Red Herring / Video Games

Red Herrings in video games.

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• Abyss Crossing: At the Farming Village, the party learns of the Goddess of Creation and Order, Siro, as well as the Goddess of Destruction and Chaos, Kuro. It seems like Kuro is going to be the Big Bad of the game due to the previously defeated Astras mentioning that the party is fighting against chaos. It turns out Kuro did instigate the Astras going out of control, but did so on Siro's request.
• Promo and art of Agarest Senki leads people to believe that Leonhardt is the protagonist of the story. This is true for only 1/5 of the game since the game runs on a generaton system. People consider his great-great grandson Rex to be the true protagonist. He's the guy that stands behind Leonhardt on the game cover.
• AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative throws several hints regarding the nature of the characters and the overall narrative, only to flip expectations upside down with the reveal that Ryuki's and Mizuki's routes are actually a mix of past and present instead of Ryuki's route being entirely the past and Mizuki's being the present:
  • The "Half-Body Killings" seemingly involve half of the victims' bodies appearing six years in the past, and the other half appearing in the present day but somehow being fresh, inviting supernatural explanations. All but a couple of the victims actually had both halves of their respective corpses discovered within hours of each other; the instances that geniunely were separated by six years involve an unwilling organ donar and their recepient, with forensics happening to sample DNA from the same person's organs each time.
  • Ryuki appears to be shell-shocked and dangerous due to the events of the Explosion route, becoming an absolute wreck during the six years that separate his route and Mizuki's route. While the guilt of the Explosion ending weighs on him and he's going through mental struggles, half of his route takes place during the present which means that he is still competent enough to help the investigation — Mizuki just happens to keep seeing him at his worst.
  • The Nirvana videos trigger Ryuki in a manner reminiscent of a Manchurian Agent, especially during the Explosion Ending where Tearer expresses confusion that he won't shoot Date. In reality, Ryuki's mental episodes put him in a harmless daze and Tearer expects him to shoot Date because he's holding Tama hostage with the threat of a complete data wipe.
  • Tokiko Shigure, the leader of Naix, pops up a couple of times after her death suggesting some mysterious means of reviving. In truth, almost every scene involving Tokiko takes place in the past, with her death occurring in the present.
• In Arc Rise Fantasia, despite his constant attempts to dissuade the party, everybody thinks Rastan is the legendary swordsman Leon, and as everything about his person seems to support this fact, they simply ignore his protests. He's telling the truth. He isn't Leon. Serge is Leon, but he left that name after his sword-hand was crippled by Ignacy.
• Assassin's Creed II:
  • The town of Forli which looks to be important. It has feathers, glyphs, side-missions, the works. Ezio passes through it on his way to Venice, seemingly setting up a Chekhov's Gun. However, before the DLC was released or if you did not get it afterward, Forli turns out to be ultimately inconsequential, as no further non-DLC plot points play out there. With the DLC in hand, this is subverted as it becomes the focus of the 12th memory sequence.
  • In Brotherhood, various hints such as Ezio claiming Mario led him to Cesare in the In Medias Res start, cutting away from showing Mario's death onscreen, not showing a body - contrast with the rest of Ezio's male relatives whose corpses you see - and Machiavelli apparently not knowing how Ezio arrived in Rome suggest that Mario somehow survived. Nope.
• Banjo-Kazooie had a meta example in the form of "The Ridiculously Secret Area 1", a line of text found in the game's code for warp text. As data mining was becoming more mainstream and common for console games, with people peaking into the game's code to find goodies, cheats, Dummied Out content, or hidden developer messages (like the hidden rants in The New Tetris which took only three days to be found and leaked to the internet), this was planted by the developers to send hackers into a frenzy searching for a dummied out level that didn't even exist.
• Baten Kaitos:
  • In the first game, the party loses the sole End Magnus they've managed to keep from The Empire. Savynna proposes the possibility of a spy, but after confirming that nobody would've had the chance to pass it off to The Empire, and after a run-in with Giaccomo, who not only does not deny the claims of somehow stealing the Magnus, but implies he may have, the party comes to the conclusion that there's no spy. There is. It's none other than Kalas, the main character, and he didn't pass it off to The Empire. He passed it off to Melodia, who is manipulating the Emperor into gathering the End Magnus for her. The delivery happened when the party met her at Parnasse and she "tripped" so that Kalas would "catch" her. The reason the player never picks up on this fact is because the player is a spirit watching from another world, thus never see things from Kalas' point of view.
  • In the second game, Baelheit's aggressive promachination campaign earns him the scorn and enmity of the rest of the nations, while being hailed as a hero in The Empire he hails from. Later, after unveiling the man-made machina continent Tarazed to the world after being crowned Emperor, he states that he will destroy the other islands, including the origin of his Empire. This all but assures us he is trying to force the world to submit to him. That's not his goal. He wants to stop people from relying so much on their hearts, forcing them to rely on machina instead, so that they won't grow too powerful, in order to prevent another catastrophic war from occurring, like it did one-thousand years ago, forcing humanity to live in the sky as they do in the present. Thus, he's no tyrant, but a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• At one point in Gilbert Goodmate And The Mushroom Of Phungoria, the main character obtains "the world's smallest juice press". There's no way to use it in the game, and if the player looks at it in the inventory, it disappears, and the protagonist remarks that "it's so small I've just lost it".
• In Bendy and the Ink Machine, Henry Stein returns to an animation studio where he used to work. After he powers up the eponymous ink machine, he is attacked by a living version of the studio's star cartoon, Bendy. In Chapter 2, he learns that the former music director, Sammy Lawrence, has been turned to ink. In Chapter 3, he meets a version of cartoon character Alice Angel, who refers to herself as "Susie" - like one of her former voice actresses. Seemingly, all the cartoon and ink creations running around the studio are formerly human. In this chapter, he can also find a recording of studio owner, Joey Drew's, that implies that Joey is seeking immortality. These and other clues pointed to Bendy being Joey Drew, but Bendy turns out to be the soulless prototype that prompted Joey Drew to use his worker's souls in his attempts to bring his cartoons to life.
• Red Herring are among the creatures described in the documentation that came with the Infocom Interactive Fiction game Beyond Zork. They were also an example of this trope, and never actually appear in the game.
• During BioShock Infinite, Booker and Elizabeth are approached by the Lutece twins to choose a necklace for Elizabeth to wear. One has the emblem of a cage, and other has an emblem of a bird. The players naturally assumes that the choice might determine an important part of the game's story, and possibly even alter what ending the player might see. Turns out it doesn't matter what necklace Booker chose, because it doesn't impact the direction of the story at all, including the ending. Though this is foreshadowing the fact that the Leitmotif of the Songbird are the notes C-A-G-E, so the emblems are not entirely useless. Also, if you pay attention, the necklace gives away the fact that near the end it is no longer "your" Elizabeth that is accompanying you.
• In Broken Age, the protagonists of the game's two seemingly unconnected plotlines both meet characters that are heavily implied to be the other story's protagonist many years in the future. Which one is correct? Neither. The two stories are taking place at the exact same time.
• In Bug Fables, the game tries to make you suspicious of the Big Good of the game, Queen Elizant II. She appears to be a harsh and authoritharian ruler who made several questionable decisions such as banning all ladybugs from the Ant Kingdom and breaking the alliances with the Termite and Wasp Kingdoms, her knight Zaryant is very dismissive of the Team Snakemouth and other exploration teams, she also refuses to state her reasons for searching the immortality-granting Everlasting Sapling, her castle and attire are eerie with the gloomy music playing when you are in her palace, and even the Wasp King, the actual Big Bad of the game, is presented as supposed Red Herring, since the player is led to believe he is fought in the fifth chapter in the seven chapter story. She even has the battle sprite, which would make the player believe she will be the Final Boss. Ultimately, all of it turns out to be a misdirection: at the end, it's revealed that Queen Elizant II is not evil at all, and is actually an insecure and inexperienced queen who struggles with living up to her beloved mother's legacy, with ladybug ban and reignition of old hostilities with other kingdoms also being the results of her inexperience, her reasons for finding the Everlasting Sapling are selfless, since she wants to use it to bring her mother back and reinstall her as a queen, and the Wasp King truly is a villain in the story, and a Final Boss to boot.
• The Case Of The Golden Idol: Right from the start of the game, it starts giving you details that aren't relevant and words that aren't used, so brute-forcing a complicated solution is much harder than it needs to be.
  • In "The Intoxicating Dinner Party", Edmund Cloudsley has three vaguely intimidating letters in his wastebasket: one from a Cult, one from some kind of revolutionary figure, and one from a political rival. If you check the servant's quarters, one will have some cryptic notes, and another will have pamphlets about aristocrats being parasites. Only one of these is relevant to the actual death. Specifically, one of the servants is a member of the cult and is the killer. The butler's revolutionary sympathies never come up. For bonus confusion, while the rank of the cultist who gave the order is accessible from the threatening letter, the other appears in the title of a kids' book a small child is reading, with the only hint being obtainable by deciphering an oddly worded letter in the killer's pocket.
  • Only two of the henchmen listed in "The Explosive Events at the Forest Cabin" ever show up, and the trick is working out which two.
  • In "The Interrupted Weekend at the Doctor's Salon", the middle paragraph of the solution is unrelated to the overall plot. To add further confusion, the butler, who fell asleep for no obvious reason, shows the same pink eyes as another character who had been slipped a drugged drink, making it look like he, too, was drugged deliberately for some reason. Presumably, though, he was knocked out by the fumes from the already-drugged sherry, which incidentally is another word that is added to your list of possible solutions but is not used in the answer - the actual thing the game wants you to work out is that the Lemurian prince slipped a different drug to another guest, in order to secure himself an alibi while he reclaimed a stone seal that rightfully belonged to his tribe from the collection of Lemurian artefacts in the salon.
• The Castles of Doctor Creep includes many a Lock and Key Puzzle, but occasionally a key will turn out to be completely unnecessary. The red key in Alternation is the best example in the game; it looks like you need to collect four keys to finish the game, but the red key leads to a switch that doesn't help you.
• Chicory: A Colorful Tale: While investigating for the Simmering Springs mystery, you encounter a crocodile named Chili who admits he loves stealing things in the same room with a piece of evidence. He clarifies later that while he loves stealing things, he only stole Quince's "squeeze" supply, not the furniture.
• In The ClueFinders 4th Grade Adventures: The Puzzle of the Pyramid, a pupilless cat with a jewelled collar (very unusual, given the modern setting) gets into a fight with the heroes' Evil-Detecting Dog and can constantly be seen watching them from the background. She's firmly on the side of good- Bast sent her to see if the group was worthy of being granted her power. She deliberately goaded Socrates into chasing her so she could lead him to The Mentor's shop.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day:
  • The Windmill. It visibly has paths on higher levels of it that are just out of jumping reach and appears to have a Context-Sensitive Button on top of it. It gets blown up after the War chapter. Conker was sure it was going to be the final level.
  • The Panther King's castle. It's a huge structure visible from several parts of the game, the area leading up to it is a broken bridge with several signs to keep anyone out, yet the final area only takes place in a bank that is a small part of it. Conker never enters the castle itself in actual gameplay.
• CrossCode makes the player believe that Lea, the main character, is actually an amnesiac/comatose Shizuka, the girl that appears in the first few minutes of the game, as not only their appearances are similar, but they also share the same gameplay style, both being Spheromancers and all. As the game goes on, the player is pretty much convinced that both characters are one and the same... until the real Shizuka appears and confronts Lea, revealing that not only Lea is Shizuka's Evotar clone, but the whole coma story was a lie.
• In The Cruise there's a small fish at the very bottom of the diving tank. If you examine it, the text states:
  It is a medium-sized red fish, quite possibly a herring.
• In D2, Kimberly seemed to get infected by the monsters of the game, with several signs pointing to her being infected, the only really clear way to get an idea on whether or not one is infected is to see if there's green blood. She is not infected, as right after Laura, the main character, kills a clone, Kimberly spits out red blood.
• In Dark Souls, in the beginning of the game you pick a gift. One of these gifts say that it don't do anything at all, but that didn't stop people speculating about it, resulting in long articles on the wiki about it. After over a year of teasing by the game's director, he finally admitted it did nothing at all and he just wanted to see what people would do.
• The Dead Mines: At one point the player reaches a collapsed tunnel and remarks that he needs to find a way to bypass it. Lying nearby is a note with a riddle, implying the answer to the riddle might help clear the cave-in. However, the solution turns out to have nothing to do with the riddle.
• Lampshaded in the Infocom game Deadline. The dead man's son George acts very suspiciously. However, if you enter the dining room when he's there, you will witness him eating an entire plate of red herrings. Needless to say, he's innocent of the murder.
• In Deltarune, when the player character Kris and The Bully Susie fall into the Dark World, Susie is nowhere to be seen and Kris changes of appearance, getting a blue-and-purple scarf/cape, blue skin, and armory. There are Let's Players that theorize Kris and Susie fused during their fall, before actually finding her out in an attempt to hide.
• Discworld Noir: Unusually for an adventure game, there are a few false leads, such as the story of the madman Azile, who buried people upside-down, and Malaclypse's gibberish. Mostly.
• Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance: The Big Bad, Void Dark's Overload skill lets him steal other Overloads, which is what he did with Killia's old Overload skill, Alma Ice Sculpture, which has the ability to freeze time around objects. Killia notes that while it's very powerful, it's impractical to use on living beings because it takes too much energy to maintain. Later on, Void Dark finds an Overload that creates magical spears that siphon energy from Netherworlds, where the second half of the story is spent stopping them. So what does he use all this energy on? To power up Majorita's Overload, Broken Faith Magia, so that he can use it to properly resurrect his dead sister, Liezerota.
• Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!
  • Tracker Barrel Trek has a throwable wooden crate in it. These were common in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, but this wooden crate is the only one in the entire game. If you're thinking it serves a special purpose, such as being able to gain access to a secret or marking the location of something, you are wrong: it serves no purpose whatsoever other than being something you can throw at an enemy for a free kill.
  • Swoopy Salvo plays a downright dirty trick on you to con you out of missing a Bonus Barrel. Early on you find a pair of Buzz's quickly circling a single banana, which is practically impossible to get without taking a hit, and all you get is a Bear Coin if you go for it which are outright useless at this point (you'll likely have 99 by now unless you play a lot of Swanky's minigames and really suck at them). Later in the level you encounter the exact same setup, only this time the Buzz's are circling an invisible Bonus Barrel. The only invisible Bonus Barrel in the entire game.
• In Dracula Unleashed, Annisette Bowen's father Arthur is found dead in his bedroom clutching a piece of white cloth. Protagonist Alexander Morris has the opportunity to investigate it, dropping it off with a university professor, who identifies it as being over a century old. Showing it to a member of the Hades Club later has him mention that he buried his wife in a dress of the same fabric. His wife being a "Bloofer Lady", as is now heavily implied, has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the plot.
• Dust: An Elysian Tail: The Amnesiac Hero Dust is heavily implied through the game to be Cassius, the Royal Assassin. They have the same hat, the same silhouette, the same attacks, and soldiers from the army he participated in are investigating him. Then it turns out that the truth us a bit more complicated: Dust is a being made out of the fusion of two souls, one of them was Cassius, meant to give him power, but the other one was Jin, Ginger's brother, meant to give him innocence.
• To make the puzzles in Dweep even harder, the levels often contain "decoy" items or other features meant to lure the player onto a false train of thought.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: Rogue has a ninja-like appearance with black schlera, making him seem like a Smog assassin. This is to hide that he's actually the Vulcuro Kael, who secretly abandoned his mission in Pon Pon Village, only to be captured and forced to work for Zeta again.
• EarthBound (1994) throws one out in the very beginning. Buzz Buzz's prophecy mentions that Ness, two other boys, and a girl will fight to save the world. Ness, Picky, and Pokey (the party at the time) make three boys, to which Pokey says he doesn't want to be a part of anything dangerous.
• Several times in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • Ulfric's ability to use the Thu'um without being a Dragonborn or a Greybeard would be something greater in the plot, right? Nope. It was just something he used to beat High King Torygg in a duel, and when you meet Torygg later in Sovngarde, he doesn't have much of a grudge. It might come up if you side with the Imperials in the civil war and have a shouting duel with Ulfric himself, but that's it.
  • Delphine is convinced that the Thalmor have something to do with the dragons returning. They absolutely don't, they really are as blindsided as everyone else by it, and they only play any role in the main plot when you are trying to track down Esbern, formerly of the Blades.
  • In the "Blood on Ice" quest in Windhelm, a major clue points to the Court Wizard as the culprit for a murder spree against the local women. If you take the clue to a guard rather than directly confront him about it, he is thrown in jail and then later another dead woman is found. After sheepishly confronting him about your mistake, he points out all of the people you have been talking to for clues were lying to you through your teeth and the real culprit turns out to have been the seemingly harmless jewellery appraiser, Calixto Corrium.
• Occurs in the first plotline of Eastern Exorcist in Lu Yun-chuan's campaign, where Lu, one of the four titular exorcists, released a hulijing his brothers were about to execute on account that she's an innocent young girl, only for him to be attacked by an Ape Demon, and two of his three sworn brothers killed, with the last brother an Almost Dead Guy who claims the hulijing he spares ratted them out to the demons. Turns out it's not the case, the last brother is The Mole working for the villains, the hulijing is indeed innocent which Lu doesn't find out until the last cutscene when she performs a Taking the Bullet to save him from the real traitor.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Vincent van Gogh is summoned as a Servant, but is given the infamous Historical Gender Flip treatment. Given that she acts just like her, everyone assumes that she is actually Vincent's sister Wilhelmina Jacoba "Wil" van Gogh impersonating him. It later turns out that she is actually the ocean nymph Clytie from Greek Mythology who was given Vincent's memories by the Outer Gods, which nobody saw coming.
  • The sixth Lostbelt presents a huge one. With Morgan le Fay being the Lostbelt King of it and Altria being a country bumpkin trained in magic by Merlin, we are led to believe the Point of Divergence in this Lostbelt is that the King of Knights never actually pulled Caliburn, and thus she never became king. Additionally, we are also led to believe that this Lostbelt got pruned because Morgan made fairies the dominant species instead of humans. Turns out the real Point of Divergence in this Lostbelt happened before either one of those girls were born, and this Lostbelt was actually pruned because there was originally no life (human or fairy) in it at all.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy VII. The illusion of player control on the first disk. Specifically the date mechanics, and Cloud's personality.
  • The hunter-killer in Final Fantasy XII has everyone in Clan Centuro suspect Monid because the killer is a bangaa and he's a bangaa that always disappears from the group whenever a hunt is posted. During the Belto hunt, Monid appears to have turned against you, but it turns out that he was talking to Ba'Gamnan, who appears from behind the party and is overjoyed that Balthier finally showed up. Ba'Gamnan reveals that he is the one who had killed the hunters in order to lure Balthier out so he could kill him. After Ba'Gamnan is defeated, Monid reveals that the hunt you signed up for was a phony hunt set up by Montblanc to lure out the killer. Because everyone had suspected Monid already, he used that opportunity to investigate the killings on his own by Montblanc's request.
  • The "YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse" raid questline from Final Fantasy XIV throws one to players who previously played NieR: Automata: the end boss of the first raid dungeon is 9S, who underwent Sanity Slippage in the later chapters of Automata and is shown trying to kill 2P, the apparent heroine of the questline. The player is led to believe that 9S has gone mad by the time they fight him. In the lead-up to the second raid dungeon, however, it is revealed that 2P is actually an evil clone made by the Machine Lifeforms, and 9S is Good All Along in this questline.
• The interactive fiction puzzle Final Selection has several red herring clues, including a Crossword Puzzle clue of "Marxist found in shoals provides a clue of doubtful value" and a hard-to-find and even-harder-to-decode clue in the fireplace that translates to "FOOLISH NO HOPE".
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses
  • All three lord characters display rather concerning behavior in relation to the masked villain calling themselves the Flame Emperor. None of the three are present onscreen whenever the Flame Emperor shows up, Edelgard implies that teaming up with the Flame Emperor might be a good idea, Dimitri is shown having a friendly conversation with one of their accomplices, and Claude shows a fixation on the Sword of the Creator right after the Flame Emperor states that they want more information about it. Dimitri and Claude are innocent; Edelgard is the one behind the mask.
  • The early portion of the game drops several hints of a connection between Byleth and Nemesis, through Byleth bearing the Crest of Flames despite Nemesis having no known descendants and being able to wield the Sword of the Creator just as he did. It later turns out that both of them having the same Crest is largely a coincidence (the Crest of Flames originates from Sothis, Byleth and Nemesis were both artificially implanted with her powers but in very different ways), and there is no link between them at all.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • In Five Nights at Freddy's 4 Plushtrap serves this role. When his image was released it led to speculation that this game would concern the Murderer and would follow Five Nights at Freddy's 3. He turns out to only be in a minigame and the game runs Simultaneous Arcs with Five Nights at Freddy's 2, which chronologically came first in the series.
  • In Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, the first three nights are Tutorial Levels. The first night teaches you to shock the animatronics to get them to go back to their rooms, to crawl through vents, to pay attention to the automated voice messages tied to the vents' motion detection systems and to hide from the other animatronics in Circus Baby's room; the second night teaches you about moving through Ballora's room and manually resetting the Pizzeria's systems and the third night teaches you about getting through Foxy's room and how to fix a broken Freddy animatronic in one of the rooms. After that you won't have to do any of these things again and everything you thought you knew about Five Nights At Freddy's is thrown out the window, especially the stuff about learning and going through repetitive patterns to fend off the animatronics.
• Flight of the Amazon Queen has a gorilla that you need to bypass. There's a banana in a nearby area, but using it on the gorilla does nothing. Instead, you need to talk to it to make it leave the path.
• The Godfather: The Game subverts The Law of Conservation of Detail. There are various places that appear different on the map, many a locked door... Quite a few of those aren't of any consequence whatsoever, even in sidequests.
• In God of War: Chains of Olympus, it's assumed that Morpheus is responsible for capturing Helios, leaving the whole world vulnerable to his power. Nope, Persephone did it.
• God of War (2018): The plot kicks off when a Mysterious Stranger arrives at Kratos' cabin, attacking him for unclear reasons. While a Driving Question for the plot is what he wants with them, especially after you learn that he's Baldur, son of Odin, his dialogue in that first encounter is deliberately written to imply that he somehow knows who Kratos is and wants him for something related to his past in Greece. It actually turns out to be a case of Mistaken Identity; Baldur was looking for the last Frost Giant - Kratos' late wife Faye, though neither knew that - and assumed Kratos was who he was looking for, and had no idea he was chasing the infamous "Ghost of Sparta" but with what you learn about the Giants, the dialogue still fits.
• In Guru Logi Champ, the pictures you reveal sometimes look nothing like what their preview implied.
• In Heavy Rain, one of the protagonists, Ethan Mars, keeps blacking out for long periods of time, coming to in the middle of a plot-important street, holding origami figures in his hand, and having visions of drowning bodies, which is exactly the Origami killer's MO. When it turns out he's not the Origami Killer, it is never explained.
• In the Henry Stickmin Series, in Completing the Mission's GSPI/IRO route, a literal red herring appears as an option in one of the choices. As of its relation to the actual trope, it's a subversion, as choosing it is the correct option and allows you to advance further.
• Being a murder mystery game, The Hex has some of these.
  • Various characters are unnerved by a splotch of red on Bryce's bed. It turns out that it's strawberry juice from a pie he had baked earlier.
  • Chandelle keeps a giant sword mounted in her room, and there's a strange letter on her bed talking about a ritual. The giant sword is a memento of Lazarus, and the letter details a deal to exorcise a demon inside of her.
  • Lazarus' face is on a "Wanted!" Poster in the kitchen, and he kills Irving at the start of his chapter, and at the end of it the bartender claims that it's the end of the murder mystery. If the player chooses to keep playing, the bartender agrees that it is not the end and that wasn't the real murder the player was warned about.
  • The Super Weasel Kid segment suggests the shifty and grumpy Mr. Squarrel killed Mr. Shrewd. Getting Mr. Shrewd's glasses (via a slightly complicated three-step process) reveals Mr. Shrewd just died of old age, and this sent Mr. Squarrel into a depression because he was his lover.
  • The other characters believe Rust to be a shifty character given his nervous stutter and the knife strapped to his chest. He's the most innocent out of everyone.
• In Ignac, you have to find a way to open the bathroom, and there's a yellow key in your drawer, but it doesn't fit. Also, once you open the bathroom, inside you can pick up a sponge, a toothbrush, and a toothpaste, neither of which are needed to complete the game.
• In I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, in Gorrester's storyline you have the option to electrocute a bunch of animals in cages to death in order to get a key. However, it turns out that the key is a red herring.
• Ib:
  • There's a multi-coloured skeleton sculpture entitled "Puzzle". It does nothing and plays no role of importance. It is, however, a Shout-Out to fellow Game Maker dev Clysm, developer of Seiklus, where said skeleton comes from.
  • A dialogue option only available if you haven't done anything to anger Mary yet suggests the possibility that both Garry and Mary could survive at Ib's expense. However, this is impossible - one of the two dies no matter what the player does. A Game Mod exists that does give the player the option to save them both at the cost of Ib's life, but it has been left in a state of Keep Circulating the Tapes.
• Investi-Gator: The Case of the Big Crime: Played with. At first it seems like Investi-Gator is going to accuse Insti-Gator of the crime in the first episode... but he's actually pointing at a literal red herring that walks into the room. The red herring, simply named Red Herring, confesses to the crime. But Red Herring reappears in episode 2, having made a Heel–Face Turn, and becomes an ally to Investi-Gator.
• Quite literally in the Game Boy game James Bond 007. There is a man in a market place who offers to help you in exchange for a "small rouge fish." Alas, the fish is nowhere to be found.
• Killer is Dead:
  • Shortly into the game, we meet a woman named Moon River who Mondo swears he knows from somewhere, even having flashbacks to his childhood, where they were friends, along with having a pet unicorn. It turns out that no, they never knew each other, but the man she asks him to kill did, and is indeed Mondo's brother.
  • The man who you control in the first chapter seems to be Mondo but it's actually David, the man who asks you to save the world from aliens is actually an alien himself and so on.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, masked character DiZ has the same unique skin tone and eye color as series villain Ansem, the same interest in manipulating anti-hero Riku, admits to using a pseudonym, and in dialogue is heavily hinted to be Ansem himself. The twist? DiZ is Ansem, while the villain we knew as Ansem isn't. Played straight in that all the clues pointed towards DiZ being a villain, when he's actually the most useful member of the protagonists' side (although he's not very nice).
  • In Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days the mysterious fourteenth member of Organization XIII, Xion, resembles a black-haired Kairi. Nomura has said that this was to throw people off her actual origin: an Opposite-Sex Clone of Sora.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep seems to indicate that Tetsuya Nomura's fond of this one. The Big Bad of the game has a mysterious apprentice named Vanitas. Vanitas (apparently) wants to be a deadly rival to Ventus. He's the apprentice of Master Xehanort, like Riku was mentored by Xehanort in Kingdom Hearts. Vanitas even has armor that's very similar to Riku's. Who is it? Ventus's Enemy Without, who looks just like Sora underneath the helmet. Didn't see that coming.
• In Super Kirby Clash, Team Kirby's investigation of Parallel Nightmare's whereabouts leads them to the Empyrean, where they encounter who they believe is Parallel Nightmare... only to reveal it to be Taranza.
• In the ZX Spectrum game Kosmos you can buy a "yellow kipper" item from one of the merchants. When you use it, you get a message: "Yes! It's really a red herring."
• L.A. Noire: At the end of one case, Phelps has two highly possible suspects for a set of murders with plenty of evidence going against them. No matter who he puts away, it is later discovered that the evidence was planted and neither of the two were at fault.
• Lands of Lore has two notes in Urbish Mines that read "Piscata Rosea 4 4 5." Likewise, in the first Legend of Kyrandia (also made by Westwood Studios) you can find a "Piscata Rosea" item near the end.
• A stock feature of the MacVenture series — Uninvited, Déjà Vu (1985) and Shadowgate — is that a lot of the items in the settings are just there to waste your time or clutter your inventory. Taking it a step further, in Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers, you can occasionally find coins on the ground, and there just so happens to be a shop inside the castle. Every single thing for sale is useless in Del Cottonwood's quest. That's not to say the shop has nothing useful, but you won't be buying it with just a coin.
• Maniac Mansion has plenty. The staircase that's out of order, the chainsaw without fuel, the hamster in the microwave...
• In Mass Effect the trailers, the prequel novel and the early gameplay imply that the Big Bad Saren is motivated by his racist hatred towards humans. As it turns out, this character trait is purely coincidental to his actual plans. In reality, he's been brainwashed by the true Big Bad, who is an Omnicidal Maniac.
  • Mass Effect has tons of this, due to massive amounts of All There in the Manual that have nothing at all to do with the gameplay. One example that does get into the gameplay is the Asari Consort. She's hyped as a major player in Citadel intrigues, implied to have psychic powers beyond the usual Asari abilities, and is suggested to be something like an oracle. But after running a pair of optional sidequests for her, she never appears again- the door leading to her room is even permanently locked. An even bigger example is the Prothean trinket she gives you for no clearly stated reason. It does have a use- if you can find where to use it- but all it does is unlock another interesting-but-irrelevant piece of backstory. That, and an enormous sum of experience points.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater:
  • It's implied that Ocelot knows Tatyana (actually EVA) is a double agent due to her wearing the same perfume during an earlier encounter he had with her (while the latter was disguised). It's later revealed when he blows her cover that the perfume had nothing to do with his suspicions, it's that she stank of gasoline from the motorcycle she rides around on.
  • It's also used in how Snake loses his right eye, being Big Boss. He gets captured by Volgin and as a test of The Boss' loyalty, he demands she cut out his eyes with a knife. A squeamish scene, but not for players who know their Metal Gear lore and are paying attention: Big Boss is missing his right eye, but Boss goes to cut out his left first. Predictably, she's stopped by Tatyana before she can go through with it and Snake actually loses his eye minutes later when Ocelot is doing his Russian roulette game on Tatyana and he sees the bullet in the chamber of the next gun; knowing that EVA will die if he pulls the trigger, he jumps in the way and knocks Ocelot off but the gun goes off right in his eye and blasts it out.
• Metroid:
  • In Metroid, there exists a look alike of Kraid that dies in one hit, though to find it, you have to go pretty far off course so most players do not see it.
  • In Metroid Prime, there is one, and only one, item in the whole game that can be scanned, but doesn't have any other purpose. It's made worse when the description says "An ornate wall hanging with a highly reflective surface. It does not appear important." This caused many players to waste untold time and return trips refusing to accept that it's truly unimportant.
• In The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, in one early-game text conversation between J.J. and her professor, the player learns that she's been designing prosthetic limbs in her product design class. This initially seems like it's related to the fact that, in the world the game takes place in, J.J. has the power to dismember herself to to proceed. However, this detail ends up being purely coincidental.
• Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle: It's revealed that Bowser Jr was the one sending Beep-0 messages of awakening "Tom Phan". He did so by hacking into his email, tricking him, Mario and the others.
• The point-and-click adventure Morningstar featured a literal Red Herring. It's optional to pick up, but once you do there's no way to get rid of it.
• Mortal Kombat loves doing this to mess with fans, even to the extent of putting them in ways that can only be accessed through hacking or datamining. As such, it's sometimes difficult to know what's this and what's simply real remnants of cut content.
  • After fans noticed a (non-functional) counter in the first game's audit menu labelled "Ermacs" and thought it was referring to a hidden character in the game (it actually stood for Error Macros, i.e. how often the game had crashed) the developers decided to throw fuel onto the fire in Mortal Kombat II by adding "Shawn Attacks" and "Kano Transformation" counters, neither of whom were playable characters. (Kano was a playable character in MK1, but only appeared as a background cameo in 2. Shawn was the name of Ed Boon's cousin.) Mortal Kombat 3 then had a "Johnny Cage Transformations" audit, a character who was canonically dead in this game. Then Ermac became a playable character for real in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for good measure.
  • Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 had one character, a purple ninja named Rain, only appear in the game's Attract Mode. He did show up as a playable character in the home ports, though. There is also a text string stating "Hyper Fatality !!" in addition to "Johnny Cage Loses Big Time !!", and "Boon Wins" and "Tobias Wins" text. (Ed Boon and John Tobias being the co-creators of the series.)
  • Mortal Kombat: Deception has a Konquest game mode that sets up the story behind Onaga's return. The game throws a couple of red herrings and- as the game's name suggestions- deceptions your way, but the most interesting one is the shuriken. Early on it's possible to find a shuriken. In normal play, it doesn't seem to do anything, which led to a lot of fan debate and theory for many years. Further inspection has revealed, however, that it actually does absolutely nothing at all. Whether its purpose was merely Dummied Out or it was thrown in there to mess with the fans is entirely down to your personal viewpoint.
  • Mortal Kombat 9 had a placeholder character (named "DLC Basemale") that, when selected, had the announcer shout "Fujin!". Mortal Kombat X also had a fatality that happened to show a fake social media feed - one of the possible comments was by Ed Boon and asked "Has anyone unlocked Fujin yet?". He appeared for real as a character in Mortal Kombat 11's Aftermath expansion.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 attempts to convince you that the tattooed man who keeps appearing in cutscenes is the Big Bad. Turns out, he's not even The Dragon; he's actually a Well-Intentioned Extremist working against the Big Bad, and eventually joins the party. Unfortunately the intro cinematic spoils this by showing the two fighting.
• Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch has one early quest where you are required to find the king's pet Red Herring in order to meet His Majesty, and this very quest sometimes causes players to not take this literally, which results in a hilarious moment where they briefly get lost looking for a metaphorical Red Herring.
  • For extra hilarity: the quest marker shows where they need to go. Yes, they get lost looking for the Red Herring while the game tells them where to look for it.
• Outer Wilds:
  • The main story is about figuring out why you're stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop that ends with your sun going supernova. Something you might notice, while studying your solar system map, is that the Interloper disappears into the sun late into a loop, so maybe there's something about it that's detonating your star? But when you land on the comet and explore its interior, you'll learn that while it had a volatile core of dangerous "ghost matter" at one point, it has long since detonated (which is what wiped out the Nomai nearly 300,000 years ago). Then, as you research the Nomai's "Ash Twin Project," you'll learn that they needed so much energy to power a 22-minute time loop that they built a Stellar Station to blow up your sun. This paints the Sun Station as the Very Definite Final Dungeon, but when you finally reach it, all it has for you are Wham Lines in its logs. The Nomai fired the Sun Station to no effect, and they couldn't figure out how to make it work before the comet killed them. Your sun is going nova because it's at the end of its natural lifespan, and there is nothing you can do to save it.
  • The Echoes of the Eye DLC concerns a mysterious alien vault that's been sealed away inside a ringworld, with three codes needed to access the controls to open it. The codes have been burnt in the real world, but copies of them were taken into the aliens' VR simulation, so it looks like you'll just have to track them down in there. Unfortunately, you soon find that the aliens were one step ahead of you and deleted the digital copies of the codes as well... but in those same data vaults are bug reports showing glitches you can exploit to sequence-break the simulation and gain access to the vault controls without the codes.
• Many puzzles in the Professor Layton games give misleading or irrelevant information in the instructions.
  • In The Curious Village, Puzzle No. 8 says that a land is split in two, and two boys, Alfred and Roland, are going to work on one half each. Then it points out that Roland takes longer to plow but sows faster than Alfred, and finally asks how much money does Roland deserve. The fact that one finishes the work faster is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is that each boy works half the land, so they are paid the same amount.
  • The Diabolical Box:
    • Puzzle No. 117 features a photograph of three men and their wives. Two of the women are sisters and your task is to determine who's married to the third woman. The answer is straightforward based on the instructions' statements, so the puzzle adds a couple of irrelevant facts like "No man is behind his own wife in this photo" and "The woman who's not a sister to any of the other is in front of the man who's married to the older sister" to possibly make you think it's necessary to find out everyone's identity, but you don't need to do that at all. In fact, the women could be out of the photo and it wouldn't make a difference in terms of resolution.
    • Puzzle No. 93 has you figuring out a little girl's age based on four pieces of information comparing the ages of her parents, her older sister, and herself. However, only two of these are useful; the rest are pointless. It's one of those mathematical problems with two equations and two unknown quantities ("My sister is twice my age" and "In five years, I'll be my sister's age").
  • In The Unwound/Lost Future, Puzzle No. 70 features 10 siblings. Luke is (let's imagine) the eighth of them, and then the wording rambles about the order in which some of the siblings were born and their gender. At the end, the question is: is the third-to-last sibling male or female? The answer is male because we assumed that Luke was the eighth. The rest of the information is pointless.
  • Invoked in Professor Layton and the Last Specter. Luke, having locked himself in the room, issues a test for Layton, to do something he can hear from inside his room in order to gain entry. Around Luke's door, various items have the numbers 1 to 7 on them. The solution is to do nothing; Luke says he deliberately set up the puzzle to test Layton.
  • A lot of the puzzles in Layton's Mystery Journey make use of this. A few particular examples:
    • Puzzle No. 78 involves the player seemingly needing to work out how much ice is needed to keep a dead fish fresh. However basically the entire question is irrelevant, and the actual solution is to just not kill the fish in the first place.
    • Puzzle No. 134 tells the player a little bit of information about pH measurements, and asks them what pH 0+0 indicates. The question is actually just asking "what does pH 0+0 look like", the answer to which is "photo". Everything else is just to throw you off.
    • Puzzle No. 168 displays cars at a starting line of a race. Most of the cars have letters on them, but there's one car between cars "S" and "A" with a question mark on it. The question asks you to look at the starting area and work out what letter goes between "S" and "A". The cars are a complete red herring, the relevant part is the "START" printed on the starting line, making the answer "T".
• Progressbar 95: Directories you find in ProgressDOS may be empty, for the purposes of wasting time when you search and think you'd find something in "C:/FILES/FOLDER/" for instance.
• In Quack Shot, Donald Duck travels the world in search of a legendary hidden treasure, fighting Pete and his goons along the way. When Donald finally reaches the treasure, he's incredibly dismayed that the treasure is actually a boring statue of a princess. Seeing as Donald is the Butt-Monkey and The Chew Toy, this would have been in line with his character, despite the player's anguish. However, the game throws in one curve ball at the end: Huey, Dewey and Louie drop the statue, revealing a priceless necklace inside, making Donald's adventure worthwhile.
• In the Resident Evil remake for the Nintendo GameCube, there is one in the form of a videotape. At the beginning of the game, Chris or Jill is told to investigate the gunshots they heard after they entered the mansion. This leads to one of the characters first zombie encounter. After dealing with the Zombie, a S.T.A.R.S victim named Kenneth has a videotape you can collect to view later. One might think this is an important clue. Turns out the videotape doesn't come up again until the last area of the game. And if Chris or Jill decide to watch the tape, all they'll see is Kenneth getting attacked and killed by that same zombie in first person view. In other words, the tape has nothing to do with the many task needed to beat the game, or alter any of the endings. In fact, it's easy to miss the area where the tape can be viewed.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn:
  • Quite a few of the choices for possible fates don't actually happen to anyone, which makes it harder to simply randomly guess a cause of death. This is also true of the possible culprits, as there is no "foreign enemy"—every death is down to an accident, illness, the sea-dwellers (all "beasts"), or members of the crew.
  • There is one seemingly obvious assumption that trips up a lot of players. The dying Bosun asks about his "Frenchman" and is told that he was "torn apart" by the kraken. You've already seen a scene with a crewman being torn in half, front and center, so there's his identity solved, right? Turns out, this is not the Bosun's mate, neither is he French. The actual Bosun's mate is a few meters away, last seen fighting a tentacle of the kraken, right next to his Bosun. His death happens offscreen and his identity is not marked as solvable until much later in the game; you're meant to deduce who he is from the fact he's always seen near the Bosun^note or, if you already know your naval history, the fact that he's the only one wearing a ''marinière'', or French sailor's shirt..
• Riven: The Sequel to Myst:
  • The Fire Marble Puzzle has 6 fire marbles. You only use 5 of them to solve it. This should not constitute a spoiler, or even a surprise; the numerological motif of "five" is everywhere in the game.
  • A developer anecdote mentions that a book press was removed from the Crater Island portion of the game because playtesters kept gravitating towards it because they could not figure out what its puzzle was. The press had only been included to complete the image of the book creation process, and was not part of any puzzle. The developers removed it to avoid unnecessary player confusion.
• A quest in Runescape gives you a literal red herring which is actually used in a very intricate puzzle. You have to cook it so that the colouring comes off and it is in fact this red substance that is pertinent to the solution. Certain other quest puzzles in the game can provide you with items are that are undeeded.
• Sacred Earth - Alternative: The flashbacks indicate that Konoe's party opposed her sister, Kagura. This makes it seem like Kagura is the Big Bad of the game, but it actually turns out to be the original Konoe, who seeks to destroy the world to bring her family back.
• Sam & Max: Freelance Police:
  • Girl Stinky in season two talks in a suspicious or guilty manner every other sentence, and Max blames her for any number of things. In that season, she deliberately does nothing worse than be really sarcastic and a terrible cook. Things change in season 3, though.
  • In particular, a running thread through Season 2 was what happened to Grandpa Stinky. Girl Stinky first said he went on a vacation, which grew more and more grandiose in each episode. Both Sam and Max blatantly accuse her of killing him at various points. Then the season finale rolls around, and she was telling the truth. Stinky was on an expedition... but Sam and Max erased a super-powerful adhesive from existence, thus causing an accident that killed him.
  • She remains a Red Herring in Season 3, where she doesn't actually do anything other than conspire in secret. Though there's circumstantial evidence she attempted at least one murder, on Flint, in this series you can expect the real culprit to show up next Season.
  • In Episode 4, Sam has to convince Flint Paper she's a red herring so he can tail her by telephone, discovering... absolutely nothing. Even when involved with the dogglegangers, she was under Mind Control.
• The bizarre point & click game Sanitarium featured several bogus clues, all involving literal red herrings: An empty shed with a red fish painted on the roof (your character even remarks on how certain he was that there'd be something important inside), a mental patient holding a large red fish who reacts to an incorrect puzzle solution, and finally a ruby-studded fish artifact that does nothing but take up an inventory slot. A developer explained, "Straka's one complaint about our design was that we didn't have any 'Red Herrings' in the game, so we literally decided to add them." There was originally supposed to be one in the shed, as well.
• The Secret of Monkey Island:
  • A Red Herring is actually a solution to a puzzle: In the game there's a troll guarding a bridge, who demands "something that will draw interest but have no real use" so that Guybrush may pass the bridge. The solution? Feed him a literal red herring. The puzzle's actual red herring is the description that leaves our hero to look for a figurative red herring. It's so meta it runs into itself coming the other way.
  • One puzzle has Guybrush tied to a tiki idol and thrown into the water. There are several sharp items near him, but are just out of reach, making him think that the puzzle involves finding a way to reach one of them. He can pick up the tiki idol and leave the water.
  • Episode 2 of Tales of Monkey Island references the Red Herring. Part of the solution of obtaining the Red Herring was to scare the seagull away. Here Guybrush had to somehow lure the seagull away from his cut off poxed hand, by cutting loose a barrel full of fish on the mast. When the seagull gets to the barrel, he pulls out the aforementioned Red Herring.
  • Guybrush can obtain fish egg bait, which he can use on a certain spot to fish. Turns out that not only is the fish egg bait itself a Red Herring, using the fish egg bait on the Fishing Well actually results in pulling out a Red Herring, only for it to slip out of his hands.
• The RPG Maker 2000 game Sensible Erection featured a Fetch Quest involving rugs with various colors of fish on them. Guess what the last one was.
• Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments has one in the last case. The murder took place in an alley that bends at a right angle, and it involved an illusionary light show with a disappearing culprit. There happens to be a mirror angled curiously at the crime scene from one exit of the alley (Sherlock makes note of it), and there is a flower shop owner nearby. Neither the mirror nor the florist ever come under suspicion.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Persona 2 has one of the series most dangerous schemers at the forefront, so of course Red Herrings are all over the place:
    • At first we are told of the dangers of the Crystal Skulls, how they drain the energy of it's victims and will be used to raise the spaceship Xibalba. Except, they where never anything more than pretty trinkets. The real danger was the rumors with the skulls only serving as a distraction.
    • Throughout the game you are faced with Maya Okamura, the woman who is said to be the Maia maiden who will be sacrificed to bring about the end of the world during the grand cross. The cruel twist is however that it is Maya Amano who is the supposed Maia maiden while Okamura is the key pawn to make her death happen.
    • The Nazis, as bad as they can be while being run by Hitler who supposedly survived the end of the war, having hid in Antarctica this entire time. The Big Bad right? Nope, just another diversion. The true purpose of the rumors summoning them was due to how interlocked they had become with the myth of the Spear of Longinus which would provide a weapon that could ensure that the end of the world would not be preventable.
  • Persona 4:
    • The Investigation Team goes through several of these while considering potential victims; all women (proven untrue when Kanji is taken), all connected to the initial murder (coincidence, as proven when Rise is taken), and all appeared on the midnight channel beforehand (correlation, not causation- although it's a plot point that Namatame made the same mistake in regard to the two deaths and then started throwing people who appeared on the Midnight Channel into the TV), and all appearing on TV. Turns out, the first victim was killed by accident, and while the second victim did find the body (which resulted in her appearance on TV), the killer just used that as a pretext to lure her into a trap.
    • Every time you prevent a murder, it cuts to a mysterious figure in the fog who keeps saying "again," or some variants thereof angrily; it's got to be the murderer angry that his killings have been stopped right? It's actually Namatame, glad to see that he's "saved" another person. Although he actually is the person responsible for the person you just saved being thrown into the TV, but he has no idea he's endangering them and had nothing to do with the initial two deaths.
    • The party thinks they've caught the killer by catching Mitsuo Kubo... but he's Jack the Ripoff. He hit on Yukiko near the start of the game (admittedly, so did most of the boys at school) and got angry when he rejected her, tried talking to Rise but was ignored and expressed disdain for biker gangs(Kanji was mistakenly assumed to be part of one). As such, when he appeared on the Midnight Channel and claimed responsibility for the killings, the Investigation Team remembered him and concluded he was responsible. In actuality, he only killed Kinshiro "King Moron" Morooka in a copycat murder, and the killer pushed him into the TV in order to prevent the police from deciding him the suspect, which would likely result in Namatame no longer kidnapping people to "save" them.
    • When it's time to figure out the true identity of the killer, it's noted that Ryotaro Dojima objectively fits all of the major points for the killer's profile (he had contact with Mayumi Yamano and Saki Konishi as a police detective, he would not have been considered suspicious at the scenes of the crimes, and he could have monitored and threatened the protagonist in his own home without raising suspicion)... but it's pointed out that he nearly died pursuing Namatame, and would never harm his own daughter.
  • Persona 5: That coming disaster the Butterfly of Death and Rebirth that keeps showing up at random intervals is talking about has to be The Mole and The Conspiracy that have been threaded throughout the story coming to kill you and your party, right? Wrong, they're actually talking about the Big Good being impersonated by the game's real Big Bad, who has been playing you and the villains from the opening of the game, and is planning to start eating reality after you're done dealing with The Conspiracy for it.
    • There are a few of these in relation to the casino heist that opens the game, which ends with the protagonist getting caught by the police due to the actions of a traitor within the Phantom Thieves. The identity of said traitor is Akechi, but the game briefly attempts to throw suspicion on Makoto instead - her sister is the target of the heist, and Makoto is clearly hesitant about stealing her heart. The bigger herring is actually the framing device itself. Not only did the Phantoms know Akechi planned to betray them from basically day one, but Joker's arrest and interrogation were all part of a plan to get Makoto's sister on their side (they don't steal her heart at all) and fake his death to throw Akechi and the conspiracy off their trail.
    • Then there's Morgana. Despite his insistence that he was originally human, throughout the game he has recurring nightmares of himself spawning from a pool of darkness in Mementos (and early on, he even briefly ponders - then dismisses - the possibility that he used to be 'a bad guy'). So the average player, especially one coming from Persona 4, would likely assume he's a friendly Shadow like Teddie, right? Nope. Morgana did technically come from Mementos, but only because it's where his creator, Igor (the REAL Igor), was imprisoned at the time. Meaning, if anything, he's more like an honorary Velvet Room attendant.
    • In the Royal re-release, we have Kasumi Yoshizawa. She literally turns this trope up to eleven.
    • Firstly, there's her identity itself, as she turns out to unknowingly be Kasumi's younger sister Sumire Yoshizawa. Kasumi's identity overwrote Sumire's after some cognitive therapy, courtesy of the school counselor Dr. Maruki.
    • There is a very unnatural emphasis of her opposing stance with the Phantom Thieves, because she agrees that they were ultimately good, but people might become over-reliant on them. This can very easily lead you into believing that she might oppose the Thieves like Akechi. She doesn't, she's a very loyal ally from start to end and that was merely brought out once when you hang out with her and Akechi in a cafe. Furthermore once she is exposed as Sumire, it turns out that she entrusted Dr. Maruki to cope with her crippling Survivor Guilt by turning into a copy of Kasumi, and it's implied that this was Kasumi's mindset. In a seeming turn of Irony, even the real Kasumi doesn't follow this to Sumire; She helped Sumire throughout most of her life and manifested an inferiority complex on her which led to Sumire nearly being ran over by traffic when she tried to run away from Kasumi and not seeing incoming traffic, and in a seemingly ironic fashion, that was Kasumi's very own demise.
    • On the second day of the game, Sojiro talks about a 15-year old girl who died from a traffic accident a month before you arrived during the mental shutdown-induced traffic jam; Kasumi is 15 years old when the game's events began. You may think that Kasumi is the ghost of a girl who died in the Mental Shutdown cases; in reality, although the real Kasumi was the victim of that accident, it had nothing to do with the mental shutdowns and the Kasumi you meet isn't a ghost.
    • Kasumi also talks about her overprotective father who directed the talk show where Akechi was often interviewed. That talk show belongs to the TV Station President who is defintely a loyal crony of Shido; You might think that he's evil. He's not and he's actually a really competent parent.
• Whilst searching the Lab Equipment Room in Silent Hill, Harry can examine a bottle of distilled water and a bottle of glucose. Normally he'll only comment on things that have some sort of relevance, otherwise he merely says something generic like, "The shelf is full of chemicals." Players caught on to the fact that he specifically points out what the bottles are filled with, leading many people to assume they could be collected and used at some point in the game. Apart from a bogus Urban Legend of Zelda, the items turned out be useless.
• Singularity has an interesting example; the Red Herring is on account of Nolan North. His distinctly recognizable voice is lent to Devlin, the protagonist's Red Shirt squaddie. Because the game is about time travel, you either assume the familiar sounding but shadowed man who yells one line in the same voice is Devlin on account of an alternate timeline bringing him there, or you pass it off as a voice actor being recycled, as happens in many games. It's actually North being recycled, but the character he's recycled as is the protagonist, from the future.
• Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood: After forming an Enemy Mine team with Sonic, Dr. Eggman mentions that several of the Marauder bases had 'IX' marked in various places. One of Sonic's dialogue responses is 'Ix? As in nine?', to which Eggman muses that the Roman numeral for nine might be significant. Nope. The leader of the Marauders is Imperator Ix. 'Nine' has nothing to do with it.
• In The Spectrum Retreat, one of the logs mentions that Worrall gave the hotel's manager AI full control over the place. Combined with the manager's erratic behaviour, this implies the game is a case of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. As it turns out, nope, stopping you from leaving was what you asked the manager to do.
• In the 8-bit Action-Adventure Spellbound there is an actual red herring which proves quite useful for casting Fumaticus Protectium. The real example is Prism, the author hated the company of that name.
• Spelling Jungle: Some levels include extra letters or other items to try and throw the player off track.
• In Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, one mission has you infiltrating a bathhouse in Japan to witness a deal between one of the antagonists and an unknown party. The owner of the bathhouse is said to have ties to a crime syndicate called the Red Nishin. If you interrogate a particular civilian, you ask him what that name even means. The civilian describes a kind of fish which Sam identifies as a herring. Needless to say, the syndicate had nothing to do with the deal.
• Stray Souls: Dollhouse Story: The protagonist is the wife of a Distressed Dude, and she drives after him. She crashes in a weird town full of dolls plagued by a serial killer... the killer's gonna have a doll theme, and the protagonist will have an epic showdown with The Starscream, right? Wrong. The killer is the evil half of the Distressed Dude, who has a Literal Split Personality.
• The various Telltale Games, especially the The Walking Dead series, adds prompts such as "Gabe will remember that" or "Your relationship with Steve" has changed" even for the most minor of characters. Even characters so minor they're not coded at all with relationship values. This way there's no Interface Spoiling and you have no idea who is merely a Sacrificial Lamb or Lion doomed to die, and who's going to be around for a while.
• In The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge, you have to feed the cat Squiggles a literal red herring to gain access to the bathroom.
• There's a mole in the party of Tales of Berseria, and two red herrings. Magilou is set up as one due to her selling out Velvet early on in order to avoid getting interrogated herself, but she has no real motivation to explicitly betray anyone. Then it's Eleanor, given her orders from Artorius to backstab the party and return Laphicet to the Exorcists; however, she ultimately turns her back on the Exorcists for good, passing up several opportunities to turn over Laphicet. The real mole is Magilou's malak, Bienfu. Melchior placed him under a Geas to relay information on the party to him. Magilou eventually catches onto it and removes the geas, and ultimately he and Magilou remain with the party.
• The Talos Principle: Several puzzles contain elements or architecture that aren't useful to the solution and are just there to mislead. However, some elements are also there in order to reach a star.
• In The Touryst, one of the possible NPCs you can photograph for Stèphane's Fetch Quest is the DJ on Ybiza island, who seems like a good candidate for one of the clue phrases in that quest. The camera even identifies him the same way that it does the other NPCs needed for the quest. Too bad the DJ doesn't count for that clue phrase...or any of the others. He's just there for the sake of a different quest entirely.
• In Ugly, you play as an ugly man wearing a blue outfit. During the game, you can find secret crayon images apparently showing the story of an ugly kid in blue being abused by his own father, who is conventionally beautiful and wears a red coat. These images are explicitly called "memories" by the achievements. The story they tell is true, but there's an important piece of information that the game omits to tell you until the end: you are playing as the father, not the son. The main clue is that the father is present in all the memories (at one point he's hidden behind a Portrait Painting Peephole), but the son is excluded in some of them. The reason why the playable character is ugly is because he was eventually burned in a fire, and the blue clothes he wears are the same ones he used to wear underneath the red coat.
• An Ultima game for the original Game Boy pulls this off rather cleverly — one dungeon has an optional room marked with the words 'Lair of the Scarlet Fish'. Its contents: a Wand of Fireballs that is impossible to actually get.
• Uncle Albert's Magical Album has three jewels representing constellations, but only one is useful.
• Undertale:
  • The soundtrack has a track called "Song That Might Play When You Fight Sans", a Mega Man X-styled remix of Sans's theme "sans.". It is never used at any point in the game — the use of "Might" in the title was very deliberate. Sans' actual battle theme is Megalovania.
  • The game drops several hints that the correct way to spare the first boss is to wear down her HP until she gives in. If you actually try this, you'll end up accidentally killing them. Afterwards, you are nudged into Save Scumming, and the game starts dropping hints to the actual correct solution. All of this is meant to lead into a Wham Line that Flowey has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory and knows what you did, which would only make sense if you took that particular sequence of actions, without resorting to railroading you and then blaming you for "choices" that weren't actually yours.
  • One enemy, Doggo, has light blue attacks (instead of white ones) which are unavoidable - but they will not hurt you if you aren't moving. Shortly after this, Sans tells you that his brother Papyrus has a very special attack, and that you can avoid blue attacks by not moving. Sure enough, when you fight Papyrus, he eventually tells you to prepare for his fabled blue attack, before attacking you with a flurry of bones that deal no damage if you stop moving - but that wasn't Papyrus's Blue Attack. The players heart then turns blue, and falls to the bottom of the attack box, suddenly affected by gravity and far more vulnerable to attacks. If you were paying close attention when Sans mentioned the "blue attack" before, you'll have noticed the text was in a different shade of blue to the "don't move" blue attacks, though what that means is only obvious in hindsight.
  • The player character's identity. It turns out that the character you're naming at the beginning of the game isn't the one you control (the True Pacifist ending reveals that their name is Frisk); you were naming the fallen human, the first child who fell down Mt. Ebott and kicked off the plot. The opening cutscene is in sepia because it happened a long time ago (you even find an old calendar from the same year in Toriel's house; the player might assume it's just old because this is months later, not years), the Game Over text is from their deathbed, and the coffin with the red heart on it outside Asgore's throne room isn't empty because it's waiting for you, but because Toriel removed the child's body to bury it in the Ruins.
• In Valkyria Chronicles, Welkin's interest in natural science tends to be directly and non-directly useful throughout the course of the war. However at one point while exploring some Valkyrian ruins, he says the shape of the structure looks familiar to him for a large portion of the scene before determining that it reminds him of the spiral shell of a type of marine cephalopod, then wondering if there might be a connection due to the resemblance. This observation has no baring on the plot and is quickly dismissed, but it makes for a mildly interesting in-joke: the art director mentions that he didn't base Valkyrian design on any particular culture but instead used a collection of seashells he found as a reference.
  • One mission takes the party to Fouzen, a mining town converted into a concentration camp for Darcsen by occupying Imperial forces. There the party meets Zaka, their inside man for the liberation of the town, and the entire situation the Darcsens are in, along with a speech by Zaka, seriously tests Rosie's hatred for Darcsen. At first, it seems like the entire scenario is setting up Zaka as a Sacrificial Lamb, wherein he performs a Heroic Sacrifice helping the Gallian forces to take back Fouzen, and his sacrifice finally shakes Rosie out of her bigotry. Instead, he not only lives through the entire operation, he joins Squad 7 immediately afterwards as a secondary tank operator, while Rosie's bigotry is shaken, but it takes a while longer for her to discard it completely, just in time for Isara, another, far more longstanding Darcsen character with more history with Rosie to get killed instead.
• The fire extinguisher and soda can in the white chamber are actually completely useless—this is lampshaded with the soda can, which when used is described as smelling like fish. There's also the spam e-mail that implies Sarah is a pop singer on the space station. Turns out she's one of the scientists.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: One particularly egregious case in the "Carnal Sins" questline. Geralt is pursuing a serial killer who brutalizes his victims by, amongst other things, burning their eye sockets. Along the way you're introduced to Reverend Nathaniel, a Sinister Minister who inhibits your investigation every chance he gets and generally seems to delight in spreading as much pain and misery as he possibly can. Then near the end of the questline, you find him torturing a Bound and Gagged woman who the killer had proclaimed as his next victim with a hot poker. Incredibly, he's not the killer! Just some random psychopath the real killer tried to frame. And if you kill Nathaniel before Geralt figures this out, the real killer gets away.
• The World Ends with You has several:
  • Kariya assumes that Joshua's overpowered abilities are a product of his being alive and sneaking into the Game, and Joshua runs with it. They actually come from his being the Composer.
  • There are two for Neku's murderer. First, a cutscene shows Joshua apparently shooting Neku, but then an extended version of the scene shows he was actually shooting at Minamimoto, behind Neku. Then it appears that Minamimoto shot Neku. However, the cutscene is later extended a second time, showing that Minamimoto was shooting at Joshua, and it really was Joshua who killed Neku.
  • The game goes to great lengths to lead the player and Neku to believe that Mr. Hanekoma is the Composer, since his alter-ego, CAT, is responsible for designing the player pins and the red pins. However, Joshua is actually the Composer, and Mr. Hanekoma is the Producer.
• In NEO: The World Ends with You, a major mystery of the story is the identity of new protagonist Rindo's online friend Swallow, since the only clue he has is that they're in the U.G. with him, but Tsugumi Matsunae, a member of the Ruinbringers, seems to fit the bill on a few regards. Her Social Network profile hints that she has a connection to Rindo, she turns into a bird Noise during her boss fight(albeit a crane rather than a swallow), and after said boss fight, Swallow stops replying to Rindo. Swallow's real identity is Shoka Sakurane, and the reason she was unable to message Rindo as Swallow was because the Reapers suspended her account after her Heel–Face Turn at the end of the second week(made on the day of Tsugumi's boss fight, solidified the day after).
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3:
  • The main story pulls a meta one for those who played the previous two games. The second game turned out to be a Stealth Sequel to the first, and 3 is a Distant Sequel to both games. The Big Bad of 3 goes by the initial Z and is said to be the one controls the world, which may lead players to believe he's a reincarnation of the first game's evil god Zanza. Z has no connection to Zanza. Moreover, Z isn't even a person, but the living embodiment of the people's anxiety about the future and the desire live in the "endless now" rather than accept the unknown.
  • The prequel expansion Future Redeemed has one involving the identity of the Seventh Founder of the City. The story stars Matthew, who goes on to be known as Founder Vandham, and introduces his companion A, whose existence is never hinted at in the base game. Given the relatively obvious possible reasons for why A's involvement could have been kept out of historical records, you might think they're the mysterious Seventh Founder. They're not; the Seventh Founder is Riku, who presumably chose to stay hidden due to being a Nopon. For that matter, A's name practically begs for the player to assume they're the missing 26th Moebius; they're not, and neither is Alvis's other offshoot, Alpha. The letter is a placeholder reserved for Alvis specifically due to Origin being based on his Core (Ontos), and there was never going to be a Consul A.
• In Yakuza 0, we are eventually lead to believe that Tachibana, Kiryu's new boss, is the man who had abducted and sold Makoto Makimura into slavery in her backstory, since she reveals to Majima that the man in question had a bat tattoo on his arm and the audience later sees that Tachibana has the same tattoo, which would make the player suspicious that his motives for searching for Makoto are much more sinister than he lets on. It's only much later that we learn that the man Makoto has been searching for is really Tachibana's right-hand man Oda, who has the same bat tattoo Tachibana as it was the symbol of their old street gang. Oda had kidnapped her sometime before he had even met Tachibana, who would have been horrified to learn this since his real motive for trying to find her again is that he is actually her long-lost brother.

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