Jigsaw Puzzle Plot / Video Games

• Jon Ingold's text adventure All Roads is rare example of a computer game that pulled this off with only a few hours of gameplay. The full plot involves possession, body switching, and anachronistic storytelling. And then there was The Muldoon Legacy series by the same author, which added a healthy dose of science fantasy.
• 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim puts you in control of thirteen different protagonists, that you can switch to at any time, all with their own unique storylines that take place at completely different times. With some scenes overlapping between characters, some serious Mind Screws, the past and future versions of numerous characters running around, and some of the individual stories being Mind Screws in and of themselves (special mention going to Ryuko's amnesiac, drug-addled story and Nenji's "Groundhog Day" Loop story), and you've got a recipe for a story that will take a long time to fully comprehend even after you finish.
• With the addition of the bordering on Mind Screw ending of Brotherhood, the Framing Story of Assassin's Creed definitely qualifies for this now. Ubisoft were meticulously vague with just about every sentence said, giving the player bits of evidence and conspiracies that either seem to contradict each other, or seeming have no relevance whatsoever. Not to mention the player has NO IDEA if said sources of information can be trusted, if everyone secretly has an ulterior motive, or if they're just being overly paranoid about things. "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted"... more like "Believe NOTHING, expect EVERYTHING, but don't expect to know how it all fits together".
• BioShock has a fairly straightforward main plot. The setting's backstory, on the other hand, is revealed mostly through audio recordings left behind by people who used to live in Rapture.
• BlazBlue:
  • The main story of Calamity Trigger is told piecemeal through every character's Arcade and Story Modes. Some players might find making a chart or a table handy, 'cause it gets complicated. Then, once enough pieces are revealed, it becomes simpler in a satisfying way.
  • Starting from Continuum Shift Extend, there is an additional story chapter that recaps the essential meat of the plot of the last game in about the length of an individual character's chapter. Emphasis on essential.
  • Unfortunately, because it's a Fighting Game, a search for information on how to use the characters often ends with a plenitude of spoilers, which may not be major (fighting game) but it can ruin the satisfaction that figuring it all out near the completion of the story provides.
• Bloodborne is even worse than the games it serves as a Spiritual Successor to. The true nature of what's going on is buried in item descriptions and the occasional telling piece of scenery. It's not even clear which parts of the story are real or not, or if all of it or none of it is. Figuring out the timeline of all the important players and events prior to the game's start is almost as hard as the game itself.
• Square Enix's RPG Chaos Rings is built on this trope. Each playthrough features one of four different parties, whose stories are all interrelated. Only once you've played through each of their paths does the overarching plot come together.
• Cube Escape: The first released installment was a simplistic game about fishing at a lake with some Surreal Horror Jump Scares thrown in, but the games since then have each revealed parts of an increasingly complicated and symbolism-laden plot/backstory involving the mysterious death of a woman, a lake that runs on people's extracted memories, bird-headed creatures who may or may not be demigods, and much more.
• Dark Souls is this to the point of being a Kudzu Plot. There is very little in the way of story progressing cutscenes, and very little is directly explained to you. You can gain a bits of understanding about the setting, the past, and what is currently going on by compiling NPC dialogue, item Flavor Text, and by observing your surroundings.
• The Dark Parables have evolved into this over time. With the release of each game, the player learns new details about characters and situations they encountered in previous installments. The series is now up to its tenth game, and Word of God states that they intend to produce several more titles (since there's plenty of material to use, given that they're all based on fairy tales), so the various plot threads will continue to weave together for an indefinite length of time.
• Desktop Dungeons implements this, in part, to deal with the fact that there's no single linear path for the plot to take. Information about the backstory is often doled out in class challenges and boss monologues.
• While Deus Ex's main story is pretty straight, the backstory is hidden in pieces in various in-game media this way.
• Doom³ does this with its audio logs, video disks, and emails. Plus, it also makes players actually get the plot by placing important information such as codes with the plot.
• Dragon Age has this for history and details of the world of Thedas, for which you collect bits and pieces as codex entries that you can spend hours reading them and piecing them together; in fact, the main conflict of Dragon Age: Inquisition was foreshadowed as early as in Dragon Age: Origins if you took the time to slug through the entries dealing with the Elven Gods, the fade and the Old Gods. To a lessor extant the Broad Strokes of all six origin stories happened, and the dwarf storyline especially requires you to have seen both dwarf origins to get the whole picture.
• Befitting its subtitle, Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages has a plot that requires you to throw yourself down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, alternate history, mythology, deception, and more. You start the game only having a vague idea that you're supposed to look for the secret of "the drowned god" and that you're supposed to look for some mysterious artifacts, and early in the game there are large sections of the backstory and the important players dumped onto you that you have no context for yet, and so you have to inspect every piece of information with a fine-tooth comb in order to make sense of it. It doesn't help that the game had a lot of it's story cut out, meaning that many pieces of the puzzle will never be revealed after the death of the game's creative lead, Richard Horne.
• Before the beginning of the main story in Ensemble Stars!, a 'war' happened in which the student council conspired to sabotage a number of other highly skilled idols and promote the student council president's own idol group fine. After Anzu, the player stand-in, transfers in, the main story kicks in and the student council are taken down. However, the specific details of what went down during the war, including who was allied with who and how they reacted to the events, have only been revealed in trickles across assorted event and gacha stories. To make it even worse, you can normally only read those stories if you manage to collect the associated cards, which involves either extensive, intense playing (for events) or Random Number God mercy (gachas). (However, players are also able to access limited numbers of keys which allow them to read episodes without the associated card, and translations of the stories into English can be viewed online.) And that's not even getting into the many, many characters' backstories, which are often hinted at years before they get explained in full. For one example, Chiaki is a very important character who would've been majorly impacted by the war, and is a close friend of one of the biggest victims (Kanata), but though the game started in 2015, it was only in January 2019 that the players found out his part in it all: he was a fine supporter who honestly believed they were carrying out justice until he got to know Kanata and realised he was actually a good person who didn't deserve what happened to him.
• Fallen London: So many pieces, so many puzzles! And dozens and dozens of little storylines that always tell you more, but never enough to figure it all out at once. But every time, you get hints for another completely different storyline... All in all, if you want to have the whole story at any time, you'll need to work through many others, and piece it all together. Even snippets from the earliest moments of your career that were never important can gain a lot of relevance later on.
  • The worst case of this is the Finding Mr Eaten storyline, for a couple reasons. There's multiple endings, so you need to play through it multiple times or converse with others who have beaten it, and it's very highly advised to not use a "main" account for it. This is because it completely and utterly destroys your account, to the point where you're worse-off than a fresh one at the final step, even if you turn back at the very end and get the strongest weapon in the game in the process. If you continue, rather than get a weapon, you get one of the endings and your account gets deleted. For good.
• Final Fantasy VIII aimed for subtle exposition, and never outright states its most important plot points (such as Squall being Laguna's son or the motivation of Big Bad Ultimecia).
• Only by the end of Final Fantasy VII will you most likely understand everything that has gone on before, then a replay is recommended. It's possible to skip all the optional scenes that explain the backstory, and without them, it's practically a different game altogether.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses features an interesting take on this trope. While the game features four different routes, playing them all isn't required to understanding a single greater plot — it mostly helps sheding light on certain character actions and the motivations of other factions (namely "those who slither in the dark" and the Church of Seiros) that otherwise go unexplained. Every path tells its own story, but knowing what happens on the others and the elements shown only in those will allow the player to notice a lot more Foreshadowing.
• First Encounter Assault Recon does this nicely, at least in the original F.E.A.R., Extraction Point, Perseus Mandate, and the second canon game, F.E.A.R. 2. F.E.A.R. 3 pretty much drops this entirely. The nice thing about the jigsaw plot is that it is handled in a way that provides a bonus to attentive players, but is not mandatory for understanding things.
• While the plot of Five Nights at Freddy's seems to be nothing more than "homicidal animatronics gun for hapless security guard", a grisly backstory is revealed via secret posters. The rest of the series adds more pieces to the mythology, including a creepy puppet seemingly masterminding the animatronics, a purple Atari man bringing death wherever he goes, yellow animatronic/suit hybrids that are lethal deathtraps, the mysterious Fredbear and his restaurant, the purple Atari man's family (and his own robot creations), and even the animatronics' creator. Said information is also presented in Anachronic Order, so have fun figuring all that out.
• Half-Life has the basic story of "mad science allows extradimensional aliens to conquer the Earth." Beyond that, you have to notice newspaper clippings in the game, keep your ears open for off-hand references in dialogue, and pay close attention to how your alien allies speak. It can be frustrating, but the alternative could have been a scene in Half-Life 2 where Gordon Freeman was locked in a room with an actual slide show of exposition. Even then, even if you are paying very close attention throughout much of the game, if you only play Half-Life 2, then expect to still be pretty damn confused and ignorant regarding the overall plot. Much helpful information is not given until Episode 1. That's right; HL2 makes you wait for the next game to clue you in on massive sections of the plot.
• Heavy Rain. Let's just call it a mystery with multiple player-determined characters and paths and solutions but set answers.
• Played extremely straight with Her Story. The game's story is told through videos; and you can view the videos in any order (you have to find the videos by querying the right terms into the search engine). The way the story is presented, the player has to piece together the full plot on their own.
• Hotel Dusk: Room 215 does this as well. You yourself are looking for your former partner Bradley, and as you talk to the residents of Hotel Dusk and learn their stories they begin to slowly interweave and overlap with yours and each others. By the end of the game you've found peace for yourself and everyone else in the hotel, if not resolved their problems. Its sequel, Last Window, does this as well. It has the advantage of an In-Game Novel version of its own story to help you review how the story has gone so far.
• Killer7 sets the puzzle pieces in front of you, takes a handful away, and leaves you to assemble the rest.
• The Kingdom Hearts series. It rations out the information just enough that all the Wild Mass Guessing and Fan Wank can start to make sense if you aren't careful.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep is probably the best example, as you have to play the game three times (each time as a different character) to piece together the entire story, plus gather all the "Xehanort Reports" that explain (as best they can) the more confusing details.
  • Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] gives the big picture by including detailed summaries of all the previous games in the series, and shows how all the plots are tied together. Good luck understanding the story of the actual game, though...
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. If you listen accurately to what Kreia and other teammates tell you, play a Lightsider and learn everything you can from the Jedi Masters, and play the game several times that way (plus at least once dark side to note how peoples' stories change), you might actually be able to figure out just what happened during the complicated backstory, which is also full of contradictions because several characters just flat-out lie. To make it worse the player character already knows most of it and the game pointedly averts As You Know; one of the most reliable sources of exposition is dialog choices, and even that's assuming you can figure out what is and is not a Schrödinger's Question.
• While Left 4 Dead has a straightforward plot, the survivors' personalities can be understood fully by listening on their comments. One of the most infamous is Ellis' tell-tale involving Keith.
• The Legacy of Kain series, with plan upon plan, a whole cast of Chessmasters, of varying levels of ability and success, and a(n un)healthy dose of time travel....it becomes quite a headache to keep it all in mind.
• Downplayed in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If you head straight to fighting Calamity Ganon after the tutorial section, you'll still get enough plot exposition to know what's at stake. But completing the other story quests will not only make the fight much easier from a gameplay perspective, they'll also provide you with further clarification on what Link's relationships with Zelda and the Champions were like.
• While The Longest Journey had some elements of this trope, its sequel, Dreamfall, goes full-hog with it. So many pieces, and not enough game to cover them with.
• Mass Effect is heading for this. The main plot is fairly straightforward, but if you do loads of sidequests and talk to people a lot little details start cropping up - e.g. in the first game, Wrex can tell you a story about an asari mercenary he knew and fought with. In the second, an asari you meet (Aria T'Loak) unknowingly implies that she was that mercenary.
• The Metal Gear series is notorious for this. The plot of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots basically consists of putting all the puzzle pieces together, as the chronologically last game in the series aside from the spin-off sequel Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
• The entire Metroid Prime Trilogy does this.
  • The first game does this to the largest degree. It is wholly possible to go through the entire game without even knowing what you're doing or why you're doing it. Scanning Chozo Lore and Pirate Logs as you find them will give you bite-sized pieces of information that can eventually be assembled to see the whole picture. Fortunately, the game introduces scanning early on and makes it a core element of gameplay, so it is much more difficult than it sounds to blunder cluelessly through everything. It definitely doesn't hurt that the game marks the story scans with the icon indicating that they are mission-critical. Echoes and Corruption have cutscenes that provide enough information for the player to know the general plot, though rich amounts of details and backstory still have to be scanned.
  • Metroid Prime: Hunters requires you to piece together the plot without the aid of cutscenes or expository sequences. And much of the information has to be taken from haphazardly-scattered, scannable data caches which are only visible to your scan visor. Yes, it is ludicrously easy to walk right by the entire story and not even realize it.
• Nier, strangely jumping ahead 1312 years after the tutorial and only giving hints as to what happened in the interim. Nothing is as it seems.
• Octopath Traveler: Characters' stories and the overarching plot come together pieces at a time, with many revelations being saved for The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
• Odin Sphere. The story prior to Armageddon is spread throughout five books telling different parts of the story from the perspectives of five different characters. Trying to keep track of everything — such as who does what, what goes where, and when what happens — can be extremely frustrating, especially if you're trying to figure out how the ring Titrel is passed from person to person or how each character pursues their agenda. It doesn't help that the game often jumps through hoops of And Now for Someone Completely Different. Thankfully, the game provides a cinematic theater organized into a comprehensive timeline to properly keep track of everything in a chronological order.
• Oracle of Tao: Many things are revealed in this game, spaced out all over the place. There is at the very opening, a World Sundering, of the New Earth and the Void which was the old Earth. Then Ambrosia gets a series of religious truths foisted on her, along which the revelation that she might not be real, and the realization that she has a Literal Split Personality causing chaos around her. This is to say nothing of the often conflicting (as viewed by histories, versus personal accounts, versus the demon's own account) versions of people getting raptured by a demon's coming, various personal plots scattered about the world, Ambrosia's quest to find her memories of her parents, and various secrets revealed at the end about her identity, the world, and everything in it. And it's not even truly over, so there is a second game to tie up loose ends, with an additional secret or two the Oracle's role is actually a replacement to extend the lifespan of God, since without someone to renew the cycle, God and everything else in existence is doomed to return to the Void they came from.
• The Path is extremely complicated and piecing together the story takes quite a bit of time. And even then there's still loads of stuff that's up for your interpretation.
• The Professor Layton series, of course — they're point-and-click adventure games with mystery plots, so it's pretty much to be expected. The games even go so far as to have a screen of unresolved plot questions, with each one checked off as the details are discovered.
• Project Downfall is nigh indecipherable in a single playthrough. Each alternative path and ending reveals a little more of the bigger picture.
• The protagonist of [PROTOTYPE] has a Cannibalism Superpower, so he learns the backstory by eating people who have memories connected to it. This is made more complicated by the fact that few of these people fully understand the situation (and according to one memory, some of them were deliberately given false info once the higher-ups figured out that any real info might get back to the protagonist.) The result is a bit confusing, to say the least.
• Quest Fantasy is pretty complicated and is told in Anachronic Order. Often, things are not explicitly spelled out as to where they connect, so the player has to keep track of a pretty complicated story despite the total playtime of all the games not being too long.
• Rengoku: The game manuals only provide the basic summary, while the rest of the story is told by bosses and post-floor cutscenes one at a time. While the plot of the first game is still minimalistic, in the second game many named characters have a lot to say about how the Tower came to be.
• Suda 51's The Silver Case series begins with Moonlight Syndrome, in which nearly everyone dies, moves on to The Silver Case itself, in which the only detective investigating the events of Moonlight Syndrome is murdered, and then moves on to Flower, Sun and Rain, whose plot is too complicated and fantastic to explain here. By the way, one of the characters from Moonlight Syndrome makes a cameo in killer 7. The two boys with the adult voice are Mitra. And that game never came out in America. Suda 51 is doing this for his own sick amusement, isn't he?
• The Siren Games are designed like this, challenging the player to piece together the truth from the various character scenarios and the many archive items that can be found. Even then, the game outright hides certain pieces of the puzzle from you; for example, the first game never shows the scene where Kei Makino is murdered by his twin brother, who assumes his identity and effectively replaces him in his scenarios.
• Sonic the Hedgehog fell into this in the games from Sonic Adventure to Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) (with the exception of Sonic Heroes due to the game really just having an Excuse Plot). In the case of Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2 and especially '06 it was due to the Another Side, Another Story nature of the plots with not all the events being directly seen from the chosen character's point of view. As for Shadow the Hedgehog, it was due to the pick-your-path nature of the plot meaning not everything was revealed on a single run through the game.
• Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion to an extent. At first it appears to be a parodic game, with the title's Jump Scares being simple cartoony cardboard cutouts, but as you progress through the house you find notes left by people who have previously entered it, hinting towards its true purpose.
• Star Control II just throws you into a huge starmap with no set objective aside from a vague "become powerful enough to defeat the bad guys", and the only information you have is 20 years out of date. It's up to you figure out what's going on and what you need to do from the bits and pieces of information you get from the aliens you encounter.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: Eight player classes, each with their own story arc and five companions with their own, smaller character arc. The companions from the Consular class have worked with the Trooper's companions and the Bounty Hunter's. The Jedi Knight's healer used to "date" Imperial Agent's terrorist companion. The Imperial Agent sabotaged friends of the Consular's terrorist companion. The Smuggler's companions used to be best friends with the Sith Warrior's companion. The Imperial Agent's opponents include characters from everyone else's story. This in addition to all the little story arcs and sidequests that can date back to Knights of the Old Republic, the Tales of the Jedi comic, and the Star Wars Expanded Universe in general. It's BioWare, prepare for a long play-through to understand half of it. In the expansion Knights of the Fallen Empire you find out that many of the parts that don't seem to fit, especially the Sith Emperor apparently pursuing several mutually exclusive strategies at once, were due to him deliberately wasting everyone's time while he readied his other empire to win in the end.
• The Talos Principle: The terminals and Alexandra's recordings comprise the bits and pieces of the story.
• A Valley Without Wind is very open-ended, and set up in such a way players make the plot as they go along. It does this by dropping the player into the world without a single clue as to exactly what put it in this state to begin with. The player has to unlock various "mysteries", then seek out secret missions to earn precious scraps of backstory piece by piece.
• The Witness: In a very literal sense. Not only does one have to solve puzzles in order to uncover the plot, but the plot itself is a carefully hidden puzzle, buried in a hidden section of the mountain, found in the form of audio recorders that provide their own clues as to what happened.
• The World Ends with You to some extent. However, it actually lets you unlock special messages to clear up some parts after the main story is over.
• Zombies, Run! indulges in this a fair bit. The first mission introduces someone firing on a helicopter with a missile launcher, which gets touched on now and then but never resolved. The relationship with New Canton comes in, gets dropped, and then comes back again. Bit by little bit, the dual storylines explaining how Abel Township is surviving and how the plague began get resolved.ç

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