A quick note for clarity: This trope is about the game itself tricking the player, specifically. It's not simply about plot twists, or about characters being deceptive. It's not just "Tomato in the Mirror, but in a video game". The wise old mentor turning out to be the villain all along is not this trope.
For the most part, video games are remarkably trustworthy. There are things that players can, in general, rely upon: The tutorial will give accurate information on how to play; on-screen instructions aid the player; all mechanics required to win will be made apparent.
And this makes sense: When the player begins a new game, they're engaging with a new and unfamiliar context. As a result, the foundational "rules" of how they interact with that context are undetermined: How do they do anything? Should they go left or right? What are they supposed to be doing? And so on.
Thus they naturally rely on the game to help them along: to teach them the rules of this new "reality", and to support their efforts to interact with it. After all, how could one play games if they couldn't be trusted to bring the player into the experience? However, this also means that players are susceptible to that trust being subverted. And that is this trope: those games that use the player's trust in the game itself to trick them.
Maybe the game tells the player to go only go left, when going right is the only path to the Golden Ending. Maybe the tutorial lies to the player about mechanics. Maybe the game messes with the interface to prevent the player from choosing something.
And when this happens, it can pull the foundation of the player's experience out from under them. Suddenly interaction becomes more uncertain; old familiar truisms of gaming may no longer apply. It can make for quite an unnerving experience.
One simple manifestation of this is for the game to claim that the traditional When All Else Fails, Go Right in effect, when in fact it isn't. May involve leading the player away from an Offscreen Start Bonus.
Compare The Computer Is a Lying Bastard, in which the game provides information, but isn't very good at it. Compare also with The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, in which the computer cheats at the game. Contrast Deconstruction Game, which is a game that makes a point of examining one or more video-game tropes. Indeed, a Trickster Game's subversion of expected video game tropes is one potential means of making a Deconstruction Game.
A somewhat-related concept is the Player Punch, in which the game uses the player's investment in a character (or other object of attachment) to make a narrative element more impactful and/or motivating.
Examples:
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Action Games
- Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice marks how many times you've lost a life by showing a patch of rot creeping up Senua's arm, with the promise that once it reaches her head it'll be a true Game Over, and you'll have to start over from the beginning. Notably, it never tells you how many continues you have left. It never actually reaches her head. Even if you were 95% sure that was the trick because a kind developer wouldn't actually do that to you, sowing doubt and distrust for the game itself is just one of the many brilliant ways it puts the player into the role of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Adventure Games
- Dreaming Mary: The game's instructions puts the player on a very linear path- meet the characters, play their games, collect seeds, and finally visit Boaris. The player is told to do things like not go into certain areas and to ignore things one of the characters says. Breaking these rules results in a very different and more horrifying game, where the player learns more about Mary's plight and may eventually set her free.
Collectible Card Games
- Inscryption begins with a card-based main menu where the spot where the "New Game" card should be is just a gray outline, forcing you to play the "Continue" card instead. Why this is, and what the nature of the game itself even is, expands far, FAR beyond the scope of anything shown on the game's promotional material. The game constantly adds in new rules and mechanics, as well as new twists, to constantly pull the rug out from under the player and keep them on their toes. Among other things, the cabin card/escape room gameplay that appears to be the entire game is only Act 1, while Act 2 completely changes the art style into pixels and adds two new card types, Magicks and Technology, while revealing that the talking cards who helped you were villains using you all along. Then Act 3 has bosses that play around with the fourth wall, like the Archivist who tries to make you think you are risking your own computer files in the battle, and in the end it turns out you were unwittingly helping P03 upload the game onto the Internet.
Platformers
- Depict1 plays this trope right from the title screen, what with "press nothing to begin" being the very first instruction you see. You learn very quickly that The Computer Is a Lying Bastard and your trust in what the game says is immediately toyed with.
Puzzle Games
- Baba is You starts as a simple deconstruction of the "sliding block puzzle" game, in which you can change how objects respond to each other by mix-and-matching the "rules" that govern each level. It continues into being a deconstruction of that premise as the words of the rules themselves become physical parts of the solutions, then into being a deconstruction of its deconstruction, and so on. To get the true ending, you'll have to think on multiple levels of meta-control at the same time, transforming empty space, level icons, and eventually the interface itself all into parts of the ultimate solution. Time after time you'll think you've broken the game only to realize that breaking it is part of how you play it.
- There Is No Game starts out by telling you, well, that. And will keep trying to convince you there is no game and nothing you can do.
Third Person Shooters
- Second Sight has the protagonist psychic, John Vattic, travelling back in time to prior incidents and able to change the events with the knowledge of the future. Except that he's not travelling into the past. He's in the past and is having precognitive visions of what will happen unless he acts.
- Spec Ops: The Line starts off by doing its level best to convince the player that it is a standard military shooter; everything from the trailer, the demo, the cover art to even the first 40 or so minutes of gameplay is engineered to make the game appear as nothing more than a typical America Saves the Day, kill-all-the-bad-guys shooter. However as the story unfolds, it slowly reveals itself to be a Genre Deconstruction of military shooter games, and criticizes the genre for providing players an unrealistic and immoral escapist fantasy through the glorification of violence. The game straight up calls out the player for using the game to act out a power fantasy, calling into question the morality of playing games which simulate killing people for fun. The game's protagonist, Capt. Martin Walker, transforms from a strait-laced, no-nonsense soldier into a vicious, bloodthirsty maniac as a result of his experiences and the increasingly barbaric actions he is "forced" to carry out. At the end of the game, it is revealed that he had been hallucinating large parts of the game, including the existence of Col. John Konrad, the alleged "villain".
Visual Novels
- AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative: The game presents itself as a "simple" story with two point of view protagonists and a branching flowchart.
- There's actually three POV characters.
- The flowchart is split into two main branches, Mitzuki in the present and Ryuki in the past. Half of the nodes in the main branches are switched, so half of Ryuki's nodes are in the present and half of Mitzuki's nodes are in the past, except it's her identical twin. It's corrected before the big finale.
- There's a third route, where the story goes off the rails in a meta plot about leaving reality and the mystery is solved very quickly.
- Doki Doki Literature Club!:
- In most visual novels, one's save-game collection is a reliable means to go back and "fix" any mistakes that the player may have made. Which makes for all the more of a punch when those saves are erased after a particularly impactful and likely-upsetting scene, thus taking away that means of "setting things right."
- At certain points, the player is presented with traditional visual novel choices—except that all of those choices say the same (likely unexpected and undesirable) thing, or there's only one (likely undesirable) option, or, in one case, the game outright moves the mouse away from all choices but one.
- The Central Theme of Fleuret Blanc is materialism and obsession — two things that video games, by their nature, tend to encourage. This makes for a very interesting choice of medium, and the dissonance is played up for all it's worth. The mechanics encourage you to reduce your co-workers to Relationship Values and hoard their prized possessions — which don't even have any meaning to you! — all while characters wax philosophical about the meaning of objects in our lives and if we can really gain happiness just through having enough possessions. One of the characters is an avid gamer obsessed with virtual achievements and the like. Gaining an item results in a cheerful Item Get! jingle, while losing one results in a sad trombone noise, even when it's part of a scripted sequence. This makes many players have a kneejerk negative reaction to losing items, even when it makes perfect sense and is the smarter option. The gold placard is a particular Troll in this regard; it's only ever added to the inventory in cutscenes, because Florentine always discards it again by the end of the scene. You never keep it permanently, even though it looks like a legitimate item. The game also dramatically tallies up Scoring Points at the end of every day over a background that says "Everything is collectible"; these points do absolutely nothing. While there is never any explicit betrayal of the player on the level of some other examples here, the game is carefully crafted to make the player uncomfortable and reevaluate their behavior.
- The featured romance in Magical Diary's Horse Hall version is with a 'bad boy' character who is actually playing on the trope expectations of the target audience to lull the character, and the player, into doing exactly what he wants. Many players recognise the manipulation on a character level and laugh about playing out the "cheesy romance", but don't realise that they themselves are being tricked as well. There are YouTube videos of horrified shrieking from players suddenly discovering that they were being played all along.
- You and Me and Her. Despite some strange metafiction sprinkled throughout involving Aoi, the Miyuki's route, the first route of the game is a fairly normal romance story. After the player decides to do Aoi's, however, a series of strange questions begin popping up that, if chosen incorrectly, suddenly lock the player into replaying Miyuki's ending. Because Miyuki's actually fully aware of the events of her route, and intentionally trying to sabotage you. Once she reveals herself, she hijacks the game and intentionally removes the save feature, just to ensure you can't fight her.
- Each entry in the Zero Escape trilogy has a surprising revelation about the identity of the player character:
- Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, unlike many visual novels, is narrated in third-person, not first-person. Turns out, it is a first-person narration. From another one of the participants. In the past. And said person is Zero.
- The sequel Virtue's Last Reward is a "screw you" to the Japanese players' narrow-minded thoughts on player characters. The game creator wanted to make an adult hero, not a slightly older teenage hero. Japanese gamers don't like the idea of playing as old men because they can't be awesome (basically). So the game has you play as a 67-year-old man but tricks you into thinking he's 22- and once again, he is (unknowingly) the Zero of the game.
- Zero Time Dilemma
- The game presents itself in cutscenes as a third-person adventure game in the style of Telltale Games. Once again, it's secretly first-person, from the perspective of someone you didn't know existed- and for the third time in a row, he is the new Zero.
- The flowchart is wrong, but gets corrected later. Specifically events depicted as being concurrent are not, they are sequential.
- One node in the flowchart is missing until the finale, and another is replaced with a different one.
Web Games
- Tower Defense game GemCraft: Chapter Zero is a fairly mild version. The Player should be wary of the premise of the game (a sorcerer seeking the ultimate MacGuffin) since it's a prequel, and the boss-fights are named ancient guardians, but overall the player identifies with the main character, wanting to beat all of the levels. Then you get to the very last stage and have to free the MacGuffin from a seal. Destroying the seal unleashes the Sealed Evil in a Can that possesses you, necessitating the character of the original GemCraft game, Chapter 1, to come along and clean up the mess you made. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!
Wide-Open Sandbox
- The Minecraft adventure map The Easiest Adventure Map™ is a jab at simplistic, easy, low-effort adventure maps, as well as the players who prefer them to maps with more effort put into them. At first glance, it's a light-hearted map with an Excuse Plot about a witch stealing your milk for no good reason, and following the instructions given will railroad you through 10 easy challenges and hand you an unsatisfying ending. However, going against the instructions and deliberately failing the challenges will cause the witch to become less funny and more aggressive, and failing all 10 will reveal that the player is trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine, forcing them to find the way out.
