Note: This praxis contains spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line. If you care, then just leave 2 or 3 points and be on your way. But, y'know, I recommend you don't buy Spec Ops: The Line, so spoilers aren't all that important.

It was a weird moment when I realized I'd done this task by accident. I usually think of myself as "setting out" to do tasks, but setting out to surprise yourself smacks of rather missing the point. Moreover, I'd always been rather confused by how to approach this task, since documenting your surprise with a thing is kind of a sucker's game (though, totally awesome jobs at it so far, everyone who's tried). Now, I don't have any hard, multimedia documentation for this, so flag if you will, but I'll make you a deal:

This completion relies heavily on me having beaten Spec Ops: The Line. I'll be able to prove that I've beaten it by knowing how the story goes. As to the rest of it, you'll have to take my word. So, I demonstrate adequate knowledge of the circumstances of the task, and you trust me enough to believe that I'm wall-to-wall on this one.

Alright, so, Spec Ops. The game as it is revolves around a three-man Delta Force squad consisting of operatives Walker, Lugo, and Adams, dispatched to a near-future Dubai ravaged by apocalyptic sandstorms. Their stated goal is to perform some quick recon, check for survivors, and then roll out and let the big guns take over the evacuation. Necessarily, things don't go that way- around the end of the first act, Walker, and by extension, the player, drop a bunch of white phosphorus rounds on some unsuspecting civilians (totally by accident, yo). This unhinges Walker, and over the course of the remainder of the game, he becomes progressively more and more psychotic, blaming everything that's happened on the mysterious Colonel Konrad (formerly in charge of the evacuation) who is holed up in the middle of the city. What follows is a bleak and upsetting downward spiral as Walker fights his way through more and more of Konrad's seemingly limitless supply of grunts, the Damned 33rd.

Regrettably, what could have been a pretty moving and disturbing game is lost under layers of ham-fisted, heavy-handed "WAR IZ BADD" sermonizing that the game never misses a chance to beat you over the head with. I get that war is an atrocity, I completely agree, no matter how necessary or justified. But there are times when a measure of subtlety will get the message across far better than screaming it in my face every minute. Give me a chance to reflect, give me a moment to consider my own actions and let me be the judge. Let me conclude that my own actions are horrific, don't just try to force the conclusion down my throat. It doesn't matter if you're right, the harder you force, the more I am likely to disagree.

The killing joke is that I was completely with the game right up until about the end of the second act. I was even with it after it got preachy on me. But around the start of the third act, where even the loading screen messages were taunting me with jabs like "Do you feel like a hero yet?" and "Can you even remember why you're here?", it was really starting to wear on me. And around then, a funny thing happened. A thought popped, unbidden, into my head.

Konrad is dead. The entire thing is Walker's hallucination.

Brief aside. I'm terrible at picking up plot twists. I can't do it. Every surprise heel-turn and big reveal gets me every time. Fuck's sake, I was surprised when Azariah Kyras turned out to be working for the Chaos gods in Dawn of War II.



(This guy!)

Bottom line, plot twists get me every time. So I was stunned that my subconscious was all of a sudden tossing this prediction at me, since it usually doesn't bother me. The kicker? I was totally right.

At the end of the game, you find Konrad, dead by suicide and apparently having been so for some time. Most of the stuff that happened to you post-Willie Pete was Walker's hallucination, dreamed up to give him something to blame so he didn't have to deal with the guilt. With his team dead, Walker confronts his guilt and his own dark psyche in a Fight Club style face-off where you can either let yourself commit suicide, or destroy the darkness lurking inside you at the cost of your own humanity. Walker, if he survives, returns to civilization a broken man, regretting his own survival.

So, hey, wait a minute- if Konrad was dead, who were the 33rd taking orders from? Was it the Radioman? What was his deal? Why were the 33rd following him in Konrad's absence? In fact, why were the 33rd even still here? It's clear they're not going to be able to hold the city, everything's going completely south. They were only here because Konrad was commanding them, and presumably he was charismatic enough to inspire them to continue. Why do they keep fighting Walker and the delta operatives?

And speaking of, we get little clips afterwards that show Walker, through the course of the game, displaying textbook signs of shellshock and battle fatigue, often in front of his teammates? Why did they continue to follow him? Shouldn't they have relieved him of command and gone home?

Whatever, it's not a review of Spec Ops. The only point I'm trying to get at here is that I'm usually terrible at guessing plot twists, and here I'd picked this one out pretty much bang-on.

Later on, as I reflected, I realized this was something that might make a good completion to this task. I'd surprised myself- unexpectedly, no less, with no prior planning that might have spoiled the results- and spun correctly it could even be a fun story.

But then, as I typed up this story, I realized something- as a consequence of my lack of planning, I had no real proof. I had no pictures, no recordings, nothing that might bolster my claims except my knowledge of how the game ended. Moreover, I have no proof that I was actually surprised, given that it's rather notoriously difficult to document that sort of thing (being that it would have been a surprise and the moment would be passed by the time I could document it).

So, what was I to do? It's not as though I was going to wind up with an objectively better completion for the task, since any genuine surprise would be similarly impossible to document. But would the other Players accept my completion, sight unseen, trusting in my better nature and honour?

Would I even still go through with submitting it, knowing that I ran a high chance of getting flagged?

The answer is, obviously, yes. And that, gang, really surprised me.