan uses a palette-swapped generic soldier model, in contrast to the rather distinct-looking (though still a palette swap, but not as obvious) helmetless sprite he had in prior versions of the game, which gives away that he's not a very important character, and certainly not playable.
      • In The After Years, checking the Hooded Man's equipment shows he uses his left hand to hold his sword, which is a huge hint on who he really is.
    • In Final Fantasy V:
      • Faris is Bifauxnen. You learn it early, but it can be spoilered even earlier when you first change jobs: some of Faris's sprites in the first set of jobs that you get from the first crystal look somewhat feminine, which can tip off an observant player a bit before the actual reveal. Most versions downplay this, as none of the first set of jobs look overtly feminine on Faris, and all of the ones that give her a distinctly feminine appearance come after the reveal. However, in the pre-Pixel Remaster mobile/Steam versions of the game, the redrawn character sprites make Faris look quite blatantly female from the get-go, with some of her job sprites (including some obtained before the reveal) including a noticeable bust.
      • Exdeath's Castle, as climactic as it is, is not the final level. How do we know this? We're still missing all of the level 6 spells and almost half of the Summon Magic. Granted, this game has a tendency toward the Guide Dang It!, so a player without a guide could think they simply missed all of that... but there's no reasoning away the gaping holes in the game's bestiary for the GBA version.
    • Final Fantasy VI:
      • You can go to the (empty) "Espers" menu right from the start of the game. Even though it's about a third of the way through before you properly find out what espers are and how they work.
      • The battle menu has a discrepancy between Terra and every other party member. At first, Terra can only attack and use magic, and there's a gap where her special ability would be. Characters like Locke and Edgar have their special abilities and a gap where magic would be. Anyone who's paying attention won't be at all surprised when other people learn to cast spells, or when Terra turns out to have a secret power. And if you still had any doubts, once Celes is recruited, she has both a special ability and magic on her battle menu, verifying that it's not just Terra's menu being formatted weirdly.
      • None of the permanent playable characters are ever mentioned by name until you are given a chance to choose what that name is. This means if you see a character mentioned by name and you're not given the chance to name them, you know for certain they'll never join your party. It also means that, when the name entry screen comes up for a certain ninja before he joins, or a certain airship-owning gambler even before you meet him, you know that they're going to be part of your crew eventually.
      • In the SNES version, you're eventually thrown into a battle with a yeti with unique sprites named Umaro. Later translations downplay this Five-Second Foreshadowing by just calling him "Yeti" in the battle screen, and you properly name him after the fight.
      • In the scenario where you have to save Terra from The Empire, you get to command Locke and a gang of moogles. All but one of them have fixed equipment that cannot be changed. The moogle whose gear can be swapped out freely will play a role later on.
    • Final Fantasy VII:
      • The digital re-release has an interface spoiler through its achievements notification. When you get to the absolute final battle against Sephiroth with only Cloud, you get to use Cloud's ultimate Limit Break Omnislash. There's an achievement for this, but it pops up as soon as the cutscene leading to the one-on-one duel starts. This can cause new players to immediately know the game isn't quite done yet. It also pops up if the player loses the battle against Safer Sephiroth.
      • Some of the achievements subvert this. For example, there's one for every character using their Level 4 Limit Break, including Aeris/Aerith's. Unless you're specifically going for it, she won't have enough kills through normal playUnlocking Limit Breaks  before she's killed, and you won't be able to get the achievement on that playthrough. This also caused the old "Aerith comes back" rumors to spring back up, with the achievement cited as proof you can get her back.
      • In a subversion, long after Aerith is dead, you can still buy staves, such as the Fairy Tale, or win similar weapons, despite the fact that said character never comes back. By this point, they're only useful for the "Throw" command. Weapon-wise this is also played straight, however, due to the fact that Aerith does not get an ultimate weapon — she won't need one where she's going.
    • The French translation did a Translation Spoiler by mistake: when you first arrive in Nibelheim with Sephiroth, Cloud asks him about his family. During Sephiroth's Mind Rape of Cloud in the Whirlwind Maze, Sephiroth answers "Ma mère s'appelait Jenova" (my mother's name was Jenova). But in the flashback in Kalm, he says "Ma mère était Jenova" (My mother was Jenova). Cue many players scratching their heads when he started to go psycho about the whole Jenova thing.
    • In Final Fantasy VII Remake, Chapter 12 sees the player encountering various members of Avalanche as Cloud ascends the Sector 7 pillar. Early on, you'll find Biggs, who has been critically wounded fighting Shinra troops and passes on after having one last conversation with Cloud. However, checking the Chapter Select screen after completing the mission reveals that Biggs is listed as comatose, not dead, which doesn't seem to make sense considering he was near the bottom of the pillar when it collapsed. This is a spoiler for The Reveal in the ending that Biggs survived and was moved to the Leaf House in Sector 5, where he awakens from his coma during the final cutscene.
    • Final Fantasy IX:
      • It's pretty obvious that Marcus, Blank, and Beatrix aren't permanent party members simply because they have no "Trance" bar.
      • Unlike the other members of your party, Zidane has Trance abilities that have nothing to do with his character class. Whereas everyone else's abilities augment their job-specific skills (Steiner the Knight does more damage; Garnet the Summoner casts stronger spells...), Zidane the Thief inexplicably gains access to a set of appallingly powerful offensive spells that always do maximum damage. Even though Zidane's backstory isn't explored until Disc 3, this is a strong hint that there's more to him than meets the eye.
      • If you play the Chocobo Hot and Cold mini-game as soon as you're able to on disc 1, you can obtain Chocographs that show areas which don't match the geography of the current continent, such as barren lands and icy fields compared to the mostly grassy lands you been traveling through. Looking up the "help" info for one of the graphs reveals that there's other continents you will explore besides the Mist Continent.
      • Garnet being a summoner is spoiled as soon as you get control of her at the start of the game, due to her Summon command already being available and her summons being listed in her ability list. Her summoning abilities aren't brought up in-story until later, when her mother extracts her summoning magic from her.
    • Final Fantasy XIII has a fairly subtle one; four of your starting characters have two ATB slots and get a third when they become l'Cie. Vanille, however, already has three slots before this happens, because she already was a l'Cie before supposedly getting transformed alongside the rest of them. This is also hinted at by her relatively high starting stats compared to the normal humans.
  • GreedFall: The Nauts claim to use magic to navigate the seas, but just looking at Vasco's stats will tell you they're lying — he doesn't have a mana bar like the other party mages.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Sora obtains Riku's Enemy Card after their fourth and final battle. In the GBA and PS2 versions, the card is just labeled "Riku", but in the HD 1.5 ReMIX version, it's renamed Riku Replica, spoiling his identity just before the following cutscene that also reveals this plot point.
    • In Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, the final boss is referred to as a "mystery man" on the mission screen while you fight him, as if to conceal his identity, yet when you fight him, the boss's health bar clearly says that his name is Riku.
    • In Kingdom Hearts II, when Roxas levels up, the notice has a yellow border, just like guest party members, foreshadowing the fact that Roxas is the Decoy Protagonist.
  • In Rune Factory 4, the Fan Art exposition is presented by Ventuswill in her human form, which you can normally only see once you have completed pretty much everything else in the game.
    • The item description for poison powder mentions that Leon might like it, despite it being available as a monster drop or random chest item before Leon’s first appearance.
  • Lunar: The Silver Star:
    • In the Sega CD version, most important characters have a short introductory cutscene followed by a text one-liner. The only character whose intro is voiced instead of displaying text is Ghaleon, who is revealed later in the game to be the Big Bad.
    • Related to the above, if one uses Alex's Ocarina in the PlayStation remake to view the Sound Test, one of the track names spoils Ghaleon being the Magic Emperor.
  • Lunar: Dragon Song:
    • The game lets you find a chest (in a room that is mandatory to clear, no less) with Gideon3's card inside. This happens even before you fight Gideon2 at the end of the game. Quite the giveaway...
    • You'll find claws for Gabi on sale long before you even meet her. And equipment for Rufus is available in only one town (though by then you've already met him, and he offered to join your party more than once), but unless you backtrack immediately after he joins he gets killed by Gideon before you ever get the chance to shop for his equipment.
  • LunarLux: There are several hints in the UI indicating that there's a second party member, who turns out to be Nickle, the Murk Slayer.
    • In the save/load screen, each file has two bullet points, with the first one having Bella's name.
    • The status bar on the bottom of the screen looks like it's divided symmetrically, yet Bella's status only takes up half of it.
    • The Elixir item description states it heals 35 SP to all party members.
    • The Sour Candy item and the Meter Boost support skill both refer to the Anti Meter, but Bella only has a Lux Meter. This is because Nickle uses the Anti Meter to activate his Phase Form.
  • Magi-Nation zig-zags this:
    • Checking the rings in the ringsmith will show what sorts of creatures there are in the area.
    • The player will routinely get animite for core creatures - suggesting that they will be able to summon them.
  • Children of Mana has a similar situation: there are slots in your equipment screen for several weapons that you don't start with, and the gem inventory screen can rather taunt you with its emptiness.
  • Odin Sphere: The skill tree in Leifthrasir reveals what locations your Player Character will be going to at least one chapter ahead of time.
  • Shows up in Trials of Mana: The game leads you to believe that opening the gate to the Sanctuary of Mana and acquiring the Sword of Mana will be the game's big finish. It's somewhat undermined by the fact that unless you've spent an inordinate amount of time Level Grinding, you're nowhere near the level needed for your second class change, and at that point in the game, have no obvious way of getting the MacGuffins needed for it anyways. (They can be obtained early, but it is unlikely to the point of Guide Dang It!; they're plentiful later.)
  • In Albion, shops sell weapons none of the party can wield (in the early game), though it is justified and otherwise would be plenty of Fridge Logic. The weapons, themselves, are described with a list of character classes which can wield them, revealing whom you can expect in the party later. And equipment in Summoner actually lists the name of everyone who can use it, including equipment solely for characters you haven't yet recruited.
  • Shin Megami Tensei
    • In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, the Cathedral of Shadows has 12 slots demons for use in fusion when you can only have 8 in your party at a time (the size expands by 2 twice before midgame).
    • Persona 3:
      • The game does get around the "list expansion" business - there are no individual slots, just blank space. (Then again, in that game, your Persona headcount is set by your level, not the plot.)
      • The game pulls a fakeout at one point where the stairs to the next area of Tartarus don't appear until a certain plot event, so it looks like you hit the top of the tower. Thing is, if you've been keeping up with Elizabeth's requests to defeat the various Hand enemies, you'll see a quest available to get Gold Medals from the Hands in a block you haven't been to yet...
      • There are a ton of these around Arcana Hanged Man. Despite all of your party members talking about how it's the final battle, it's pretty hard to miss that the Fool social link goes up to level 6 of 10 immediately before it. The Social Link only maxes out after you make the choice that sets you on the path to the good ending.
    • Comes back in Persona 4:
      • After defeating the Disc-One Final Boss and reaching what appears to be an ending, you're still at Level 9 for the Fool social link, giving away that it's a Bad Ending and there's still more plot to go. The Link doesn't reach level 10 until you've found the path to the real ending. The same goes for the Star Social Link, since it only reaches Rank 10 after you speak to Teddie again after identifying the real killer, and he only gains his ultimate Persona just before rejoining the party.
      • After that, the Judgement Social Link is unlocked and maxes out after apprehending the killer and defeating the "final" boss - but it's noticeable that there seems to be no more dungeon crawling after defeating said boss and, thus, no way to actually put to use the Ultimate Persona unlocked from the Link. This may have been intentional, at it's pretty much the only hint that there's still one more dungeon to go through for the true ending.
      • The true killer might stand out in the original version as the only major character to not have a Social Link. In the Golden remake, this was changed and he's given a Social Link, but at that point, the killer's identity was largely a Late-Arrival Spoiler anyway. Still, if you did manage to go in unspoiled, you'd definitely raise an eyebrow upon seeing his Arcana is the Jester — another 0, like your Fool. Or that his Link will only raise during plot events once it's past a certain level. His Social Link only maxes out after you reach the path to the true ending.
    • Persona 5:
      • A relatively minor example: in the sixth Palace, you can look at your party's stats before you enter into any battles, giving away the identity and appearance of your new party member's Persona before the dramatic reveal in battle a few minutes later. Said party member is the only one besides Morgana who awakened a Persona prior to their debut battle, although this tidbit is disclosed a few days prior to starting the sixth Palace.
      • It's easy to narrow down who The Mole in the party is because his Social Link doesn't give you any bonuses past Rank 6 when everyone else gives them up to Rank 10, and the bonuses he does get are all generic ones that are common to all party members like Baton Pass and Harison Recovery. Other subtle touches include him not appearing in the opening animation, and once he joins your party, he is referred to in the UI only by his family name, as opposed to every other member of the team. All but the last one of those is removed in Royal, but as above, more like a Late Arrival Spoiler in that case.
      • The new party member in Royal, Kasumi, awakens to her Persona in early October, when your party is likely to be in the mid-40s level-wise. If you look at her stats during her awakening battle, you'll notice she doesn't learn her next skill until Level 75, giving away that she doesn't properly join until much, much later, starting at 75.
      • You can learn Makoto's name through the in-game Text Log before it's properly revealed in-game hours later. Considering that other characters who are initially known by descriptions will retain this in the Text Log until their name is said, it's strange that Makoto is an exception.
    • Persona 5 Strikers
      • Sophia's "Persona," Pithos, does not have an arcana, and all of its ability names have question marks next to them. This indicates that it's not a real Persona, and in the endgame, she awakens her true Persona, Pandora.
      • The first person you meet in Sendai is a woman who casually approaches you for some banter with a drawn portrait, but you do not see her personally again after another event in the same arc. The next time she pops up she's talking you across the phone and it turns out that she has a cut-in, further implying that this is actually an important character...that seemingly does nothing even after apprehending the supposed culprit. This woman is actually the true culprit of the in-game Metaverse incident.
      • Immediately after you complete the Osaka Jail, you unlock the last Bond skill for purchase. This skill, a useful ability with a steep Bond point cost, indicates that the game isn't over just yet.
    • Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker claims that Yamato Hotsuin does not exist in the Triangulum Arc, and that the Anguished One cannot be found. The Fate Level menu shows two empty spots for them.
    • Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
      • It's perfectly possible to get a StreetPass entry of a save file from during the period of the game when Rei has been removed from the party, spoiling that Zen eventually becomes a stand-alone party-member.
      • If you're diligent in filling maps 100% and getting the related completion chests, you can unlock a weapon for Zen before the Fouth Dungeon's boss, the Clock Hand the description of which name drops the final boss "The Clockwork God", as well as hinting to Zen's true nature as being one half of the God Chronos.
      • Rei learns far fewer skills than Zen does, and learns her final skill at level 36 as opposed to Zen learning his final skill at level 63. That's a good clue that she ends up leaving the party.
    • Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth
      • In the tutorial battles, you may notice that Makoto and Haru are higher level than most of the others. The two of them get kidnapped by Kamoshidaman, the Arc Villain of the first labyrinth, and only join your party after he is defeated.
      • Around the time you get to the end of the fourth labyrinth, you get Ticket Request #33, but the requests for each labyrinth's Optional Boss are numbered 40 or higher, so that's at least seven missing ticket requests. As you can probably tell, the fourth labyrinth is not actually the last dungeon.
    • In Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse with a keen eye may notice that when they first defeat some of the Divine Powers leadership (Krishna, Maitreya, and Inanna in particular), they're not made available for Fusion yet, as is typical of more modern SMT games; it wouldn't make sense for you to be able to fuse boss demons if they're still running around. This is a tip-off that they're not truly defeated. Also, Krishna simply vanishes the first time you defeat him, instead of shattering like the other bosses.
    • In Shin Megami Tensei V, the Amatsu, an entire race of Demons that has been readily available for fusion in previous games, are left completely missing from the fusion list. Most of the Amatsu were actually wiped out at Armageddon, with Aogami (Susano-O) and Tsukuyomi being the sole survivors.
    • Rule of thumb for this franchise: If the game presents what appears to be the final dungeon or the final boss, experiment with some fusions. If you come up with any results more than about ten or so levels above where you are currently, you're not at the finish line yet.
  • Chrono Trigger
    • During a flashback, when Frog is recalling Cyrus's demise at the hands of Magus, Ozzie's dialogue is prefixed with OZZIE's name in all-caps, as you'd expect of an NPC, but Magus's dialogue is prefixed with a very PC-looking 'Magus'. The DS version rectifies the problem.
    • The worst offender is the DS version's "Dojo", which shows Magus in tech screenshots and it shows his two techs. Before you get him. The Item Encyclopaedia also shows weapons, which includes a portion of the list with scythes. Now who do we know that uses that type of weapon?
    • As soon as the player starts getting the Rocks that allow for Triple Techs without Crono when you Can't Drop the Hero, they'll become suspicious that something will happen to him.
    • As Two Best Friends Play points out, the Hero Medal's description is "Ups critical hit rate of Masamune," and Frog is the only one able to use it.
  • In Chrono Cross:
    • Before you even leave the first town, you get to talk to a vendor, who offers the game's blacksmithy screen. On the blacksmithy screen you can see a huge box, mostly blank, reserved for characters who can equip the particular weapon, spoiling very early on that this game will have tons upon tons of player characters.
    • Later in the game, when you encounter the Disc-One Final Boss, the fact that your character box is not even half full yet is another tip that this is not nearly the end of the game yet.
    • When you confront the completed Dragon God, the battle menu calls the boss the "TimeDevourer", even though the real Time Devourer is a different entity who isn't fought until a bit later as the Final Boss. However, dialogue after the battle reveals that the Dragon God was consumed by the Time Devourer and acting as its mouthpiece, so the mislabeling might have been intentional.
  • Rise of the Third Power: During the prologue, Prince Gage briefly joins Arielle to return to the castle. Unlike Phillip, he's shown in the menu as a playable character, despite being aligned with the Obviously Evil Arkadyan Empire. He ends up joining the party in order to oppose Emperor Noraskov.
  • Rogue Galaxy has a few examples of this. The "SP" folder on the inventory screen blatantly spoils two key item collection quests, and Jaster's Tech Tree unlocks the dual tech "Fated Passion", whose description (and animation) detail a romantic subplot that comes almost completely out of left field.
  • In Shadow Hearts: Covenant, you can quickly see how many characters will join your party at the end by looking at the vertical spaces left in the main menu. That's assuming you didn't read the manual, of course.
    • The game also tries to trick you into thinking Nicolai is a main character. He's listed alongside the rest in the booklet, he's in your party at the very beginning, and is even the first character you control outside of combat. But checking his bio not only reveals that he is not what he claims to be, but is a bad guy as well!
  • You can tell how many characters you'll get in Tales of Innocence and Tales of Hearts because the menu has six slots for them.
  • Tales of Berseria:
    • Looking at the costume options for "Malak Number Two", or even just playing as him and reading the tutorial for his controls, will reveal he'll eventually be called "Laphicet".
    • The Artes list and tutorials for Velvet describe her Break Soul as putting her in "therion form" long before therions are mentioned in the plot.
  • Dragon Age:
    • In Dragon Age: Origins, you can tell if a companion will join your group permanently because their character and inventory screens have an approval bar, while those of temporary followers do not. Temporary followers also don't gain any experience. Also, characters from the various origin stories that will show up later in the game have a background to their character portrait, but ones that will leave forever have a plain black background.
    • They try to avert this in the Awakening Expansion Pack. Mhairi will never survive her Joining, but she will acquire experience and gain/lose approval in the brief time she's with you. But it's revealed in another way: if you check the character info screen, you'll notice her contribution to overall party damage always stays at 0% even after she's attacked.
    • In Dragon Age II, every companion has a special skill tree unique to them, except for one, which tips you off that they're a temporary companion. It's Bethany/Carver, who leave after Act 1, either dying in the Deep Roads, becoming a Grey Warden, or joining their respective organization (Carver joins the Templars, Bethany is forced into the Circle of Magi). However, if they do not die, they can be brought back for the two DLC expansions (Mark of the Assassin and Legacy); in this event they do have unique skill trees.
      • Late in Act 1 of the game, you will receive a quest from a minor nobleman asking you to find his wife, whom he believes ran off with her lover. Too bad that immediately upon finishing the conversation you receive the notification that you accepted the quest "The First Sacrifice", which not only implies that there is more to this than a lovers' spat and that you're unlikely to find this woman, but also that this is likely to become a problem again later on. Three years after this quest, the killer also takes the life of the player character's mother, which they spend the rest of the game blaming themself over.
    • In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the Player Character is not crowned Inquisitor until a certain point in the story, so before that all NPCs and party members refer to them as "Herald of Andraste" or just "Herald" in dialogue. The game slips up a few times, though, with one of Vivienne's greetings, a banter between her and Cole, and a few minor NPCs calling you by the wrong title too early.
  • Subverted in Neverwinter Nights 2: Shandra dies a plot related death a while before the end of the game, but functions in all ways like a normal party member, including an approval rating and even what seems to be a romance option... which can never be completed.
  • One of the access points in NieR: Automata is labeled "Near the Tower" in the fast travel menu, even before the Tower actually appears.
  • Lufia & The Fortress of Doom has a rare case of a sprite spoiler, although it's rather subtle: Lufia's in-battle and menu sprite shows her wielding a polearm, though it's not her actual weapon of choice in gameplay. Female, blue-haired and using a polearm—think back to the beginning of the game. Who else meets that criteria?
  • Ultima VII's Dialogue Tree, as noted in this Let's Play:
    It's important to note here that Klog is lying. Characters normally don't tell you they know nothing about a topic; you usually just don't get the topic to ask them about. Since Klog does have these topics, it means he does know something, but it will be quite some time before we can coax the truth out of him.
  • The World Ends with You's save stats show your current partner. Towards the beginning of the game this will spoil that you get more than one party member. This is actually a fix to the even worse Interface Spoiler in the original Japanese version, where your save stats showed the week number instead of your partner's name, explicitly revealing that the game doesn't end at the end of the first week. If you save your game immediately after defeating the boss of Week 2, your save will show "Beat Day 1". This spoils Beat doing a Heel–Face Turn and becoming Neku's partner, a twist so unexpected that the Big Bad never saw it coming.
    • If you're a big spender, you can unlock the ability descriptions for some of Beat's personal equipment—which directly refer to him specifically using it—several days before he becomes your partner. Granted, you can get personal equipment belonging to almost every character in the game, both heroes and villains.
  • NEO: The World Ends with You:
    • The Noisepedia sorts enemy Players by their faction and has the faction leader listed at the end. The fact that Kanon isn't listed after the two types of Variabeauties enemies spoils that you won't be fighting them.
    • Subverted with the Social Network, in which characters are laid out in a large diagram with lines connecting related characters, so you can tell who's related to whom. The Ruinbringers start out just below Rindo, but are moved to next to the Shinjuku Reapers, with their initial position likely to avoid spoiling that Shiba, the Game Master of the Shinjuku Reapers, also leads the Ruinbringers.
    • Near the end of the game, you can unlock a Social Network ability that shows the level at which pins with evolutions can evolve, and also which character needs to equip certain pins for them to mutate (as opposed to whether it can evolve just appearing as "???"). This shows that some pins need to be equipped to Minamimoto to mutate, all of which can only be obtained well after he leaves the party, spoiling that he eventually comes back (in Another Day).
    • Veterans of the first game know a pin deck has 6 pins. So when looking around the menu and observing there are 6 inputs for pins and how each party member can only equip one type with no overlap between them (at least without Social Network upgrades), it's not much of a logical leap to deduce the Wicked Twisters will end up with 6 people.
  • Paper Mario:
    • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
      • The fact that enemies you don't use Tattle on have their entries given to you for the log (by searching in Professor Frankly's trash) if you can't fight them again supplies some spoilers. In particular, there's the fact that while Marilyn and Beldam are fought again, Vivian is not.
      • Each time you get a Crystal Star, the game will tell you about its special powers in battle and what they do. So when you get the Ruby Star in Chapter 4 only to move on without learning about its abilities, you know something's up. Another big hint is the fact that if you happened to have been using the W badge at the time Mario suddenly changes to his default clothes out of the blue after the fight.
      • Whenever Goombella uses Tattle on an enemy, their place of origin, so to speak, is mentioned in their entry. Because certain enemies can be encountered before then (Most notably in the Glitz Pit and the Pit of 100 Trials), this can lead to you finding out about a particular place before you actually get there.
      • A minor glitch produces a minor spoiler: if you get the secret party member Ms. Mowz at first opportunity, have a different party member active, and use a healing item outside of battle, it will allow you to use the item on Bobbery, even if you haven't met him yet.
    • Super Paper Mario
      • The pause menu has a "Chapters" tab that shows descriptions of the chapters you've visited so far in the game. When Dimentio "ends your game" and sends you to the Underwhere, you unlock the description for Chapter 7-1, even though you aren't supposed to know that the Underwhere is Chapter 7-1 yet!
      • You can obtain Tippi's card rather early in the game, potentially during the second chapter, by completing only the first 10 floors of the Pit of 100 Trials. The card contains a glaring spoiler in its description that is clearly written with the intention of the player doing the Pit late into the game, outlining the fact that "Her name was Timpani before Merlon turned her into a Pixl." possibly long before either the fact Tippi was human or that her name was Timpani - which is especially egregious as Timpani's name will have already been seen and continue to appear in the mysterious intermissions between chapters - are revealed.
    • Paper Mario: The Origami King:
      • The Toad Alert accessory is a bell that rings when you're near a Toad on the overworld. It also rings a lot while fighting the Paper Macho Gooper Blooper and Mega Pokey, spoiling that you're going to free Toads trapped inside them after you defeat them.
      • The Sidestepper is an enemy you can fight in the second streamer area. If you check its description in the Monster Compendium, it says that it's "as sharp as Scissors"; notice the capitalization. Being the last streamer boss in the game, and how it fits the theme of the others, you can easily predict its surprise appearance ahead of time.
      • You can get a statue of the Paper Macho Buzzy Beetle in the Ice Vellumental Mountain, halfway through the fourth streamer. This is an optional miniboss that you might not have fought yet. However, if you read its description, it says "The personal pet of Scissors, stripped of its paper armor and Kamek's magic." You're not supposed to know about Scissors nor Kamek getting captured at this point in the game, and these happen at the end of the fifth streamer area.
  • In Yggdra Union, you can pick up various equippable items that can only be used by Russell and Elena as early as chapter 2. They don't even show signs of wanting to join forces with you until chapter 4.
  • In Tales of the Abyss:
    • The records screen shows the names of all your party members, including a guest, right from the beginning. Especially noteworthy for giving away that Asch will be fighting on your side later on in the game, who early on is portrayed as an antagonist. But if you check Asch's status screen while he's with you, you'll notice his pool of Titles is much smaller than the rest of the party, which hints that he won't be staying for long.
    • In Baticul, one of the citizens mentions that Princess Natalia is a master of the bow. The store in Baticul sells bows. None of your other party members can equip bows. Granted, since Natalia is shown in the opening, this could count as Foreshadowing.
  • In Tales of Zestiria, the game gives you battle tips after winning fights early in the story. It's possible to receive a tip on using Princess Alisha, which mentions her by name before she even gives Sorey her name in a cutscene.
  • The Disgaea series does this as new menu items are added. Especially in the remakes, where new ones that weren't in the original are added — in the PSP version of Disgaea 2, you have to play through the bonus mode to unlock an option.
    • The Disgaea character creation/reincarnation screen also "spoils" the existence of class tiers once you start unlocking them, though the levels needed for each tier to unlock varies with each class, and there are certain classes that don't unlock unless you meet special requirements. Same with Makai Kingdom.
    • In Phantom Brave, however, character creation occurs on a Ring Menu where new choices expand the ring.
  • In Planescape: Torment, the first time the player meets a future member of the party, an entry about him/her appears in the journal, in the "Party members" section. It is a kind of spoiler, because some of them join the player's party late after the first meeting.
  • In Tales of Symphonia:
    • When you reach the Tower of Salvation, Remiel tells you the reason Colette was brought there was to die and become the new body for Martel. Colette then proceeds to complete the transformation into a lifeless being. This would be an emotional scene if not for the fact that right after Colette completes the transformation and is supposedly dead you get a message that says "Colette Learned Judgement!"
    • Another example is when you finish said Disc-One Final Dungeon and aren't told to insert the actual second disc yet.
  • In Neverwinter Nights 2:
    • In the first area you visit outside of your Doomed Hometown — the road to some seemingly-unimportant swamp ruins — the minimap reads "The Mere of Dead Men". Now, the player character knows the apt name of the creepy swamp their home village is built on, but the player isn't supposed to know that yet. Also, one of the initially greyed-out prestige classes is Neverwinter Nine, potentially spoiling the offer Lord Nasher makes to you much later in the game.
    • Since the developers didn't bother to change the names of NPCs on-the-fly and weren't willing to outright lie to the player, you can tell that someone's going to try and deceive you about their identity if the overhead label that appears when you mouse over them says something vague, like "Man", instead of their actual name. Mask of the Betrayer demonstrates a plot-scripted character name change (Kaelyn the Dove can append a similar animal moniker to the end of your name), so we can put this down to Obsidian not caring enough.
    • The identity of the main enemy of act one, the Githyanki, is revealed to the player by the interface almost immediately, but it takes most of the act for the characters to learn.
  • Mass Effect:
    • In both this game and its sequel, the squad selection screen has silhouettes of unrecruited party members.
    • A minor one: when Shepard, Anderson and Nihlus view the transmission from Eden Prime, the subtitles identify the name of one of the soldiers under fire as Ashley, a good 10-15 minutes before she's properly introduced, while giving the other soldier a generic rank.
    • The moment you gain control of Shepard in the first game, you can go to the Squad screen with three points to give to your character. When you check out the Charm and Intimidate skills, it cheerfully informs you that you'll be allowed more points for them once you become a Spectre. This despite the fact that you're still a whole cutscene away from even knowing you're up for it.
    • During the opening moments of the first mission, you're given the option of removing Shepard and Alenko's helmets, but not Jenkins. Jenkins dies the moment they enter combat.
    • During the Noveria mission, the player comes across some bugs which, when aimed at, are identified as "Rachni". Naturally your party cannot see this, and will wonder what those bugs were until The Reveal.
    • The target of Garrus's personal mission claims he's someone else. The subtitles don't agree.
    • Right at the beginning, on the ship, there's a greyed out option to open the galaxy map. If you try, it tells you that only the captain can do that, which is a pretty strong indicator that you will soon be in charge of the ship.
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • The silhouettes are replaced with datacards with information about your future party members, since the point of the main quests is to recruit them. However, others that Cerberus wouldn't have been aware of (or would they?) like Legion also have a datacard on your squad menu.
    • In the prologue, the identity of your rescuers is initially unknown and Jacob makes a big point of telling you that it's Cerberus. Except that each of the five or so computers that you can interact with prior to that point are all named 'Cerberus Laptop'.
    • Legion is addressed by the name in the subtitles upon your first meeting, then reverts to "geth" the next time you speak.
      • The existence of a geth squadmate is also partially spoiled by one of the upgrades you can pickup in the levels unlocked after Horizon being "Geth Shield Strength". However, they try to disguise it by having its description refer to "squad members who use Geth shield technology",
    • When you go into the Collector ship and find out the truth about them, the dialogue wheel, as usual, pops up before The Reveal has actually been said, and one of the dialogue options reads "The Collectors are Protheans!"
    • If you go and customize your armor after the first mission (post-resurrection), you're allowed to pick what clothes you wear on the Normandy, which at this point is totally illogical given that the ship was destroyed in the tutorial level. Thus, the appearance of the second Normandy is somewhat less surprising.
    • One of the DLC packs available on the Cerberus Network explicitly notes that it is an alternate costume for Garrus.
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • If you import your character from Mass Effect 2, the game gives you a quick review of all the decisions you've made thus far. Most of them are expected, but one of them is the choice of whether or not you saved Maelon's data, which is treated as a fairly minor decision when you make it. This makes it clear that the data is going to have an impact later on regarding the genophage cure.
    • Scanning all of the systems for Search-and-Rescue assets as soon as possible makes searching for similar assets later in the game a breeze. Each system has a percentage marker (up to 100%) located next to it that dials down after some main missions. Thus, it's easy to see at a glance what systems need to be visited (even for side missions that may have popped up), taking a lot of the guesswork out of the supposedly-sprawling galaxy.
  • The "fill-in-the-blanks" party menu also appears in Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. Basically, BioWare is very fond of this.
    • The "Force Sight" ability in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is not learned until you get Visas Marr in the party, unless you use first-person view with Kreia. If you happen to do that in the Polar Academy you will see that Atris is shaded slightly red, revealing that she is gradually falling to the dark side.
    • In Jade Empire, Wild Flower has two portraits, one for each spirit possessing her. When Ya Zhen (the evil spirit) reveals that he may aid you in return for your support, it comes as little surprise.
    • Some of the portraits are obscured with a big ol' "?" (and they're only silhouettes of heads) so it can be hard to tell who you can end up with. Even if you were expecting there to be another party member during the Siege of Dirge since there was an open spot, you might not have expected it to be The Dragon. (You might have, if you were paying enough attention to the dialogue, but that's legitimate Foreshadowing and not this trope.)
  • Sands of Destruction features a Quip mechanic, where sometimes lines that characters say in cutscenes become equippable. They can gain these lines before they join your party, however, highlighting your incoming members.
  • Suikoden:
    • There's a somewhat subtle one in that Sanchez, who you go to to change your team, is not listed on the Tablet of Stars, which reveals which of the 108 Stars of Destiny you've recruited. It's because he's not on your side; he's The Mole.
    • Also, you know if any character you talk to is important to the story: Their face appears in the text box if they're important.
    • Another one is if you pick up on a plot point about the Soul Eater rune: every time someone important to Tir dies, another spell of the Soul Eater is unlocked. Considering you start off with one level, you can imply there will be three important plotline deaths. One of them can be subverted if you meet the conditions for the Golden Ending.
  • Suikoden V avoids this by taking a while before it gives you the Tablet of Stars. In doing so, it hides that one of your allies, Sialeeds, is set to betray you. However, there is another interface-based hint that Sialeeds isn't actually a Star of Destiny liked you'd expect her to be from her role in the early story. Specifically, her rune slots. She's a mage who's stuck a permanently-attached Wind Rune on her right hand, unable to upgrade to the more powerful Cyclone Rune (something that's decidedly less common in Suikoden V than it was in earlier games of the series), and more tellingly she never unlocks a left hand slot (let alone a head slot) no matter how hard you Level Grind her, which ever since multiple rune slots were introduced in Suikoden II has been practically unheard of for mage characters.
  • The Legend of Dragoon's pause screen includes a section devoted to Dragoon Spirits (enough to hold 8 of them) and the Addition section has a column devoted to SP gain (the meter built up that allows Dragoon transformations). Furthermore, the status section lists Magic Attack and Magic Hit (accuracy) on each profile, a stat that can only be useful to Dragoons. It's quite clear early on (after Lavitz gains his) that everyone in your party will eventually become a Dragoon.
  • Star Ocean:
    • In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, in the weapon compendium, while the actual weapons are not revealed until you get them, it is staggered by playable characters. As soon as you get Lymle, you'll see that Faize's total amount of weapons is significantly smaller than Edge and Reimi's, revealing how he'll leave the party eventually.
    • In the remake of Star Ocean: The Second Story, each playable character's name is rendered in ALL CAPS, so it's easy to determine who will (Or has the potential to) join the team.
    • Star Ocean: Till the End of Time's Encyclopedia Exposita has the party members listed at the top of the Peoples section. Harmless enough with most characters joining as soon as you meet them, yet problematic for Albel and Mirage, the former starting out as a vicious enemy soldier and the latter spending over 3/4ths of the game on the sidelines due to not originally being in the party at all. If you're the kind of person who looks through the Encyclopedia thoroughly, you can find some spoilerific details on Maria a couple of dozen hours before you even meet her.
  • The Elder Scrolls
    • In Morrowind, if you find an NPC with unusual dialogue options, even if they don't cause anything to happen at that time, odds are they will be involved with a quest at some point in the future. The same is also true if the NPC simply lacks the usual dialogue options (latest rumors, little advice, little secret, etc.) This example can also apply to most of the other games in the series as well.
    • In Skyrim, in the quest journal, there is decorative knotwork surrounding the name of the quest. This varies depending on the type of quest (main quests, guild quests, Daedric quests, etc.) For many quests this isn't a problem, but for some of the Daedric quests, "A Night to Remember" being a perfect example, it may not be obvious at first. Finding this out can be a major twist.example 
  • The game Live A Live uses static sprites for its enemies, which are usually larger than your characters (that is to say, they occupy 2x2 squares at least, while party members occupy 1x2). So when you encounter an enemy that has animation and is the same size as your party members, you know they'll be fighting alongside you at some point (unless that enemy was already playable, like Oersted or Straybow). This happens no less than three times.
  • Pokémon:
    • Pokémon Red and Blue reveals the eighth Gym Leader's identity if you check the statues at the Gym's entrance. Hilariously, the Gym guide didn't know and he's stationed right next to them.
    • Another one from Pokémon Red and Blue, though minor. When capturing a Pokémon, the ball will shake up to 3 times before stopping to indicate a successful capture as a means of building suspense. Except how many times a ball will shake is actually a rough indicator of your chances of capturing the Pokémon outright. For example, when going up against a legendary and your chances of capture are say less than 10%, once you see the ball connect, it's a capture, as every other time it'll simply "miss." This basically ruins any sort of suspense this was supposed to create.
    • FireRed and LeafGreen have a "Braille Code Check" heading in the credits displayed upon beating the Elite Four. Unlike Ruby and Sapphire, Braille doesn't appear anywhere in these games until after the Elite Four, so the credits spoil its inclusion in a post-game quest. (As does the braille guide packaged with the game.)
    • In Pokémon Gold and Silver, the fact that you get to explore Kanto after beating the Johto League was meant to be a surprise. The remakes make no secret of the fact that they contain two regions instead of just one.
    • Pokémon Black and White introduces the seemingly random (though rather strange) N, who challenges you to a Pokémon battle... and gets an animated sprite, an honour reserved for significant characters only. He also shares similar views to Team Plasma, wholeheartedly believing in their Pokémon liberation goals, and constantly guilt-trips the player character into not battling. Sure enough, that's the Big Bad... until Ghetsis is introduced.
    • Can be invoked through the miracle of Wonder Trade in Pokémon X and Y, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, and Pokémon Sun and Moon. It's possible (but very unlikely) to Wonder Trade one of your Com Mons and receive a Pokémon that you normally cannot obtain until the post-game. Bonus points for if you happen to get one of the Ultra Beasts in Sun and Moon, or a Solgaleo/Lunala and you wonder why it's named "Nebby."
    • In Pokémon Sword and Shield, the eight gyms' emblems being available for your profile by default gives away the relatively minor spoiler that Team Yell and the Dark Gym are one and the same organisation.
    • In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Togekiss's "number defeated" task has exactly one entry, as opposed to most non-legendary 'mons who get multiple entries with increasingly-larger numbers. So if you happen to obtain a Togekiss before fighting Volo, it gives away the fact that you'll be fighting one important trainer who uses a Togekiss.
  • There is a minor case in Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia. It's easy to tell from the Reyvateils' status screen that exactly three of them will join the party at some point.
  • Inazuma Eleven:
    • The Area Jump menu in GO 2 has an icon for each area, with the areas you can't visit yet displaying static. There are 6 icons, which would imply that there are 6 areas in all... except this trope is subverted when you gain access to a 7th area, and the original 6 icons move over to make room for 7 more (6 of which initially display static). This is subverted again in the Endgame+, where on two more occasions several icons scoot over to make room for another, eventually ending up with 15 icons that take up every last bit of real estate on the screen.
    • In the first game, looking up one of your starting team members (Minamisawa Atsushi) in the Player Binder lists his recruitment method as "other", while everyone else who joins during the storyline is listed as "story". So it comes as no surprise when this player leaves the team early on, and shows up as an opponent later.
  • Radiant Historia has a "Story" section on the menu in case you lose track of where you should be headed that shows a diagram of events. Given the game's mechanics and plot, this is pretty much required. However, any event where you can do something more will have a line trailing off where another event connects later. Following up on the mysterious loose ends is a good way to figure out when you need to go to solve plot-related problems. Whoever decided to name certain skills has some explaining to do. Was it really necessary to name half the Dead All Along guy's skills things relating to ghosts and/or death?
  • Do not examine the achievements of Diablo III too closely if you don't want to know that Adria ends up betraying the heroes, since one achievement is for defeating her as a boss, with a demonic portrait. Or who dies early in the game (Deckard Cain has no conversation achievements outside of the act in which you met him). Or who the Stranger is (it's less obvious, but several of the Stranger's conversations are listed for the archangel Tyrael's conversation achievement).
  • Subverted in Betrayal at Krondor rather cleverly. The different armor types in the game have "racial mods" (i.e. bonuses) for three races: human, elven, and dwarven. Despite this, you never actually recruit a dwarf in the entire game.
  • The Bonfire travel menu in Dark Souls II expands to fit only the areas you've uncovered for most of the game. However, once you reach Drangleic Castle, the menu shows how many locations are in the game, blacking out the ones you've not been to. There will still be about a half-dozen blank spots after Drangleic Castle, indicating that it's not the final dungeon as you've been led to believe. It will also show the bonfires in each location in order, showing if you missed one by there being a blank spot between two usable ones.
  • In Child of Light, there are blank, greyed out squares in the skills menu blocking the ultimate skills for every character, which only open up after you complete Chapter 8. However, at the end of Chapter 7, one of your allies reveals themselves to be The Mole, betrays you to the Big Bad, and leaves the party. While you may think they will have a change of heart and rejoin later so that they can learn those skills, they do not, ultimately subverting the trope. Oddly enough, the interface does not lie. The traitor can learn their ultimate skills, but only on a New Game Plus.
  • Bravely Default: You're at the end of chapter 4, you've apparently defeated the Big Bad and you're going into the Very Definitely Final Dungeon to activate the Earth Crystal. But wait... there's still two more empty slots in the Job screen!
  • Fantasy Life:
    • The game makes new areas available via progression of a storyline divided in several chapters. Another mechanic lets you unlock new game features as a reward for certain in-game accomplishments. One set of these makes new items available in shops and works in such a way that the possibility to get extra items in the shops from the second town only becomes visible once it has been unlocked for the First Town. The story initially gives the impression that there are only three places that qualify as towns in the game and that unlocking the option for the third town is the only way to buy some of the crafting materials. Hey, what do you mean "choose this for extra items from travelling merchants and the store in Elderwood." ? What store in Elderwood? That place is just a forest full of monsters with no settlement of any kind. Well, it does have a strange statue and a bridge that can't be crossed...
    • The challenges needed to rank up in some classes will also mention the locations meant to be secret until a certain point of the story by name.
    • The existence of some job ranks is initially hidden, but there are two blank spaces between each set of job+rank combinations in the achievement list.
  • Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura displays race icons in the status window when you mouse over an NPC. This can ruin a bit of a surprise if the character's race wasn't intended to be obvious, as in the case of Gar the "World's Smartest Orc", who is revealed to be a human before you even talk to him, despite the fact that figuring out his secret requires decent conversation skills. The Mysterious Apparition is an even worse example, being a projection of the Big Bad: his icon is that of a human, but at that point of the story everyone still considers the main villain to be Arronax, who is an elf, and the truth isn't revealed until the final dungeon.
  • The in-game map in Wild ARMs 3 lets you view the (empty) sections for Telepath Towers and Millennium Puzzles long before you'll come across — or even learn about — either of these types of locations.
  • The Witcher includes a tab for every act in the game in the quest log, so you'll know just how long the story will last and that you're not going to be killing the Big Bad whenever you face him, or who you think is him.
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt:
    • Reading up on the Bestiary will often reveal what kind of monster you'll be facing in a side quest, even when it's supposed to be a mystery. Also, creatures that you fight will have their weaknesses displayed for you, so you'll know that you won't be killing any Godlings, but will eventually face the Crones.
    • In Hearts of Stone, just seeing the new Gwent cards for Gaunter O'Dimm will be your first clue that he's not just some powerful mage as you're initially led to believe, but something more insidious.
    • Another Gwent related one. The Mysterious Elf, whose identity remains a secret for much of the game has Gwent card of his own. When playing against opponents who use this card it is simply labeled "Mysterious Elf". However, it's possible to get a copy of your own before learning the Elf's identity in story, and the 'new card' notification practically blurts out his real name: Avallac'h.
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, sometimes the game's loading screen tooltips (which change with each chapter) actually hint at events in that chapter. For example, the one in the endgame that tells you what fearsome and lethal creatures werewolves are - one of the game's last bosses is a werewolf, and it's an unkillable Puzzle Boss. It's also not exactly a great idea to play as a Malkavian on the first playthrough, partly because the jokes are funnier once you understand the subtext, but mostly because a Malkavian Player Character will pre-empt big plot reveals and reference them in dialogue. For instance, when playing as a Malkavian and meeting Jeanette for the first time, the Malkavian will flat-out tell her that s/he knows that her and her sister are actually just different sides to an individual with multiple personality disorder, though in a roundabout way that uses a metaphor about Roman gods.
  • In Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1:
    • The party learn at one point that an arms deal between Avenir and the fake Blanc is about to go down at Avenir Storage No.2. The dungeon that's unlocked a couple of cutscenes later, and which you travel to to try and bust the deal, is named "Avenir Storage No.4". This is a pretty big giveaway that the party have been fed some fake info: the arms deal is actually going on elsewhere while Ganache keeps the party occupied.
    • The Steam achievements for the Re;Birth remakes also spoil the existence of certain playable characters, such as the ability to unlock the CPU candidates in Re;Birth 1.
  • Undertale:
    • Played with during the friendship event with Undyne; when she asks you what you want to drink, each option has a little text for its description; the one for tea says that it is the "blatantly correct choice."
    • The soundtrack has a track named "Song that might play when you fight Sans" that plays with expectations. It's never played in the game and is in fact not even in the game files. Additionally, you normally don't fight Sans. And when you do, it's to the tune of Megalovania.
  • Grandia II:
    • In the Steam version, one of the achievements spoils the name of the Final Boss. This is especially bad since said boss' name contains the name of another character, who is initially presented as good but turns out to be evil.
    • Two playable characters die: Millenia and Mareg. You gain an item that refunds all of the Special Coins you spent of the latter's moves, but no such thing is done for the former, implying a Disney Death.
  • Path of Exile:
    • The skill tree is a gigantic web of attributes and bonuses, with each of the 6 character classes beginning in the area of the web best suited to their core stat. An astute player will notice that there's a 7th slot in the middle of the tree, and will be tipped off to the existence of a secret 7th class.
    • Early on in a new league, the game announces to all players whenever someone reaches a milestone for the first time, such as killing endgame bosses. In Harvest league, this told everyone that the league's new NPC ended up turning against the player.
  • X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse has three characters (in the console versions, at least) marked with a question mark at all times in the selection, making clear some unlockables are there. And the identity of one is spoiled by the Review Computer, where one of the collectible items listed is "Iron Man armor".
  • In Pillars of Eternity, potential party members are clearly marked on the map by name, the only thing on the map to be so highlighted, even if they're not yet ready to join you. Particularly noteworthy in the case of Grieving Mother, who, shrouded in her Perception Filter, looks and acts like a generic village NPC and would otherwise be easily mistaken for a minor quest giver until the player starts a conversation.
  • In Fate/EXTRA, looking at the playable Caster's information can spoil her true identity as Tamano-no-Mae.
  • Miitopia: By the time you reach the castle of The Dark Lord you may notice that the journal sections for Monsters, Grub, Armor and Weapons are halfway full at most, spoiling that there's still plenty of stuff happening after it.
  • The Legend of Heroes - Trails:
    • The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is bad for this.
      • Though absent from the original PSP releases in Japan, the English PC releases featured voice acting for party members, even those who didn't joint until the sequel games. This is rather notable when you face the bracers in Grancel, as two of them are voiced and two of them are not. Guess which two become party members in future games.
      • In Second Chapter, you briefly get a seemingly-innocent 11-year-old girl named Renne to join your party as a non-combatant NPC. However, if you happen to look at her health, you'll notice that it's far higher than your party members, and far, far higher than any allied NPC you have ever encountered. It's a pretty big giveaway that she's actually an Ouroboros Enforcer in disguise.
    • The 3rd features a guide-book that lists off the benefits provided by "support" characters. This includes a comprehensive list of all the party members you get over the course of the game, including spoiler characters like Renne and Richard.
    • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel: From Cold Steel III, players can see a map that covers the entire nation of Erebonia. During the field exercises that take place each month, the students of the branch campus make camp at locations called Ex Camps. When one sees the map of Erebonia, they can also see all the locations marked "Ex Camp" on the map, no matter how early in the game they are. This can spoil the locations of the future field exercises if the player hasn't progressed far enough in the story.
  • Possibly the biggest hook of Advent Dark Force, an updated re-release of Fairy Fencer F, is that you get to play two new gameplay routes with new stories. These are the Vile God Story and Evil Goddess Story and the fact that there even exists an Evil Goddess is intended as a pretty major plot revelation in the Evil Goddess Story as there is nothing in the other two stories that even hints at this. However, the trophies/achievements for these are named "Vile God Story Cleared" and "Evil Goddess Story Cleared" and trophy guides for Advent Dark Force don't generally go to any effort to hide the names of these story modes.
  • A minor one in Deltarune. At one point, Lancer joins your party after having been an Affably Evil villain for most of the game up to that point. If you open the menu, he clearly isn't listed among your party members, spoiling that he will leave very shortly after, before you get any chance to use him in a battle. In fact, you never even get to fight with him in your team.
  • Octopath Traveler:
    • As you go around the world you can unlock the eight character's jobs as sub-jobs for the others in special shrines, but once you unlock all of them, you will see there is a big gap between them in the job menu. This spoils there are 4 additional jobs, each guarded by a powerful Optional Boss.
    • In the Steam release, the achievments for completing chapters have visible descriptions of the events that happen, completely out in the open for everyone to see.
    • A minor but useful one: enemy weaknesses always follow the same order (Swords → Polearms → Daggers → Axes → Bows → Staffs → Fire → Ice → Lightning → Wind → Light → Dark). This makes it easier to guess at any remaining weaknesses you haven't uncovered yet. For example, if an enemy has a displayed weakness to Daggers and still has an empty box to the left of that, you know it has to be either Swords or Polearms.
    • A quite large one occurs with a certain sidequest available in Bolderfall after finishing Therion's first chapter. The fact that it's titled "Daughter of the Dark God" blatantly gives away that Lyblac isn't an ordinary woman and is up to something involving Galdera.
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm:
    • A non-menu example. At each of the inns you visit, your room will contain exactly eight beds. No points for guessing how many people end up joining your party. (Granted, this doesn’t spoil the Guest-Star Party Member in Chapter 7, who doesn’t stick around long enough to use any of these inns).
    • The music credits list every song in the game, roughly in the order that you hear them. They reach the ending, where you’re at… and then keep going for quite a while, spoiling much of the extensive post-game content. The last few tracks are missing the contextual subtitles, which Tat least preserves the surprise of how they’re used.
  • Parasite Eve takes place over several days with each new day acting as a chapter for the game. You fight the Big Bad at the end of day five, but then the game transitions to day six, hinting that Eve's defeat isn't the true end of the game. You're also given the opportunity to collect and sort items you had Wayne hold onto as well as getting several healing items for free without being told why. Moments later, you're fighting the True Final Boss.
  • Subverted in Cosmic Star Heroine. After a certain character betrays the party, in the final dungeon, you acquire their ultimate weapon. You're getting that character back, right? You fight her as a boss immediately afterwards, and the fight ends in her death. The weapon might as well never have existed.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles:
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 1:
      • Checking the achievement list in will more or less make clear Fiora rejoins you at some point. To be fair, it's the most telegraphed spoiler in the game and bigger reveals are much better covered, but there you go. There's also one empty space in the affinity chart artwork for the party.
      • The fact that the quests you get in some places, such as Alcamoth or Mechonis are ALL "timed", meaning you can't do them after a certain point, will also spoil for you that some large scale event is likely to occur in (or to) these places, and that the quests present will become lost forever.
      • There's also the fact there are no Heart-to-Hearts anywhere on Mechonis...
      • And then there's the fact that the Bionis' Interior and Prison Island have a collectibles list, but seemingly no collectibles to find. The former's map also clearly expands far, far beyond what can be explored upon your arrival.
      • An early point in the game features a notable Aversion that practically qualifies as an Interface Red Herring. During the attack on your Doomed Hometown, Dunban temporarily joins your party. If you go to his equipment screen, you'll notice his current gear can't be removed. Naturally the player would suspect he'd either be Killed Off for Real (heck, he pretty much has all the qualities of a Sacrificial Lion) or at least would never join your party again. In fact... he does rejoin you later as a fully customisable, playable character. It's his sister, the protagonist's Childhood Friend / Love Interest, who's killed in the attack, and she did have fully customisable equipment at the time.
      • Played straight with Dickson, Mumkhar, and Alvis, who are temporarily controllable but have fixed equipment, lack a Skill trait, and only have two very basic Arts. It's pretty clear they'll never be permanent party members.
      • The Strange class of collectables are "named" by certain party members. The Rumble Box collectable, which was named by Riki, can be found before you first meet him.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles X
      • There's an area in NLA called the Mimeosome Maintenance Center.
      • The first time you have a Heart-to-Heart with each of your different party members, you'll receive an achievement for it. Not so much for characters that are Downloadable Content for Japan and The Master Sniper though... Heart-to-Hearts are also recorded on the map when they're found out and/or completed, and there's also an achievement for maxing out a party member's affinity, unless they're once again for said DLC characters in Japan and for Lao.
      • During character creation, you can pick from a rather wild variety of skin, hair and eye colors, as well as some extremely non-human eyes. Moreover, nobody feels moved to comment about it if you do. This is because you're customizing your mimeosome, rather than a biological human body. Nobody comments because they all know you're a tricked-out robot, even if you don't at first. For that matter, in character creation none of the eye designs look all that natural.
      • Chapter 3 introduces you to the Prone race with the implication that they were behind the destruction of Earth, and the base you encounter them in also has Puge and Pugilith support. Chapter 4 then formally introduces the Ganglion coalition as a whole, which the Prone are just one race in. However, the enemy index entries on the Prone, Puges and Pugiliths (accessible as soon as you engage any of them in combat) mention the Ganglion before you even hear of them in-story. On another note, the entry for the Prone lists them with "Cavern Clan" in parentheses, indicating that not only are the Prone divided into two races/clans, there are a few mission-exclusive fights with Tree Clan Prone, the aforementioned second Prone clan that becomes one of your allies. On a further note, there's an Achievement called Cavern Clan Immigration, implying the seemingly Always Chaotic Evil clan of Prone will become allies too.
      • The "[Race] Immigration" achievements usually don't spoil much seeing as the race names won't mean much until you meet them, with two exceptions: the one listed above is one, but you get "Definian Immigration" for completing a quest that involves the Heel–Face Turn of one of their race, and it isn't until the post game that only a couple more join in.
      • It might seem a little odd that the Enforcer healing skill is called "Repair". It removes debuffs as well as heals, so maybe it's just named a little thematically for the high-tech setting of Xenoblade Chronicles X? Well, yes, but there's a bit more to it than that. This even ties in to Irina mentioning getting repaired during an early affinity mission and she herself having the art.
      • Ever wonder why the empty bottom left section of NLA has a survey percentage number like the rest of the districts?
      • Irina and Gwin of Team Irina can join you on missions, despite technically being part of another BLADE team, with Irina even leading it as Team Irina. They have another member, Marcus, who curiously never actually becomes playable. There's a fairly good reason for that, and it involves a lot of Ganglion missiles.
      • One of the categories in the Enemy Index is Chimeroids, and a category of Criticals Up and Slayer augments exist for this enemy type, all of which can be seen long before you encounter them.
      • After you defeat Luxaar for good and go through the cutscene, you earn a story achievement. But because the progress says 4/5, you know there's still more...
      • Subverted before proceeding to Chapter 11. Both of Gwin's Affinity Missions need to be completed to begin, but nothing happens to Gwin at all.
      • During Serial Thriller, Eleanora provides two leads on a serial killer at large. One is located in Sylvalum, the other in Oblivia. Taking one good look at the FrontierNav grid, the Affinity Chart, or simply remembering the names of every NPC will indicate which one is the correct lead.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 2:
      • You gain access to the Blade Library, which keeps track of all the unique Blades you've summoned/obtained. It also shows the silhouettes of every single Blade you haven't obtained yet. Some of them will look rather familiar and they also appear at the top of list alongside those of Rex, Nia, and Tora's, which makes it evident that both Morag and Zeke become party members eventually.
      • The fact that Mòrag will join the party is practically given away if the party decides to do a sidequest in Mor Ardain the second it becomes available. The sidequest in question leads to a murder investigation, but you are blocked from proceeding until you get the help of someone familiar with Mor Ardain. At that point, there's really only one candidate for this: Mòrag.
      • Similarly, while the game tries to avert this by giving a Guest-Star Party Member a full skill tree, exp gain, customizable moves, and favored consumables, the fact that they can't bond with any Blades besides their starting one, and that said starting Blade's affinity level never increases, should raise some eyebrows.
      • Some items will list the names of locations you haven't actually been to yet in their "Obtained at" description.
      • Done with Floren in the Mercenary Missions menu. Assigning Floren to a job that requires a Blade of a specific gender reveals that Floren's a guy, but the boy himself never tells the party this until the end of his sidequest, in which they all react with complete surprise.
      • During chapter 1, Nia, Jin, and Malos all join Rex's party. The fact that Nia is the only one of the three whose party artwork is in the same style as Rex's should make it clear which of the three will end up being a permanent party member.
      • The Indoline Praetorium doesn't have any Heart-to-Hearts, there are no quests after the initial ones, and there aren't any Merc Missions to increase its stores' inventories, a clue that something major will happen to the place later on.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Zig-zagged. Similar to the previous game's Blade Library the game features a Hero Roster that showcases the game's recruitable Heroes. It's played straight in that once again you can see the silhouettes of Heroes that you haven't recruited, one in particular is clearly a silhouette of a Consul/Moebius, the game's main enemy faction, while another is clearly one of the robot assassins you occasionally fight in sidequests, neither of which you'd ever expect to assist the heroes, let alone join the party. Additionally, it manages to spoil a certain plot point, as two of the silhouettes are Smoldering Cammuravi and Glorysong Miyabi, the former of whom dies during the story and the latter of whom has been dead since the start, indicating that neither of them are going to stay dead if they end up joining the party. However, it also averts it in that it DOESN'T show the silhouettes of the final two Heroes, which hides that Melia and Nia from the first and second games respectively return as post-game Heroes.
  • In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, several revelations can be spoiled like this:
    • Camellia wears a mysterious necklace she dismisses as an ornament, but mousing over it in the inventory shows that it makes her Character Alignment undetectable. She's also a divine spellcaster, and she's able to use the scrolls of "Protection from Good" and "Protection from Law" that your evil enemies drop, which require you to be of the opposing alignment. Guess what? Trying to level up as a paladin or other class that requires a good and/or lawful alignment will also tell you why you can't. Of course, not that it isn't clear from her blatantly shady and bloodthirsty attitude.
    • Nenio is subtler and requires paying closer attention. Close inspection of her stats will show that she doesn't get a bonus skill rank or feat, despite being human, and that she has two increased abilities and a decreased ability, as opposed to a human who would have one increased ability. She's actually a Kitsune.
    • Wendaug can be identified as a demon worshipper early by looking through all her special abilities, which lists her deity as the demon goddess Lamashtu. This is also revealed if the player levels her up in a divine class such as cleric or inquisitor.
  • Mostly due to its Citizen Menu, Vampyr (2018) does this in a number of ways:
    • It's pretty easy to figure out there's something up with Dorothy Crane when she's introduced as a nurse in the Pembroke Hospital but listed in the citizen menu as the pillar of Whitechapel, making her a major figure in a completely separate district.
    • Depending on if and when you study the Swanborough Cordial, you might learn about Mason Swanborough's existence and role in the scheme almost a full chapter before being able to speak to him at all.
    • Harriet Jones having no hints and being completely absent from the citizen menu despite seeming fairly unremarkable makes it pretty clear that something's going to happen to her.
  • Recettear: Each recruitable character in the game uses a specific type of weapon. All weapon types are listed in the item fusion menu from the beginning. This includes the oddball "Claw" and "Parts" weapon types, hinting that Griff, the brooding demon and Arma, the robot girl can eventually be recruited (which doesn't happen until very late in the game).
  • TechnoMage: Return of Eternity: Throughout the game, Melvin discovers the Crystals of Eternity, which have a specialised part of the inventory to be held in. Once he collects the fourth one, due to that many being seen in the visions they grant him, he assumes he has the whole set. The specialised inventory space shows an empty slot, spoiling the fact that there's a fifth crystal.
  • Klonoa Heroes: Densetsu no Star Medal: You know a leaving member of your party is gonna come back eventually when you can still buy weapons and gear for them. For instance, you can still buy gear for Guntz after he leaves to chase Janga, and shops will still have gear for Klonoa after he's put in a coma by Janga's poison.

    Simulation Games 
  • In most Ace Combat games, 2 being one of the exceptions, you can see in the hangar and plane select screens boxes either unselectable or empty that give away how many more planes can be bought.
  • Dwarf Fortress attempted to avert this but couldn't fully. While in development, it was realized that vampires would be unable to infiltrate the player's fortress without the UI giving them away. So, the UI and a few game mechanics were changed to accommodate vampire infiltration, including:
    • Dwarves disappearing and anonymous crimes. In the old system, you are informed when a dwarf is attacked or killed and told who the culprit is. Now, you are only informed if there is a witness to notice the deed. Dwarves who haven't been seen recently are quietly added to a list of missing units, crimes will likewise be silently added to the justice screen if there are no witnesses. So dwarves can turn up dead and you won't know who killed them, but if you're attentive you'll know they vanished. Vampires can also frame other dwarves for their crimes.
    • Migrant skills. Vampires were given old, unused skills before other migrants were. So, the vampire was the only newcomer with a half-forgotten trade. All migrants can have old skills now.
    • Fake identities. Previously, you knew almost everything to know about a dwarf by reading his bio. Now they can assume false identities to hide their real age and potentially lengthy kill records. Their relationships can hint at their identity: a spouse not present in the fortress or armies of relatives suggest a vampire. This is where the aversion of the trope fails: if the dwarf worships a god then that deity will be listed as a relationship. The deity's history can be viewed, providing a list of worshipers and curse victims, and listing a vampire's original identity. If you assign a nickname to a dwarf, the list will display the nickname rather then the assumed and real names. Thus, vampires can be spotted via the UI by nicknaming all newcomers, because giving Urist McCheesemaker the nickname "Doofus" results in the god's history reading "Cursed 'Doofus' McStonecrafter to prowl the night in search of blood".
    • With the advent of messages in dwarf thoughts expressing horror at the death of other dwarfs, vampires can now be outed by their own bios - if a dwarf is horrified at the death of Urist McDrainedOfBlood, it's pretty good odds they're the vampire, especially if you hadn't actually found out that Urist McDrainedOfBlood was dead yet since nobody had stumbled on the body.
    • If your dwarf is in the military, their combat reports may outright out them as "the dwarf vampire Urist McSoldier" when describing what they've been up to.
    • One that has nothing to do with vampires: Setting up a lever and trying to link it to a weapon or spike trap can be used to detect early on whether or not your fortress's territory includes an upright masterwork adamantine sword, the kind used to seal a Demonic Fortress.
    • Checking a visitor for skills can often out their intentions; performers that have little in the way of artistic/musical skill and scholars with little training can be a giveaway, but aren't always since there's fairly unskilled travelers out there. If they have anything in the Schemer skill, however, they are almost always villainous agents seeking to conspire with your less loyal citizens to start a coup or steal an artifact.
  • The ledger keeping track of the population in Hometown Story gives a couple of things away:
    • The golden watch necklace can be seen on Carl's sprite before he actually acquires it.
    • By default, it lists members of the same family one after the other. This includes a family tie that is only revealed long after the involved characters are introduced.
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist:
    • Right from the start of the game, there is a meter tracking how much your character rebels against the colony. A meter which would not be there unless rebellion were important to the story at some point.
    • Right from the start of the game, there is a meter tracking how much Sol rebels against the colony. A meter which would not be there unless rebellion was important to the story at some point.
    • Players who regularly check the gallery during their first playthrough are bound to get spoiled:
      • The backgrounds associated with the Helio colony appear there as soon as Sol gets a random Flash Forward that uses them and are given labels that include the colony's name.
      • Most of the still-locked "Cheevos" (achievements) have names that are roundabout enough to only make sense once the player has run into the event to which they relate. Maxing out friendship with one of the romance options will unlock an achievement named after them. Not only is one of the romance options Permanently Missable Content for players who neglect exploration, another dies way too early into the first playthrough for their friendship to get anywhere near maxed out.
  • Idol Manager: The mystery behind the Phantasm Facade group is undercut by the fact that designated gallery space for the group's unlockable image is right next to an image of the player character's rival. That very same character's route also has a step that unlocks only once the player has seen all the Phantasm Facade events.
  • No Umbrellas Allowed: Not too long after getting your first two appraisal tools, a customer comes in to sell a copy of The Great Heist, but HUE tells them to hold it off because you're "not ready" yet. This is because it has tags such as "Rare" and "Popular Among the Youth", which won't be encountered and properly appraised until you unlock the relevant pages in Darcy's manual. You can also find these tags on the items you get from Dumpster Diving early on.
  • Sticky Business:
    • If a special customer doesn't ask you for a certain sticker type in order for you to unlock their storyline, it means they will eventually contact you later in another customer's storyline.
    • The Christmas sticker part section in the Upgrade store has an incomplete checklist, even if you bought all the available festive foil effects and sticker parts at the time. This is because the Christmas update has the Festive Calendar system in unlocking new ones, where you have to Play Every Day to collect them (although they can be bought with hearts anytime if you miss a day).
  • TIE Fighter makes use of a number of elements which can spoil upcoming plot points or the introduction of new equipment:
    • All objectives for a given mission are listed on the relevant screen from the start, meaning many plot twists or other developments can be inferred from the presence of objectives not mentioned in the briefing.
    • Any cockpit displays not currently needed in a particular craft are plated over. This includes a space for the beam weapon display, hinting at its introduction later in the game.
    • The player's training certificate includes obvious spaces for the TIE Advanced, TIE Defender, and Missile Boat, the first of which they won't get to fly until midway through the fifth campaign, and the last of which won't appear until the tenth. Similarly, later versions of the game allowed the player access to training simulations for all three craft from the beginning.

    Stealth-Based Games 
  • Hitman: Blood Money:
    • The weapon upgrade interface does this. Unavailable upgrades lack name and description, but the icon still informs the player that he can look forward to two more silencer upgrades, three additional types of ammo etc.
    • In Agent 47's hideout in said game, customizable weapons are mounted on the wall with silhouettes behind them depicting their fully upgraded forms.
    • Subverted in the version of Blood Money for the original Xbox, which has a space in the hideout for a Dummied Out weapon.
  • Assassin's Creed:
    • In Assassin's Creed II, you have a circle menu for your weapons which starts almost empty, and achievements such as Feather collection and Capes are to be found in the menu. In the Villa Auditore, there are rooms for all the weapons and armour you can collect, as well as galleries for purchased paintings and pictures of bested rivals. Needless to say, the walls are blank when you initially get there.
    • In Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood you have a circle weapons menu which also starts out nearly empty. If you've played the second game, you already are aware of most weapons you will get. One prominent spot remains open until the end — it's for the Apple of Eden.
    • In Assassin's Creed III, the subtitles spoil The Reveal at the end of Sequence 3. Additionally, the in-game manual and instructions didn't at all take into account the fact that Haytham is a Decoy Protagonist, as the player character is always referred to in the text as "Connor", who wasn't mentioned or even born yet during the first few sections of the game.
      • If you look at the controls menu, you'll notice that there's one for specifying how you want to control a cannon, which can reveal that you'll be using one at some point long before that sequence in the game. (It occurs very late in the game after most of the plot has already taken place.)
    • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Assassin's Creed Rogue both spoil future weapons in their crafting menus.
    • Assassin's Creed: Unity has its database spoil several reveals by showing characters in outfits that give them away.
    • Assassin's Creed Origins, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla have a world map with recommended levels due to the level scaling and beef gate mechanics. While not every area is required to be visited per the storyline, just looking at the map can give you a pretty good idea on what order you'll be traversing the world.
  • Dishonored:
    • During the first mission of Dishonored, it is possible to encounter a scene where your target is about to kill a character you're intended to save mid-sentence, with the subtitles showing an appropriate break in the victim's sentence.
    • In Dishonored 2, one audio log has an old friend of yours being interrupted and abducted by a voice you've already heard in the game, namely Delilah. However, the transcript labels this voice "Crown Killer", thus spoiling an important plot point, albeit one you likely already guessed.
  • Mark of the Ninja: Ora makes no sound when running. In New Game Plus, it's possible for the guards to search for someone and aim their flashlights right at her and reveal her — and not react at all, since she's not real.
  • In the prologue of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, if Venom Snake is killed, a normal game over screen appears. If Ishmael dies, however, it still causes a game over, with the screen stating that you've created a time paradox, something that only happens in the prequel games when a plot significant character who must appear in installments that chronologically take place after it die by mistake. This is an incredibly big hint as to the twist that Ishmael is the real Big Boss, but also overlooks the fact that Venom Snake was the "Big Boss" of the original Metal Gear, whose death should also cause a time paradox...
  • The UPlay rewards screen and achievements for Splinter Cell: Blacklist list a bonus that's given if one set of 4th Echelon missions are completed, including a set of missions given by Andriy Kobin, the apparent antagonist of Splinter Cell: Conviction. Not only is this a Late-Arrival Spoiler for anyone who hasn't played the previous game, but also spoils that the character in question pulls a Heel–Face Turn midway through the game and becomes a part of Sam Fisher's team.
  • Desperados has a mission, where you need to capture a bandit leader and escort him so he can face justice, despite claiming innocence in that particular case. Now the way this game works, it shows different outlines for different people. Red for enemies, blue for civilians and green for the protagonists. And guess which outline the bandit leader had. Sanchez was indeed innocent and joins your crew after you liberate him from prison.
    • Disregarding ingame spoilers, his face is prominently featured in the boxart.

    Survival Horror 
  • Amnesia: Rebirth: Like The Dark Descent, a few helpful hints will appear sometimes, instructing you to hide in darkness from enemies... even if you did not know anything was there.
  • Betrayer:
    • The dialog of some of the items you can offer to the Maiden in Red spoils the outcome of the investigation, even if you didn't finished it yet.
    • The entry for Allison Markley in the compendium comes with the picture of the Maiden in Red, spoiling that they are the one and the same person well before it's revealed in the story.
  • Dead Island: When you enter the town hall for the first time, it saids "Loading City Hall Part 1". This is the first sign that something is off about the town hall. As soon as you visited the supermarket and return to the hall. It saids "Loading City Hall Part 2", and the entire town hall is overrun by the zombies, there are no survivors.
  • Dead Rising 2: When you see there are three case files which take place after the 72-hour limit, fair guess that the military "rescue" won't go quite as planned.
  • Dead Space 3:
    • The game features a dynamic main menu, with ice slabs containing sections of a creature being shifted as you switch menus. The creature preserved in the slabs is Rosetta, a preserved alien corpse vital to understanding the true history of Tau Volantis. The mission involving Rosetta requires you to find all of its slabs and return it to a machine for reassembly, just like the one in the main menu.
    • An easy one to miss is that the first elevator you use on the CMS Terra Nova is the only elevator in the game that allows you to select floors but only has one option open while you're there the first time.
  • Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners: Usually, you're only allowed to have one companion at a time, but the battle menu clearly displays room for three additional party members. Thus, it comes as no surprise once you're eventually offered a chance to recruit up to four teammates.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Resident Evil 3 (Remake):
      • The presence of numerous simple locks as well as a tight passageway that Carlos specifically muses out loud that he can't fit into are clear giveaways that Jill will have the option to explore the hospital later as well.
      • Of all the weapon challenges the Lightning Hawk has a second number far larger, four times as the first in fact, than the first. This foreshadows that it will be available way earlier on the higher difficulties.
    • Resident Evil 6: The game makes no surprise that there is a fourth campaign. Or that there is a DLC difficulty.
    • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: In the End of Zoe DLC, if you save right after Joe washes up on the shore, then quit and reload, the loading screen will show Joe wearing the Advanced Multi-Purpose Gauntlet before he actually finds it.
    • Resident Evil: Revelations 2: The reveal of the old Russian man's name at the end of "The Struggle" would have been more dramatic if it wasn't mentioned in the loading screens and item menu.

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • Advance Wars: Dual Strike gives you a unique character select screen in the Campaign Mode, with an empty slot for each character from each country you can control. Not only does this spoil how many characters you will get, but they are also categorized by country. The two empty slots at the bottom are a dead giveaway that two Black Hole characters, Lash and Hawke to be precise, will have a Heel–Face Turn and join the Allies.
  • Civilization can get into this regarding religion. In Civ V the Celts' special ability lets them generate faith from unimproved forest tiles, without having to build religious structures like Shrines, so if you see a notification that a religion has been founded almost immediately after a game's start, Boudica is on the map with you somewhere. And this can also come into play when the game announces a specific religion has been founded, since each civ has their own favored faith that they'll try to claim if they're fast enough: who do you think just founded Zoroastrianism, or Shinto?
    • In Beyond Earth, if a naval unit can't move onto a particular visible hex, then there's a submarine there. It makes it an easy way to "sweep" the visible area for any potential enemy subs.
    • A minor case in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: if at the start of the turn you suddenly receive several pop up messages asking if you want to upgrade many different units, you already know that after this part you will be notified that you unlocked the tech for a new advanced power reactor. This doesn't happen when you research new weapons or armor.
  • About halfway through Chapter 3 of Final Fantasy Tactics, rumors begin appearing in bars stating Marquis Elmdor recently died in battle. His biography still lists his age, which is only removed from anyone who dies, which should be your first clue that he's Not Quite Dead. Easy to miss, but he is undead the next time you see him. Avoided with the class system: the available classes are in a circle that expands as you unlock more (unlocking classes is done by getting class levels in other classes, per character), so you never know which classes you haven't unlocked yet, or which specific classes you need to level up in for the next class.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance shows every class available while providing information on the equipment (and the abilities they teach). And given the player builds the world map by positioning the towns and such, they have a clue the plot is far from over from the number of blank spaces.
  • In the Fire Emblem series:
    • The Support menu in most games shows a full list of every character that can have a conversation with your currently selected one. This includes anyone you haven't unlocked yet, spoiling the playability of characters such as Nino, Jaffar and Vaida in The Blazing Blade or Gangrel, Walhart, Emmeryn, and Yen'fay in Awakening. Fire Emblem: Three Houses hints at spoilers for the exact opposite reason: most of the teachers at Garreg Mach Monastery are listed in the support menu and thus will be playable in the future, so the few who aren't listed there stick out like sore thumbs.
    • In some games in the series, all enemies have a Luck Stat of 0. This means that any character with a portrait who has even 1 Luck is definitely recruitable, and any character who seems sympathetic but has 0 Luck is likely to remain an enemy.
    • In Genealogy of the Holy War, you meet a mysterious white haired girl with amnesia named Julia. Assuming players don't immediately figure out who she is, a quick glance at the screen showing her Holy Blood reveals Major Naga Blood and Minor Fjalar Blood. Anyone who paid attention to the previous five chapters will realize that she is the daughter of Arvis and Deirdre, and Seliph's half-sister.
    • The Blazing Blade:
      • The prologue leads the player to believe that Lyn is a normal girl living alone in Sacae. However, if you check her stat screen or pay attention when she levels up at the end of the map, you'll see that her class is "Lord," which is generally reserved for royalty. Naturally, the end of the very next chapter reveals that Lyn is, in fact, a long-lost noble.
      • There is a pair of siblings named Lloyd and Linus Reed. You fight against one of them depending on your Lords' level and the other one much later. When you check their status screen, they are shown to have A support with each other despite fought separately and both dying after their respective maps. This is the first clue that you are going to fight both of them again after their death in one same map. Chapter 28 gives you an idea how that will play out.
      • A downplayed example can be found in the stat spread of the late-arrival character Renault (or 'Renaud' in the PAL region). For a level 16 Bishop class unit, his Magic stat of 12 is practically worthless. However, his Speed and Skill stats are both abnormally high (just four points off of their respective caps), and seem as though they'd fit better on a more melee-oriented class (such as a Hero or a Swordmaster). It's revealed in his support conversations with other units that he was once a mercenary, and had only taken the cloth not that long ago.
        Renault: I’m sorry, but... I don’t think I’m worthy of being called a bishop. Long ago, I was a mercenary. I led a bloody, thoughtless life, unconnected to the holy teachings.
        Isadora: Is that so? And then...what brought you to the light of Elimine?
        Renault: I...lost a friend. A man I could have called brother. But when he died, I knew nothing of prayers, of forgiveness. I only knew how to bash another man’s skull... So I cast aside my weapons and knelt for the first time... to mourn my fallen friend.
    • Path of Radiance has an interesting example where a particular graphic would have given away a plot twist that isn't revealed until near the end of the next game if it hadn't been Dummied Out. An unused portrait for Renning exists in the game's data and is near-identical to Bertram's portrait, just with less armor. Come Radiant Dawn, and it's revealed that Bertram is indeed Renning but Brainwashed and Crazy.
    • Radiant Dawn and Echoes: Shadows of Valentia have cutscenes that play before the round of combat in which the final boss dies (for Radiant Dawn, it's to show how the death happens plot-wise, while it's merely a touch of power to the moment in Shadows of Valentia). However, because rounds of combat have random features, this cutscene playing or not playing can tell you just what is about to happen before it does. Order Genny to attack Duma with two 9 damage hits while Duma has 33 HP and the cutscene plays? Genny's going to get a crit.
    • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, two of the villains, Gangrel and Aversa, briefly appear on the map in Chapter 9. They leave before you can attack them, but you can take a look at their stat screens. While Gangrel is ostensibly the Big Bad, her stats are much higher than his, hinting that he's a Disc-One Final Boss and she's a Dragon with an Agenda. Also, it's probably inadvisable to view Gangrel's description at the time, since it's meant for his appearance later in the game and so refers to him as the former king of Plegia.
    • Fire Emblem Fates:
      • The game plays with this a bit in regards to Kaze on the Birthright route. Despite potentially suffering a Plotline Death, this character can still S-Support with any of the Hoshidan women; not allowing him to do so would have been a dead giveaway. However, at the same time, if you pay close attention, you might notice that the sidequest housing Kaze's daughter does not immediately unlock after he gets married, like it does for all the other men. While it doesn't hint at what you need to do to save him, it does somewhat give away that something important can happen to him.
      • Also played with regarding Gunter. This character appears to have an unavoidable Plotline Death early on, but if you had them fight alongside the Avatar or Jakob, the heart animation that indicates gaining support points appears. Guest Star Party Members in Fire Emblem rarely have supports, so this seems like a dead giveaway that it's a Disney Death and they'll rejoin eventually. On Conquest, this is true. On Birthright, they really are gone for good, and on Revelation, they rejoin but can't support with anyone, hinting that this trope is in play again. But it's ultimately subverted there, as despite Gunter being The Mole via Demonic Possession, he's technically still playable throughout the entire route apart from the chapter he's fought in.
    • Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
      • Once Flayn joins your house, looking at her profile page reveals that her age is listed simply as "??". She does repeatedly avoid Byleth's attempts at finding out how old she is, but if you recruit Manuela, you'll discover that the latter's age is outright listed as "Secret", meaning that Flayn is genuinely hiding something.
      • The Dining Hall and Choir Practice activities allow you to invite any playable unit currently available for interactions except Jeritza, who only becomes available once you're on the Crimson Flower route, even if they're not recruitable into your current house and therefore aren't on your support list. This can preemptively reveal several seemingly important named characters to be unplayable regardless of the route, with all the implications that this entails.
      • Several characters play with this trope in a manner that only draws more attention to the spoiler: they still have A-rank supports (not unlockable until Part II) and can S-support Byleth depending on the latter's gender. So when Edelgard and Hubert seemingly leave your party midway into the Black Eagles path, you might suspect that they will be back into it after the fight. They will, but only if you fulfilled the conditions for accessing the Crimson Flower route and choose Edelgard's side. Similarly, on the Blue Lions path, Dedue appears to suffer a Disney Death during the timeskip; he only turns up alive if you completed his paralogue, otherwise he is Killed Off for Real. Rhea and Sothis also have S Supports in the library... but this is an aversion, as neither are playable on any route. Rhea's C to A supports need to be done while she's an NPC in Part 1 and her S is only available on Silver Snow, and Sothis is an S Support option on every route regardless of how much you interacted with her.
      • One of the big reveals on Claude's route is him being from Almyra. While other routes are mostly subtle with hinting at this, it's casually mentioned in the description of Claude's final unique class which can be seen during Chapter 19 of Dimitri's route or Chapter 14 of Edelgard's on Hard and Maddening.
      • The majority of paralogues expire only a month or two before the end of their respective parts. During Part I, this immediately draws attention to Sothis's paralogue, which expires a month before the others, hinting that something will happen to her. Meanwhile, on the Verdant Wind and Silver Snow route, several paralogues clearly have their cutoff dates placed after the upcoming showdown with the Empire...note 
    • Fire Emblem Engage
      • A keen-eyed player will notice that Mauvier of the Four Hounds has a personal skill, something only reserved for playable characters. Later in the game, he makes a Heel–Face Turn and joins the player's army.
      • Avoided in Chapter 12 via Developer's Foresight. You fight alongside Fogado, Bunet and Pandreo, only finding out afterwards that they're the prince of Solm and his retainers. If you try checking their descriptions during this chapter, they actually have unique ones that don't mention this fact.
      • In the Fell Xenologue, all the alternate royals (and all of their soldiers) are weak against Corrupted-effective weaponry, spoiling the fact that everyone in the alternate Elyos had already died, with the exceptions of the Four Winds and the Fell twins.
      • The end of Fell Xenologue 5 leads you to believe the Four Winds all died. But if you use the Rankings option before the next Xenologue (which, while connected to the internet, shows the most common characters other players deployed), you'll see Zelestia, Gregory and Madeline in the list...
    • In Fire Emblem Heroes, the app icon usually features one of the protagonists of the most recent book. The fact that the icon during Book VII features Gullveig, the antagonist, is actually a huge tell that she and Seiðr, the protagonist, are the same person.
  • In Heroes of Might and Magic V: Hammers of Fate, reading the hero Laszlo's biography immediately spoils the later reveal that "Saint Isabel" is really Biara. That's quite a Captain Obvious Reveal, but it has a heavy impact on the plot regardless.
  • In Mercs of Boom, you can immediately see all your possible research items, including things that have to do with aliens. Except you have no idea that aliens even exist for about a third of the game. Their appearance is supposed to be a complete surprise. It's not clear why the developers chose not to hide the unavailable research options.
  • I=MGCM: The post-1st anniversary main loading screen image appears to be the demonically corrupted alternate selves of Ultimate Magica Iroha and Magica 2020 Evo Kaori, so many players think that they're the final bosses of the 2nd arc. Subverted, as both Chapter 12 and Chapter 13 of the 2nd arc reveal that "dark" Kaori is neither slain, corrupted or an alternate self. She's actually the main universe Kaori, who earlier gets transformed into "Beast Kaori" after she is splattered by Omnis' black liquid, and the actual Final Boss is Nemesis Iroha a.k.a. the Ultimate Magica self of Iroha, who has become a Fallen Hero and is also transformed into Beast Nemesis Iroha after being splattered by Omnis' black liquid.
  • In Project × Zone, there are quite a few instances between chapters when it seems like a character, for some reason or other, has left the party, but one quick look at the party setup on the intermission screen will tell you that that's not the case. This is especially jarring with Arthur's Disney Death.
  • Shining Series:
    • In the Shining Force series, the Egress spell is often reserved for the hero of each game to allow the team to make a quick escape when things go bad. However, in Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya, the mage Natasha is the only non-hero character in the series who can also learn Egress. In Chapter 3, the party is forcibly split up, with the hero leading one team, while Natasha assumes the leadership role for the other.
    • Shining Force II and the Shining Force Gaiden Games spell all of the Force members' names in all caps in dialog (this includes Bowie, Kiwi, Nick, and Deanna if you go with their defaults), meaning you'll always know who has the potential to join up. Including former adversary Lemon in II.
  • Stella Glow has a few examples as well as one aversion:
    • Klaus becomes unavailable for support conversations prior to maxing out, suggesting there's more than meets the eye there. He reveals he was Evil All Along and leaves the party late in the game, although getting his Affinity as high as you're allowed to unlocks a character needed for the Golden Ending.
    • Niki introduces herself to the party as the Earth Witch, but has no attacks or magic when seen in battle. (Also, the real Earth Witch is on the game's cover, so this isn't really meant to fool the players at all. That the real Niki has been Dead All Along and this Niki was a mud doll created by the real Earth Witch, her younger sister Mordimort...that's still meant to be surprising.
    • In Chapters 6 and 8, you often fight all the Harbingers at once. You might notice that Hrodulf has a full complement of passives, whereas the other three still have room for more...yeah, that's because he makes a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of Chapter 8 while still an NPC while the rest of them officially become playable characters in Chapter 9.
    • If you took on the job quests at the Red Bear Inn, you might notice that they become unavailable if you get their mastery level to 3 stars before Chapter 8. Franz is killed during the angelic invasion of Lambert and is replaced as shopkeeper by his daughter Rena, meaning she'll always be the one you're helping for the final leg of the Franz Atelier quest. The others get put on hold at the same point to disguise this, causing the aversion. Though the fact that the limit exists in the first place might still count as a spoiler that something's up.
  • In Super Robot Wars, the games mark which units will you be forced to deploy next chapter. It gives away which series will be the focus next chapter, though sometimes this means they might just get a new robot or will appear midway the fight to save the day. This is a good thing, since if they're low in upgrades that's your chance to not get stuck in an unwinnable situation, but still. The Z2 games feature another one in that every unit's map sprite faces either to the left (if it's a protagonist) or to the right (if it's an antagonist). If someone joins up but they're facing right, expect a betrayal (except in Z3). The fact that the crashed ship on Enceladus was the Yukikaze was a plot point that wasn't revealed until the end of a scenario in Super Robot Wars V. However, if you move your cursor over the ship, the map data flat out tells you its name.
  • Whether or not a soldier manages to land a lethal hit on an alien in XCOM: Enemy Unknown is spoiled if the camera pans over them as they take the shot. Conversely, if the camera pans over an alien, you can rest assured that the next scene will consist of one of your soldiers dying.
    • On the other hand, in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, the Assassin is an alien Stealth Expert who darts across the map in Concealment before springing an ambush on your squad. But if she rolls the "Watchful" trait as one of her special abilities, she'll enter Overwatch at the end of her double move, and the little icon will appear over her exact location. She won't be officially revealed and targetable by normal shooting, but if you have a grenade launcher or other AoE attack...
    • Though it's only a one-time occurrence, you'll get the achievement pop-up when the game calculates that you've gotten it (e.g. mind-controlling an Ethereal in Enemy Unknown), which means you get the award for doing the thing as soon as you've told a soldier to do the thing instead of after your soldier did the thing.

    Visual Novels 
  • The character bio section of the Legend arc in Umineko: When They Cry tells you that Maria shares her fascination of the occult with Kinzo and has strange behavior before she started mentioning magic to her family.
  • Ace Attorney:
    • If you don't get a profile entry for a major character who is mentioned more than once, you can bet it's because they're already listed in there under another name. The Law of Conservation of Detail being heavily in play also creates a lot of these, as you know any piece of evidence will always be used at some point. This can make some later deductions in cases a lot easier than they're supposed to be, because if you're right at the end of a case and have a piece of evidence you haven't used yet, it's very likely to be the solution.
    • The last witness of any given trial is nearly always the true killer. This can cause related videos on YouTube to inadvertently spoil the killer if they're the last or so part of the case. However, the series sometimes shakes this up in the final trial, where is several games the last witness is not the killer, and sometimes the game's true Big Bad is never even cross-examined in person.
    • In some of the games, the protagonist will rearrange their evidence, which removes evidence that is no longer related to the case. If something seems irrelevant but stays in your inventory, you can guarantee it will end up important later in the case.
    • While the autopsy report won't be presented in the case, if something is missing or is worded in a particularly odd way, it will likely end up being an important part of the trial.
    • In the second case of the third game, Phoenix Wright has his own profile in the Court Record, even though the current Player Character normally doesn't have a profile, hinting that you need to present his profile at some point.
    • In later installments, whenever a specific detail of a piece of evidence comes up in the description in the Court Record, that detail will almost always become relevant when presenting it for a contradiction.
  • In Choices: Stories You Play, descriptions for the next two chapters are often released ahead of time, so you know when is The Climax or the ending two weeks before the chapter's actual release. If you're looking at a chapter description and can't swipe right anymore, you know how many chapters the book is going to have.
  • In Princess Waltz, shutting off the female voices prior to the reveal doesn't stop Chris' vocal tracks.
  • Though Fragment's Note averts the Conservation of Detail point above by giving art to all the named characters, the fact that one of the side characters, Eri, has two entire pages of CGs in the gallery clues her in as a possible Love Interest for Yukiha.
  • Virtue's Last Reward:
    • The secret files very often contain rather blatant spoilers for things that will come up in a cutscene after leaving the room they were acquired in. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that most people would view said files the minute they get them...which is before the cutscenes happen. Some of the files even spoil big game plot points like it's practically nothing. Woe betide the unfortunate soul who decides to go for the files on their first playthrough and read them all, especially if they're playing on Hard (which gives you more files).
    • The flowchart is also a big source of spoilers. By taking a look at the branches, you can tell how much story it will provide. So you'd probably think that the longest one is the Golden Ending... and that's exactly the case. It doesn't stop there, though: because the "Ally" option is always the left one at a junction and the "Betray" one is always the one going right, you can tell if it's better to ally or to betray in most cases. On a side note, the trope is subverted with Tenmyouji's ending, because its branch gets suddenly expanded when you reach its apparent tip. And it's necessary to get it before attempting to reach the True ending.
  • Danganronpa:
    • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc:
      • If you see all of Chihiro's Free Time events, you'll notice that the sheets in Chihiro's room are blue as opposed to pink, cluing you in to his actual biological sex.
      • The player is allowed to select any character when it comes time to pick the culprit, even ones who died in previous cases, which doesn't seem to make any immediate sense. That is, until you realize that it implies the possibility of suicides and faked deaths. The former comes into play in Chapter 4, where it turns out Sakura killed herself to protect the others and the latter comes into play in the final trial where the culprit is Junko Enoshima, who was apparently killed during the investigation of the first case, but actually pulled a Twin Switch.
      • In text boxes, all of the characters are labelled with their full names, regardless of nicknames, except Celestia Ludenberg, who is labelled "Celeste" in text boxes, implying that Celestia Ludenberg is not her real name in the first place. This is a pivotal point of proving her guilt in the third case. That said, Makoto is suspicious of this from the start given that she's Japanese and her name is clearly not as well as the fact that Celeste is known as "The Queen Of Liars", the interface just makes it more obvious.
      • The mobile version adds a character gallery which allows you to view every student's sprites and voice clips. To prevent spoilers, characters are only unlocked after the chapter in which they die, or at the end of the game if they live. Seems innocent enough, until one starts to wonder that if every character is listed in the same order as the e-Handbook, why is "Junko Enoshima" (the 14th student) listed as the 16th character?
    • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
      • In chapter 1, you can't progress Nagito's Free Time Event past the first event. This foreshadows that not all is as it seems with Nagito.
    • In Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony:
      • You can now manually vote on who the culprit is at the end of the class trial unlike the past games (although the second game forces you to vote for the culprit at the end of the fifth trial). You don't have to actually vote for the culprit because everyone else will do so, but you do need to vote for somebody or you get a game over. The significance of this comes at the very end of the final case, where the remaining survivors perform a suicide pact by all refusing to vote for hope or despair.
      • In the first chapter, you may notice that you're unable to progress past the second rank of classmates' Free Time Events, despite having four opportunities to spend time with people. This is because Kaede turns out to be the first murderer, and Shuichi replaces her midway through the trial.
      • Similar to the above, in the first chapter, you may get various music-related presents from the Monomono machine, or the "Gun of Man's Passion" and other masculine-themed items. The former spoils that Kaede will be the recipient of said presents, as well as the existence of a mode in which she can be given them, while the latter further proves that Shuichi is the main character.
      • Speaking of the collectable items, there are a handful of marked items that trigger special scenes if you have them when talking to a specific character at a certain point in the story. For a couple of them, it's pretty obvious who's going to be triggering the scene, so you know the character isn't going to die if you haven't activated the sequence yet.
      • While you can collect Monokumas in the first chapter, the shelf showing the Monokumas you've gathered doesn't appear until Chapter 2, since it's actually in Shuichi's room.
      • If you're familiar with the previous two games, you may recall that if your Influence bar empties, the rest of the survivors erroneously conclude that your Player Character is the culprit (even if said character isn't a suspect), and vote him guilty, thus resulting in an incorrect verdict that will get everyone besides the killer executed. The third game's game over sequence cuts off just before the vote. In the first trial, because Kaede is the supposed culprit, convicting her would actually be the "correct" choice.
  • In Nicole, the Gallery menu that holds the images of each of the romantic endings in it, is available from the start. And while the mystery plot of the game is to figure out which of the four available guys to date is the kidnapper behind the previous three cases and is targeting Nicole now... the Gallery option makes it somewhat obvious which of the guys the kidnapper is. So don't look at the Gallery until you have completed everything, okay?
  • In The Devil on G-String, this trope is both played straight and actually used to mislead the player. For scenes not viewed through the eyes of the protagonist, the text interface expands and is printed on a translucent background sporting the temporary point-of-view character's silhouette. But when the point-of-view shifts to 'Maou', who is heavily implied to be Kyousuke himself, there is no change. The fact that they actually end up being two different characters is effectively hidden by this trope.
  • In Fleuret Blanc, one of the duelists is Put on a Bus before you're given the opportunity to bout him. However, Amara will still give you tips on how to fight him, spoiling that he comes Back for the Finale.
  • Subverted by Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem. The game's Relationship Status screen shows where your Relationship Values stand with each of a broad array of the game's characters, some reflecting all four possible values (Friendship, Romance, Rivalry, and Respect) while other characters have only two or three. While the presence or absence of a character profile with a Romance slider would seem to indicate in advance who is and isn't a viable romance option, there are several secret romances available, and at least one case in which a character has a Romance slider but can't actually form a romantic relationship with the Player Character. One possible love interest doesn't even appear on the menu at all.
  • In Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair, the CG collection menu shows every single CG image in the game. There are two pictures showing Kotoba on fire, titled "Conflagration A" and "Conflagration B," with the former for him surviving, and the latter for him dying. Naturally, the fact that there's two of them, and that players are more likely to get the latter on the first playthrough, spoils the fact that it's possible to save him.
  • In Highway Blossoms, this is double subverted with the achievement, "Second Piece of Treasure." While the description, "Didn't find the second piece of treasure," is kept secret until the player gets the achievement, the icon shows a dashed line outline of the gold with question marks, all but outright saying that Amber and Marina give up on finding it.
  • C14 Dating: Joan, the Gay Option is supposed to be a Secret Character to the extent that most of her route is stumbled upon by taking detours from the routes of the male love interests. However, the gallery collecting images that can be unlocked in the various routes, which can be consulted before even starting to play, has a page dedicated to each of the male love interests... and Joan.
  • Thousand Dollar Soul, unlike other visual novels, displays the entire current scene as a Wall of Text that can be scrolled up or down, and the only breaks are when you need to make a choice or reach an ending. The choices are always displayed below the text box, and it's hard to not take a peek, which can hint at what will happen before you're done reading.

    Wide-Open Sandboxes 
  • Batman: Arkham Series:
    • In Batman: Arkham Asylum once you gather all the Spirit of Arkham messages, you're supposed to deduce their identity. While you can in fact do so via the messages alone there's a more "meta" way to figure it out. If you look at the Spirit's character bio, it lists their "Debut" as being in the game itself. There are only three other characters in the game that have that same element in their bios: Dr. Young, Frank Boles and Quincy Sharp. The former two are dead by the time you have all the messages, which leaves Quincy Sharp and lo and behold, it's him.
    • Batman: Arkham City:
      • The game has deliberately cryptic and vague trophy descriptions to avoid spoiling the plot. Defeat Grundy? "Stop the unstoppable - Wrecking Ball". Defeat Ra's al Ghul? "We are legion - Sandstorm". Defeat the Final Boss? "All the world is a stage - Exit Stage Right". However, astute players and fans of the comics might have picked up on the last achievement being a reference to Clayface, considering his past life as an actor.
      • Around two thirds though the game, you get a call from Alfred telling you about a supply drop into Arkham City containing the TITAN cure, which Lucius Fox has apparently discovered on his own. Not only does this seem suspiciously sudden and convenient in and of itself, but the drop is also marked as a sidequest objective despite it essentially being the resolution of the entire main plot, which doesn't make any sense. Naturally it's a trap.
      • The actual interface is a spoiler if the player looks at The Joker when he's cured with Detective Vision, showing he has no bones or internal organs - which gives away that "The Joker" is actually Clayface.
      • In the upgrade menu, there's a spot to put your experience points into Catwoman's abilities, pretty much spoiling that near the end of the game, you get to play a section as Catwoman.
    • Batman: Arkham Knight:
      • The identity of the Arkham Knight is only revealed near the very end of the game. However, viewing the Showcase models for Jason Todd after buying his DLC will show the Arkham Knight outfit as an alternate outfit for him, thus revealing the twist to any curious player.
      • In the Mad Hatter Season of Infamy mission, the subtitles give away the play on words that leads to the main twist of the mission (i.e. they show that Hatter keeps saying "you're Alice" as opposed to "your Alice"
  • In Deadly Premonition, the description for Becky's collectible trading card reveals that she was the "Miss Stiletto Heels" who altered the scene of Anna's body before it was reported to the police, and those for Diane and Carol outright state that they are the Serial Killer's third and fourth victims, even though the first of the cards in question can be obtained long before this detail is properly revealed, and the latter two can only be obtained at a point in the story before the major plot developments they mention even happen.
  • Grand Theft Auto:
    • When the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned was revealed to be Johnny Klebitz, players noticed that completing the "Museum Piece" mission where both he and Niko appeared unlocked the "Impossible Trinity" achievement, a blatant hint that the protagonist for the then-upcoming second expansion also appeared in said mission. They quickly came to the conclusion that it had to be Luis Lopez, since he was the only character in that mission whose fate was left ambiguous at its conclusion. Much later, Luis was confirmed to be the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony.
    • If particularly astute Grand Theft Auto V players look at the 100% checklist on the Rockstar Social Club website, they may notice that all of the sidequests that require Michael or Trevor are completely optional, even for 100% Completion - a decision which would make sense, if the player was, say, given an option to kill one of them and Rockstar didn't want 100% completion to be unobtainable.
  • In Horizon Zero Dawn, certain Machine items list all of the Machines that drop that particular item, long before you actually encounter them.
  • inFAMOUS:
    • The first game shows you the number of powers in the upgrades menu, but not what they are called or how you get them. Also, some of these are passive bonuses or upgrades such as damage boosts, health boosts and upgrades to your lightning bolt power.
    • In a scene in the last third of the sequel, Cole, Zeke and Kuo have a serious discussion in a train car about whether Cole is physically and mentally ready to use the RFI, having found "the last Blast Core". The scene probably would have had a lot of impact - if the player wasn't already aware from the on-screen text interludes between plot missions that show he still has two more Blast Cores to collect after this, as well as several locked abilities that haven't opened up yet.
      • There's also a mission that has you firing a nuke at The Beast. It's quite clearly made to seem like this is the ending of the game, except A. that would be a hell of an Anticlimax Boss and B. it's still showing that you need to find two more blast cores, which would be pointless if this mission succeeded.
  • Cole's notebook in L.A. Noire lists all four divisions that he'll be working in, in order (reading down). Since Arson is less prestigious than Vice, you can guess that he'll be demoted.
  • Zig-Zagged in Middle-earth: Shadow of War.
    • Even after conquering all four keeps, the Siege Mission tab in the Quests window only shows 50% completion, suggesting there'll be more to come after Act III.
    • Two special skills are hidden from the game's skill tree until Act III since they spoil major plot developments. Raise Dead, as the name suggests, turns surrounding dead grunts into zombies that fight for you, and an extra Super Mode in Ringwraith, which permanently replaces Elven Rage and summons phantoms of dead Gondorian soldiers to fight for you when it performs the first skill on all the surrounding grunts that you killed. You gain these new skills because Talion's original Wraith Celebrimbor betrays him and leaves him for dead.
      • The control layout in the Options menu unfortunately does spoil the first skill before you unlock it... at least on consoles. For the PC version if you didn't already complete the game, the ability will be marked "(Locked)."
    • The skins menu includes a second Talion. Equipping it changes absolutely nothing, until you reach Act IV and that model is replaced by his corrupted model.
      • Also subverted. The skin menu also includes a corrupted Eltariel skin you can view from the start of the game. Which would make you think she also turned to the dark side (like every main character did) near the end of the story or in her DLC campaign... until she doesn't. Then you find out it was just a "What if?" joke from the developers that got put in for the game's final update.
  • The powers menu spoils the number (and distribution) of powers in [PROTOTYPE].
  • Saints Row:
    • The screen that notifies you of when you have enough respect to do a mission in Saints Row 2 shows the signs of the four gangs in the game—and the Ultor logo, foreshadowing the missions you'll eventually go against the Ultor Corporation.
      • Look at your phone and see the homie section, notice any of your lieutentants missing? Yep, Carlos isn't there. Unless you count Zombie Carlos.
    • Lampshaded in Saints Row IV, where the Boss says that they have to stand and fight a particularly powerful enemy rather than running away because their interface screen still has an empty power slot and they want to fill it by beating them. Saints Row IV also plays it straight in that the achievements and challenges reveal all the activated powers and most of the special weapons long before you get them; each activated power also lists all its elements, even the ones you haven't found yet.
  • The Guide in Terraria can show you what can be crafted with any item that is a material, even endgame items. This is especially true in various mods and modpacks. Say you mine up a piece of a mod's Unobtanium while playing through it, you go to the Guide and see that it's a crucial component in a Cosmic Keystone in that mod's universe and you can mouse over the other ingredients to see that it drops from some kind of Eldritch Abomination in the mod as well.

    Other 
  • Alien: Isolation has some unaccessible doors and grates that will inform you that you require things like a plasma torch upgrade or an updated access tuner, long before you can get those items. The fact that you see those messages before the Disc-One Final Dungeon of Mission 10 also hints that the game will continue for a long time, even if you might think that it's close to an end (because of the plot and context of that level, the actions you are tasked to do, and the lot of hours you already spent before that moment)...
  • Invoked as part of a challenge in Death Stranding. The core gameplay is centered around you picking up and then delivering cargo from location to location, but for one mission, you get a cutscene of being handed a suspicious-looking package by an even shiftier-looking maintenance worker who asks you to deliver it to South Knot City. If you don't ask any questions and deliver it as usual, you'll suddenly find yourself exploding at the edge of the city for a Non-Standard Game Over. What you're actually supposed to do as the player is inspect the package in your inventory, which completely spells out that contained in the package is a thermonuclear bomb that will explode upon entering its destination or if Sam lets go of it, even directly suggesting the player show it to Fragile in order to figure out how to safely rid of it.
  • In Stellaris you are told that there is an endgame crisis, and even the name of the possible enemies that could start such crisis, right when you configure a new game. This was added only after an update, assuming that most players already know what happens, as the base-game at release didn't inform you in advance. Similarly, the Ascension Perk "Defender of the Galaxy" is anticipating that there will be a galactic crisis with unspecified "crisis factions", since you can select it centuries before the crisis starts.
  • The Mahjong client Tenhou contains a minor one. The window showing the winning hand will show the yaku one by one, and then the not-immediately-visible ura-dora (if applicable) and reveal the hand's total score afterward. You can tell immediately whether the hand is valuable enough to cause a Nonstandard Game Over (like someone getting bankrupted, or the dealer on the last hand pulling ahead of everyone else) if the button at the bottom says "END" instead of "OK". Conversely you can tell when the game will continue past its normal endpoint (due to no one having the minimum 30,000 points needed to win) by the button saying "OK" on the last hand.
  • In Story of the Blanks, once Apple Bloom enters Sunny Town, the text boxes' border design changes, possibly hinting that something isn't quite right about the place. The borders go back to normal after Apple Bloom and Twilight Sparkle leave the forest, but the narration at the end still uses the alternate design.
  • In Mario Golf, when your putt has been lined up perfectly and will go in, the camera switches to show the hole.
  • In the 1990s, the Sega CD version of Night Trap and the other four console versions had the room icons that were static images, and you could only see what was going on in one room by selecting it. In the 2017 remaster, the room icons now have dynamic, real-time thumbnails, meaning that if you see movement in one room while being in another, you know that something's going on. For example, you can watch the girls rock out in the living room and impress Sarah Martin, while you witness the Augers kidnap S.C.A.T. member Jason and drain his blood in the downstairs hallway before taking him to the basement without even going to said hallway! Oh, and beating the game now unlocks Theater Mode, where you'll see some super-spoileriffic scenes that occur while you are busy trapping Augers.
  • In any game that uses subtitles, you know something is going to happen if a character's subtitles on screen has its sentence end abruptly.
  • Games that have an Achievement System on Steam can choose to have certain achievements hidden until you unlock them. Though this leads to another problem if you've reached what seems to be the ending to the game, then you see that a good 90% of the hidden achievements are still locked. Although these could just be secrets and Easter Eggs. While you can spoil yourself by seeing the hidden achievements through the global stats page, they won't tell you how to unlock them.
  • Extermination doesn't reveal the story and mechanics behind the infection until a little bit later in the game after starting out. Opening the menu as soon as the game starts shows an infection meter, which spoils the mechanic related to it.
  • Love Live! School Idol Festival ALL STARS: The game doesn't even try to hide Shioriko Mifune's Heel–Face Turn and joining the school idol club she was trying to shut down, given that an update that gave her a 3D model and solo songs also made her a selectable partner for the title screen. The same would apply to Mia Taylor and Lanzhu Zhong even later before the game's closure.
  • The "Super Melee Mode" in Star Control 2 (accessed separately from the main game) allows you to play any of the ships appearing in the main game — including those of alien races that would otherwise only be discovered for the first time during the story. The game's original manual also lists those ships and races, so it is doubly difficult to avoid any spoilers.
  • WarioWare: Get It Together! does this during the postgame; the character select screen shows one more "locked character" icon than the number of friends you have left to save, spoiling that you will eventually recruit Penny Crygor in addition to Red, Master Mantis, and Lulu. Subverted in that it still doesn't display an icon for the secret final character, Pyoro.

Non-Video Game Examples

    Anime and Manga 
  • This actually occurs in Fire Emblem: Champion's Sword. Each chapter begins with a recap page telling the story so far and giving profiles of each of the main characters and others who are relevant to the current chapter. That's all well and good... until the final chapter gives a recap profile for a character who hasn't appeared for around 5 issues and who it'd have no good reason to recap. It was foreshadowed that they were a Chekhov's Gunman earlier on, but this kills any remaining subtlety.
  • In Continuity Reboot Sailor Moon Crystal, the To Be Continued card depicts Princess Serenity holding a staff-length version of the Cutie Moon Rod as a sceptre, well before the story arc that introduces the weapon itself.
  • Averted in-universe in The Rising of the Shield Hero. There are more than a dozen different ways for the heroes to upgrade their Evolving Weapons, but each hero's Stat-O-Vision doesn't display information about any method they don't already know about.
  • There is a good reason why the short description of Shimeji Simulation only gives the most watered-down description about it being a usual Slice of Life story in Wikipedianote  and in MangaDex. Talking about the whole of manga's contents gives away and spoils the manga's well-known Tomato Surprise twist that the world is revealed to be a simulation. It's especially much worse since this only becomes true in Chapter 30.
  • The Netflix result for Glitter Force Doki Doki has The Golden Crown of Wisdom as its thumbnail despite not being introduced until later in the show. Not only that, but the preview video also spoils Regina and Glitter Ace.
  • The anime adaptation of Log Horizon invokes this by doing absolutely nothing to hide the fact that Rondel is actually a Person of the Land, even though the visual nature of the adaptation means a few glaring indicators of that (such as the fact that his ID window uses the green NPC background rather than the blue one Players use) are now out in the open.

    Fan Works 
  • On Archive of Our Own, every fic shows the tags the author has added, which usually include characters. This can spoil the appearance of some characters, or who is in a relationship with who, or even characters' Secret Identities from the source material, if the reader hasn't caught up yet.
  • Chapter 10 of Sonic Generations: Friendship Is Timeless corresponds to the rival battle between Sonic and Shadow from the original game. However, Shadow's name in the chapter title has a question mark next to it, spoiling the fact that the rival battle against Shadow is a Bait-and-Switch Boss.
  • An in-universe example in Sword Art Online Abridged: Rosalia's ambush of Kirito and Silica is foiled not by Kirito's Detecting skill, but because the name tag hovering over Rosalia's head is poking out on either side of the tree she's trying to hide behind.
  • In any The Gamer-like story, the main character's Sudden Game Interface can do much to reveal knowledge that could have easily remained hidden.
  • Vow of Nudity: Subtle ones happen occasionally with the out-of-universe dice rolls. The author generally sticks to the official statblocks for monsters, so when one of them has an atypical stat (for example, the bandits in The Forest of Terrors having overly-high AC and better gear than they should), it's often a clue that there's something subversive happening (in this case, Spectra later discovering the bandits were city guards in disguise.)

    Film — Animated 

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Subtitle creation is usually done by third-parties, and often they transcribe dialogue directly from the script. These subtitles usually display the name of a speaker if they are off-screen, but sometimes you don't want the viewer to know who is speaking offscreen just yet, if their identity is supposed to be a secret for now. This kind of interface spoiler is especially bad when it accidentally reveals who the Hidden Villain is, or exposes a main character as being Evil All Along.
  • Subtitles can also spoil the sudden deaths of characters, if only by a couple of seconds. If the caption says something like, "I know you won't kill me. You promi-", you know the speaker's about to get shot.
  • With film adaptions of popular franchises, it's not uncommon to unveil a major character in The Stinger as a way of hyping the next installment (or to include an old favorite in a cameo). Of course, these scenes are often after the closing credits have included the surprise character in the cast list.
    • Kong: Skull Island credits Toho as the owners of Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah. Toho's characters aren't even referenced until the post-credits scene.
    • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) averts this by crediting the voice actor and creators of Howard The Duck immediately after his surprise reveal.
  • In the Coppola Restoration box set of The Godfather and its sequels, the backgrounds of the disc menus contain three important death scenes. The Godfather's menu shows Vito Corleone lying dead in his tomato garden. Part II's menu shows Michael Corleone standing in his study, which in the film is when his brother Fredo is murdered offscreen on his order. Part III's menu shows someone hanged; while it's easy to think that it's Michael given that it's the final film and considering the previous two discs' menus, it's actually a corrupt banker.
  • In the DVD of Revenge of the Sith, the menu includes the scene where Palpatine attacks Mace Windu and the other Jedi before showing you the options.
  • In Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, there are title cards for every planet featured, except for Mustafar from Revenge of the Sith, because it would've given away Darth Vader's presence as he has his own private base there.
  • Suicide Squad (2016) introduces every important character with a profile listing their talents and wacky trivia. The only teammate to not get one is Slipknot, which is an immediate giveaway that his character is the Redshirt.

    Literature 
  • With the likes of Kindle and other e-book readers, it's very easy too see the index of any given book at any time and, if the author names the chapters, this has the potential to be spoilery.
  • In almost every BattleTech Expanded Universe novel, there is a glossary of terminology and artwork of the various BattleMechs, dropships, and vehicles mentioned in the novel. This can often give away what shows up later in the story. For example, in the franchises' debut novel, Decision At Thunder Rift, a planet is attacked by a band of pirates using a small selection of dilapidated battlemechs, mostly light mechs like the 'Locust' and 'Stinger'. Yet the glossary lists heavies like the 'Rifleman' and 'Crusader'. In the book's second act, a conspiracy is revealed and a Draconis Combine dropship lands carrying a platoon that uses these mechs.
  • In the original three Heralds of Valdemar books, Herald Talia reads about the tragic deaths of the Last Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron, who died preventing an enemy army from entering Valdemar; and of the later Herald Lavan Firestorm, who immolated himself and a Karsite army after his Companion was shot. Naturally when the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy and Brightly Burning come out their protagonists are Doomed by Canon. The title of the trilogy also foretells doom for all the other Herald-Mages; all of them are dead before Vanyel meets his fate.
  • The first Hilda book contains a map of the area around Hilda's home with several locations specifically labeled. However, they never show up in the actual story.
  • The Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Priory School" includes a hand-drawn map which is shown fairly early in the story, but immediately reveals clues that aren't found until later—including, most notably, "Heidegger's Body" long before the character's death is discovered.
  • Star Wars Legends: The X-Wing Series falls victim to this via proper formatting. Capital ship names are italicized, so anytime someone refers to Ysanne Isard's secret prison as Lusankya, it spoils the big reveal that it's actually a starship.
  • Both consciously averted and played straight in some editions of The Stormlight Archive. For instance, in the deluxe paperback edition of The Way of Kings, one of the illustrations is a spoiler in what it depicts, and is thus given a more generic name in the index; but if you accidentally open the book to the back endpapers, the map is not a duplicate of the one in front but shows a completely different realm that isn't even hinted at for most of the book.
  • Worm, a Web Serial Novel, is published as a series of blog posts, with each post tagged with the characters appearing in it. However, the character tags sometimes include minor spoilers, such as revealing Atlas' name before he's named in story, or revealing the identity of Golem early. Subverted with the Echidna clones, which each have their own, named character tags despite only appearing briefly and never being named in story.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Technically, any series that features a Romantic False Lead as an element of a Love Triangle could be seen as this. You can easily tell which of the romantic rivals is going to finish in front because one's part of the main cast and the other's credited as a guest star.
  • 24
    • The show made a habit of silencing its signature beeping clock whenever a major character has been killed, to the point that when Tony Almeida returned in season 7 after having seemingly been given a silent clock in season 5, the producers pointed out that unlike most of those other times, there were still other sounds audible while the clock was onscreen. Come Live Another Day, and despite absolutely no indication that he wasn't about to die, the episode which ended with President Heller acquiescing to Margot Al-Harazi's demands, allowing her to kill him with a missile from the stolen drones had a normal, beeping clock. Sure enough, the following week's episode revealed that Jack had found a way to save him.
    • At the beginning of the fifth season's premiere, Dennis Haysbert is introduced as being a "special guest appearance", thus indicating that (like other guest stars) he won't be making any additional appearances past that episode. A few moments later, his character (David Palmer) is shot and killed by a sniper.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • The henshin belt from Kamen Rider Den-O has 4 buttons on it, confirming from the moment that the belt is shown that Ryotaro will be possessed by 4 different Imagin for 4 different forms (not counting his base form, Plat Form), each one Color-Coded for Your Convenience so that you know that not only will he be possessed by all-Yellow and all-Purple imagin, but they'll end up joining his side. Then along comes Sieg, who not only lacks a button with his corresponding color (white), but he uses an entirely different belt to transform, although it's not as big of a twist due to how rarely it's used. There's also his Mid-Season Upgrade and Super Mode, which rely on outside devices, thus being a complete subversion. New Den-O, from the same series, subverts this trope entirely, since he can transform into his main form, Strike Form, regardless of which Imagin is possessing him (since they turn into weapons for him to wield as opposed to having him change forms), and the one exception - Deneb, who lets New Den-O transform into Vega Form - also subverts this, due to the fact that there is no green button on the belt.
    • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, being a show themed around fictional video games, displays a character select screen whenever any of the heroes transform into their superpowered alter-egos. The screen includes all five main Kamen Riders even before they actually appear for the first time, as well as two portraits with question marks that are filled in over the course of the show.
  • Ozark: The pilot episode teases that Wendy, who is the wife of the main character and being played by Laura Linney, might get killed and be a case of Decoy Protagonist. Audiences might fall for it if they hadn't noticed Linney's eyes on the poster of the show in the Netflix interface.
  • Person of Interest plays fair with the Machine-eye view, so when in "Firewall" Caroline Turing is framed by a yellow boxnote , viewers who notice get an early hint she's more than just another Victim of the Week.
  • If a Previously on… segment features clips from a seemingly minor moment or character, it's almost guaranteed to become important again in that episode. Game of Thrones was notorious for this, for example.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • The second season had a case of this similar to The Wheel of Time below for actors listed by the playback UI of Amazon Prime, as it reveals Renee's last name to be Picard, making her Jean-Luc Picard's ancestor. It's also an example where the UI was updated to cover this up later on, having Renee's last name not shown even after The Reveal.
    • The Third Series also had this, as the subtitles for the third episode identfies the creatures piloting the enemy ship as 'Changelings' before their presence is revealed in-story.
  • The Wheel of Time (2021):
    • Since Amazon Prime lets you know the role any actor currently on screen is playing while the playback UI is up, viewers can immediately know Rand's mother was named Tigraine Mantear, despite their name not being mentioned even once during the episode, while readers would not discover it or its significance until the fourth book.
    • Again in the first season finale, Moiraine and Rand encounter a man in the Blight they (and supposedly the audience) believe to be the Dark One, tempting Rand to choose the Dark, except the playback names the character as "Ishamael 'The Man'", who book readers (and viewers who randomly notised his name-drop from the Dark-friend Dina) will know to be the Highest amongst The Forsaken. Unlike Tigraine Mantear in the previous episode, his actor Fares Fares isn't listed in the episode's end credits, probably meaning it's still supposed to be a mystery.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The teaser reveal for Solgaleo and Lunala GX in the Pokémon Trading Card Game blotted out several of the various stats for the Pokémon in question on their card. While fans initially thought this was to just add to the suspense of revealing these cards' capabilities, it turned out that this was to avoid an Interface Spoiler revealing that Solgaleo and Lunala are both Stage 2 evolved Pokémon, although Legendary and Mythical Pokémon have previously never been part of an evolution line. In addition, the two legendaries being evolved forms of Cosmoem was a major spoiler for that generation of video games.
  • Any tabletop game with a "roll for perception" mechanic can easily become this. After all, if your game master asks for a perception roll, even if you fail it, you know there's almost certainly something there (because why ask if there isn't?).
  • Chess: Part and parcel of chess problems and studies. The problem's caption outright tells that there's a checkmate in a set amount of moves (or, in the case of studies, that there's a way to win or draw) by force in this position, and you only have to find it.
  • Magic: The Gathering once exploited this to deliver a reveal. After the climax of the War of the Spark story, several planeswalkers ended up fleeing to the far ends of the multiverse in the aftermath of the conflict. This major arc was followed by a few minor, self-contained visits to various planes (Eldraine, Ikoria, Kaldheim, a return to Theros and Zendikar), followed by a new plane called Strixhaven. This appeared to be another self-contained arc, until people saw the new character Professor Onyx. She appears to be a brand-new planeswalker, but her card types describe her as 'Legendary Planeswalker - Liliana'.

    TV Tropes 
  • On TV Tropes, spoiler placement can give away what they're trying to hide:note 
  • If Always Save the Girl has a spoilered out description, the love interest most likely died.
  • If you're on the character page for any work with a mystery central to the plot and you see someone whose description is 90% spoiler-tagged, congrats, you have probably just found the villain.
  • Even if the work tries to avoid this by having a separate "Antagonists" section and warning of unmarked spoilers in there, it's still very easy to find the villain. If a character has a deceptively small list of tropes in the normal characters section, and a one-line spoiler underneath their profile, said spoiler will almost always be "For tropes pertaining to them after The Reveal, see the Antagonists section." The opposite can also happen, which is even worse.
  • In works that have acting/voice acting involved, if a mysterious character's actor/voice actor is spoilered out, chances are whoever plays the character already plays someone in the current cast (and is either that character, or is otherwise closely connected to said character. If it's a character that as far as you know doesn't or can't talk, even an all-spoilered out blotch where a voice actor's name or a quote would go is a giveaway that they break their silence at some point.
  • If said Walking Spoiler suddenly dies half-way through the first episode, then even the sheer number of tropes associated with them, spoilered out or not, can spoil that they're Not Quite Dead and will come back at some point.
  • If part of someone's name is spoilered out, you've probably got a Tomato in the Mirror on your hands.
  • It's common to see a trope description take some form of "Looks like it's going to be subverted, but then it's played straight. The spoiler tag isn't really hiding anything in such cases. Then again, even if you don't insert the "looks like it's going to be subverted" part but just add a spoiler tag just after the unspoilered part of some trope description, you're actually strongly hinting at some kind of trope subversion.
  • If a work seems cheerful and bright, but has a Darth Wiki or Nightmare Fuel tab, chances are you are looking at a Disguised Horror Story and/or a Sugar Apocalypse.
  • In a similar vein, if a work (usually a video game) seems to have an Excuse Plot or no plot at all, but you see multiple Audience Reactions tabs (Heartwarming Moments and Tear Jerker, especially), then what seems to be a work with barebones storytelling isn't.
  • Any mention of a villain that mentions he's The Dragon, and then a short spoiler in parentheses. In most cases you can guess that this villain will be the true Big Bad, Co-Dragons along with a second villain or not going to last long.
  • If the Big Bad entry on a page mentions a villain's name but there is a spoiler in the entry then it is a safe bet that this villain is just the Disk-One Final Boss or working with a second Hidden Villain.
  • A similar case to the Ace Attorney example can occur on TV Tropes character pages too. If a named character from a work is built up as important, but doesn't have an entry at all on the characters page, chances are it's because they're an alias for someone who does have an entry. The same happens if the character has a character page entry, but no image to go with it. In that case it's a safe bet that their appearance is the same as someone else's.
  • The sheer number of tropes present on their page can also reveal the amount of screentime a character might have. Character seems important, but doesn't have many tropes? You can either guess that they won't return or maybe it will be like the above where it's an alias.
  • If you see a character's entry, yet there's a trope that doesn't seem to fit what they were doing before? Probably means they'll return later on.
  • The generally frowned-upon format of dedicating spoiler tags just to a character's gender, either because of a reveal involving them, or because it isn't their true gender, will usually be very obvious no matter how the spoilers are added. In the former case, either the gender distribution of the work is even enough that simply their gender isn't enough to reveal anything, or the gender ratio is heavily skewed in one direction and their gender only has any need to be spoilered at all if they are in the minority gender, which would stick out like a sore thumb anyway. In the latter case, it still sticks out like a sore thumb and hints at a reveal the reader probably wouldn't be suspecting if the spoiler tags weren't there or applied differently.
  • Similarly to the above, if a character is referred to by a gender-neutral pronoun such as "they" or "them" despite not being presented as such in the work itself, it could be a sign that their gender is not what you're initially led to believe it is.
  • Death Tropes as listed on a character page is sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. On one hand, spoiling the name of the trope (which is actually forbidden) will give the reader nothing to go on, so curiosity may entice them to highlight it anyway. On the other hand, leaving the name of a trope like Killed Off for Real or Dead All Along ends up covering up approximately nothing.
  • If a seemingly innocuous character has their own dedicated page, or their character folder has a warning that says that the folder has unmarked spoilers, then odds are they're far more relevant than they appear.
  • If you wish to edit a page that has spoiler tropes on it, there's nothing you can do except try to avoid the very visible spoilers. Or just watch/read the work in question before you edit. Of course, there are also the pages about spoilers...
  • Similarly, if you want to avoid spoilers, don't click the "Related" tab. This subpage lists every page on the wiki that has a pothole to the page you're viewing.
  • On the Better Than It Sounds pages, it can be easy to tell what a franchise is depending on the amount of examples. For example, Super Mario Bros. has about 26 entries, and not a lot of other things have that many.
  • On pages which have different color palettes, like YMMV or Darth Wiki, a link that was hidden within a spoiler used to be faintly visible. This was fixed, though hovering the mouse over a spoiler tag and finding a hidden link will cause the cursor react to a clickable link, which on some browsers shows the URL for the link. This is why some editors frown upon hiding links in spoiler tags.

    Video Games-Related 
  • It's generally not a good idea to look at the ESRB rating description of a game before playing it, as many of them are very detailed as to why the game received its rating, which often means describing a Cruel and Unusual Death in vivid detail, which can sometimes make it obvious who dies and how. Suicides and Heroic Sacrifices are also specifically mentioned. Justified, in that the point of ESRB descriptions is to inform parents who are looking to see if a game that they intend to buy for their child is going to be suitable for the child. Occasionally the sample lines of suggestive or disturbing dialogue can be major spoilers, like this example from the ratings page of Danganronpa 2: "Some of them tried to have children with Junko's dead body.", a double whammy as it also spoils the original Danganronpa.
  • The PlayStation 4 disables its internal recording features when a game enters a point designated as a "blocked scene", with a popup to explain this. If said popup appears at the start of a seemingly innocuous cutscene, you can be sure a Wham Episode is coming.
  • Speedruns (unless they are watched through some live stream). Time needed to complete the speedrun can be immediately guessed thanks to the video's length. Zig-zagged by Games Done Quick recordings on YouTube, which include huge chunks of the broadcast before and after the run as if to make it impossible to guess, then tell you directly in the title anyways.
  • When talking about Undertale, if you decide to quote one of Sans's, Napstablook's, Metaton's, or Papyrus's more spoilerrific quotes without spoiling the identity of the speaker, you should probably quote them with proper capitalization instead rather than with their capitalization quirks (all lowercase letters for Sans and Napstablook, CAPS LOCK for Metaton and Papyrus).
  • The YouTube channel for Heroes of the Storm averts this for pro matches. If two teams have a "best of 7" series, they will always post seven videos, even if the series ended in a 4-0 sweep; the unnecessary videos will simply be repeats of previous matches. They even edit the videos so that they aren't the same running time as the previous match they're duplicating.

    Webcomics 
  • Discussed in Awkward Zombie: Katie has hearing problems, so she often turns on the subtitles on video games. Unfortunately, the dialogue often doesn't keep up with the subtitles, leading to a point where Katie knew someone would die before he actually did.
    In a perfect world, I'm pretty sure we would only be given one clause at a time, it would appear on-screen while that clause was actually being spoken, and it would never end with "(death gurgle)".
  • In Dumbing of Age, Jocelyne Brown is a closeted trans woman who has mentioned this fact exactly once on-panel, a significant length after her first appearance. Shortly after this reveal, all of the old comics tagged with her birth name were updated to use her proper name, giving the reveal away to anyone who hadn't read that far yet. A later comic lampshaded this in the Alt Text.
    sooner or later [Joyce and Becky] are gonna hafta look down at the tags
  • In the print version of Girl Genius, all volumes have titles along the lines of "Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank". Agatha is not officially revealed to be a Heterodyne until the third volume.
  • Discussed in Irregular Webcomic!. In one strip's commentary, David Morgan-Mar discusses how hard it is for physical books to disguise how much more of the story remains, since any reader can see how many pages are left. However, an author could surprise their readers by ending the actual story much sooner than the end of the book, and filling the rest of the pages with an unrelated short story, or The Lord of the Rings-style appendices.
  • In Stand Still, Stay Silent, members of Mission Control and the crew are given a title card with their nationality, their age, their spoken languages, their job, whether they are The Immune or not and extra info during their introduction. In Chapter 1, one such card is given to Onni, who lasts only a few pages during which he's shown refusing to join the crew and ultimately getting left behind when his younger sister and cousin leave their home military base. Guess who reappears via the literal magic of dream world interactions in Chapter 7, becomes an unexpected addition to Mission Control in Chapter 10, and graduates to actual protagonist status in Adventure II?

    Web Media 
  • The Huffington Post loves to tease readers with clickbait lines such as "You'll Never Guess This Celebrity!", but the URL for the page frequently includes the article's headline (kevin-bacon-shift-your-shopping-for-good), so hovering your mouse over the link reveals the answer 99% of the time and saves you from having to actually read the article.
  • If you are watching Double Rainboom for the first time, do so on YouTube and not on the official website, as the disclaimer on the bottom of the page spoils the fact that the story's actually a crossover.
    • YouTube spoils it too, thanks to the "related video" list.
    • The description on YouTube, which is where most people will go to first, and what will be mostly visible on a recommended videos list, clearly starts with "SPOILERS BELOW" (and on the recommended videos, that's all that is displayed), implying that you may not want to check it yet.
  • Crossing with Late-Arrival Spoiler, sometimes thumbnails can be too revealing when one checks out a whole playlist. And there are cases like the Rooster Teeth player showing the thumbnail of the next episode once you finish a video.
  • RWBY: Every volume's final episode includes The Stinger, which occurs after the end credits roll. The end credits always lists characters in appearance order. If a new character's first speaking role is in the stinger, their name appears on the list before their scene occurs. While this technically occurs in both the Volume 1 and 2 stingers for Cinder and Raven, respectively, Roman already knew who Cinder was long before the audience found out. However, the audience was as mystified as Yang by Raven's first appearance in Volume 2, so the end-credits reveal her name to the audience before Yang; as the stinger scene is a dream sequence, Yang doesn't have Raven's Volume 2 appearance confirmed to her until half-way through Volume 3.
  • Choose-Your-Own-Adventures videos on YouTube, or videos with heavy use of the Annotations, could fall for this if they used repeated clips for their bad endings, as viewers can look at the url of the video in question and turn the video into a game of Click The New Link. Removal of annotations has rendered this a moot point.
  • This is essentially the reason for the existence of Polsy, which lets you display YouTube videos on a separate screen; so Something Awful Lets Players can host their videos on YouTube without the Related Videos spoiling the story.
  • NFL Sunday Ticket's online streaming app will pop up alerts for scoring plays. However, since the video is often a play or two behind, you often get the score alert before seeing the ball snapped.
  • IMDB can reveal a Walking Spoiler if the actor is credited as a too-revealing name. Back when there were character pages, clicking one could reveal an awful truth. Though there still is a minor one when clicking the character name, given it shows images and quotes that might be revealing.
  • If you type certain search terms into a search engine, such as Google, you can get somewhat spoileriffic results from even the suggested search terms. For an example from Attack on Titan, "Reiner Braun is a Titan." If a character is Killed Off for Real (especially if It Was His Sled), Google will happily ruin it for you by suggesting "death" the instant you type in their name.
  • TheRealNinjaBoy's Nomad Adventure is an aversion of this. For context, the Nomad Adventure is a Minecraft run in Hardcore Mode. He dies in Part 15, about 17 minutes into the video, but in an example similar to Frazz's Spoiled by the Format aversion, there's about 15 minutes of a black screen in order to throw viewers off of his trail. He lampshades this in the comments section.
    TheRealNinjaBoy: It's to hide how long the episode actual is, all done on purpose...If the episode is a lot shorter than the previous ones then it'd show that I died at some point so blank space to hide the fact that I died
  • Northern Lion acknowledged in episode 4 of his The Binding of Isaac playthrough that his viewers would be able to guess whether he would succeed or fail a given boss fight based on how close to the end of the episode it was. At the time, the counter and scrub bar were constantly visible below the video instead of as an overlay that only appears when you mouse over it. This could apply to any Let's Play that always ends its episodes at a logical point such as the end of a level.
  • This came up as Five-Second Foreshadowing when hololive English members Nanashi Mumei and Ceres Fauna were playing Minecraft together. Fauna, Friend to All Living Things, caught Mumei killing a cow and entered Yandere mode, serenely asking Mumei to check her inventory for any fresh meat she might have gotten from somewhere, and then encouraging Mumei to go to bed while Fauna stayed up for just a little longer, while Mumei nervously eyed a nearby pool of lava.
    Mumei: (lying in bed) Okay, good-night!
    Fauna: Good-night, Mumei.
    Mumei: Good-night!
    Fauna: Good-night.
    (beat)
    Mumei: Good-night.
    Fauna: Good-night.
    faunaceres has made the advancement [Hot Stuff]note 
    Mumei: GUH! G-GOOD-NIGHT! GOOD-NIGHT!
    Fauna: ...
    Mumei: (strained) IT'S TIME TO GO TO BED, FAUNA! IT'S TIME TO GO TO BED, FAUNA!

    Western Animation 
  • The episode of The Fairly OddParents! in which Poof is introduced is sometimes broadcasted as a two-parter and not in a single episode. Poof only gets his name at the end of the second part (a Running Gag in the episode is several characters coming up with various names for Poof). The first part, however (which ends shortly after Poof is born) clearly has Poof's name written in the end credits (and just to drive the point across, it's written as "Baby Poof", making absolutely sure people know who this is referring to).
  • In the fourth season of Young Justice (2010), Superboy is still promoted in the fourth season's intro despite being seemingly killed four episodes in, an early foreshadowing for him actually being trapped in the Phantom Zone.

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