Before I begin, WordPress tells me this will be my 100th post, yay! Also, here there be spoilers for Deadly Premonition.

I’d like to talk about my favorite mystery trope, I don’t know if it has a real name but I’ve come to calling it “the untwist.” An untwist is when a plotline that you thought was resolved turns out not to be resolved after all, making its true solution all the more unexpected. The plotline that got me first thinking about the untwist was Deadly Premonition, a game with an incomprehensible budget allocation but a strangely alluring story.

The player takes the role of Francis York Morgan (please, just call him York, that’s what everyone calls him). Throughout the game, York will turn to himself and talk to an unseen character “Zach.” York’s conversations with Zach always appear to give Zach total agency over the situation: Zach is asked what he wants to do, or what he thinks, or what the proper course of action for York is. In many ways Zach appears to be guiding and leading York through his entire adventure, but whenever anyone asks about Zach, York dodges the question and refuses to give a straight answer.

At this point in the story I and a couple of other people I know concluded that Zach was a stand-in for the player. Games have occasionally had a habit of addressing the player directly, and having York ask for guidance from the player (who is directly controlling York’s actions through the controller) seemed like an eccentric way to continue in this tradition. Even when York sort of gives an answer on “who is Zach” to Emily (his apparent love interest), he doesn’t say much more than that Zach has “always been with him” and “helps him in every way.” This just seemed to some of us as more confirmation that Zach was a player stand-in since the answers were still vague enough to justify that conclusion.

Speaking of York’s non-answer to Emily, he tells her a story about how when he was little his father killed his mother, cryptically saying “at times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing someone we love.” Yeah it’s that kind of game. This “why did York’s father kill him mother” mystery appears to take center-stage now that the “who is Zach” mystery has been “solved.” After this point Zach is rarely mentioned and the focus seems to have shifted, again lending credence to the idea that the the mystery is solved and the player was supposed to believe that Zach is just a stand-in for the player but that the game just can’t come out and say it because it doesn’t want to totally destroy the 4th wall. But that the simple answer isn’t the true story.

In the very last moments of the game’s story, York sees a vision of his father killing his mother again. This time he sees the whole scene, in which another character is shown to have “infected” his mother with a tree-like eldritch horror which is growing inside her. This causes his father to utter the line “at times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing the one we love.” But now he adds another line: “I couldn’t do it, but you have to, you have to be stronger, OK Zach?”

Those two words “OK Zach?” had me staring agape at my screen, suddenly a plotline I thought was solved had been unsolved, then resolved in front of me while a separate plotline also got solved. The story continues with York realizing he is the alter-ego of Zach. Zach couldn’t handle seeing what his father did and so allowed a different personality (York) to take over while he went dormant inside of York. York asks Zach for guidance not because Zach is the player, but because Zach is the personality that is guiding York while York is taking over. This revelation causes Zach to re-take his place as the primary personality, complete with a new scar, a new hair-color, and a new voice just to complete the picture.

The twist worked so well for me because it solved a mystery I didn’t even realize was unsolved. As I said, I had assumed Zach was an eccentric way for York to refer to the player the whole time, so to see that he was actually a character in his own right was mind-blowing. I’ve talked with some others who didn’t have quite the same experience, they didn’t think the Zach mystery was actually solved so weren’t as dumbstruck when it was “unsolved.” But I feel like my interpretation is valid for the story, and it’s what makes the story so great in my mind. Anyway, all mystery stories depend a bit on how you take them yourself, some people get disappointed when they guess the right answer, or angry when they can’t guess the right answer. But for me, I will always hold this as my favorite way a story ever fooled me.