Have you ever been playing Kingdom Hearts and gotten bored trying to save Goofy from the dark manifestations of his past or whatever? No worries! Here’s some more games where you are almost guaranteed to have absolutely no idea what’s going on!
1) Warhammer 40k
I should probably specify a specific game here but I really don’t need to. Pick any game in the Warhammer universe at random, and I guarantee you’ll be so inundated with proper nouns within the first 20 minutes that you’re gonna feel like a Xenoid that fell into a Grolot pit (that may or may not be a Warhammer 40k reference, but you probably aren’t able to tell, and that’s kinda the point).
2) Warframe
So I’m a robot? Oh wait no, I’m a kid controlling a robot? And now there’s a future version of me here. But he’s not really future me. And there’s a creepy laughing man in a wall. And a space mom. And giant floating thumbs everywhere and… you know what I’m just gonna shoot stuff.
3) Crysis
Yes, you remember all the memes about what can and can’t run Crysis. But tell me, even if you played the series, can you remember a single memorable plot point or villain outside of the fact that North Korea exists and aliens are doing stuff? No? That’s what I thought.
4) Destiny
Hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since Destiny released and subsequently ruined every game it came into contact with by turning them into retched clones of itself. Current Destiny fans will tell you that the story has gotten better in the past few years, but the line “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain” has been a meme this long for a reason. You don’t get points for putting all the interesting parts of your narrative into digital playing cards.
5) Metal Gear Solid
Did you know that there are at least 4 characters in the Metal Gear Solid series named Snake? Because confiscate my gamer license, but I sure didn’t until like a week ago. I assumed Solid Snake was just like, a guy. So maybe a hyper-casual fan like myself has no place in this conversation. But still, I think you lose a bit of credibility in your narrative when you have scenes of wounded child soldiers about twenty seconds away from a genetically engineered female sniper doing sexy poses in a bikini top.
6) Resident Evil
The T virus. The G virus. Boulder punching. Great hair. The Resident Evil Series has been the gaming world’s poster child for weird convoluted plots since the first entry released in 1996, and all the tall sexy vampire ladies in the world aren’t going to change that.
7) Literally anything SWERY has ever touched
Some have called SWERY the poor man’s Kojima. I wouldn’t, because that’s rude, but I understand the reasoning. While Kokima’s brand of weird is ultimately in the service of powerful (or at least interesting) themes and ideas, SWERY’s brand of weird is just… weird. Please don’t think that by weird I mean bad, because SWERY has been responsible for some of the most strangely compelling gaming moments I’ve ever experienced. But good luck trying to pull a comprehensible narrative out of something like D4 (‘Dark Dreams Don’t Die’); a game in which the protagonist attempts to solve his wife’s murder with his only evidence being her last words: “Look for D”. There’s an obvious joke in there somewhere, go ahead and laugh at it if you can figure it out.
8) Tekken
Ok, full disclosure: I knew almost nothing about Tekken except that there’s a buff grandpa, a buff cheetah man, and a panda who I’m sure has a great personality. So I thought I might have been unfair in thinking that the series had a dumb plot just based on my initial appraisal.
Nope.
Tekken’s plot is, even by the standards of fighting games, batshit insane. To be fair though, there is a lot of charm in suplexing CEOs in order to execute quite literal hostile takeovers.
9) Balan Wonderworld
Did you know this game has a supplemental novel? Like, an actual book with words and pages and stuff? There’s a review of it on Amazon that says it is the best book the reviewer has ever read. Crazy. Anyway it’s probably bad and the game makes no sense.
10) The Quiet Man
Be honest, you’ve never played this game. You may have never even heard of it. I could write literally anything here, and you’d never know if I was being accurate. I could tell you it’s about a deaf guy punching drug dealers while fighting a manifestation of his childhood imaginary friend in order to avenge his dead mother, and you’d have no idea if I’m lying to you or not. That is, in the broadest possible terms, the actual plot; but you had no idea. And be honest with yourself, you’re not going to check.
