Late to the Party: Difference between revisions

* ''[[System Shock]]'' and its sequel, both of which have the hero waking from cryogenic suspension and slowly discovering the ship/station he's on has been through some interesting developments while he was out.

** Interesting to note is that System Shock's development actually necessitated a Late To The Party story, as then-current computers simply couldn't render believable character interactions.

** Quite literally late to the party in this case, since everything went down on New Years Eve.

** This trope is lampshaded, perhaps inadvertently, in Bioshock's Alternate Reality Game. In Quain's "Utropolis" manuscript, it details his arrival at Rapture and discovery of the aforementioned New Year's celebration -- at which point he muses that he was "Late for the party."

** In Bioshock 2, there's a subplot of a busisnessman who stumbled upon Rapture looking for his missing daughter {{spoiler|who was turned into a Little Sister}} told through audio logs. {{spoiler|Right before you enter one area of the game, you hear - in the actual world and not an audio log - the man screaming to "get away from her." When you go inside, you can find a suitcase full of surprisingly-normal possessions and an audio log. The audio log ends with the businessman screaming the same desperate pleas you had just heard from outside the room. It turns out that you'd been mere minutes behind him for most of the way.}} You'd think that'd be the end of that plotline, but right before the finale {{spoiler|you're late to the party again, because apparently the businessman didn't die there, and was instead dragged off to become a Big Daddy who would serve his own daughter as a little sister. You find an audio log telling you this directly after you encounter (and let's be honest, probably killed) a Big Daddy with a name matching the businessman from the audio logs, right next to an operating table for the creation of Big Daddies.}}

* In Bungie Software's ''[[Pathways into Darkness]]'' the player is part of an elite special forces team sent with only hours to stop the [[Sealed Evil in a Can]] at the bottom of a nightmarish jungle pyramid dungeon from waking up. But your parachute malfunctions before you can land, and your team leaves you for dead. Since [[It's Up to You]], you awaken hours later (also finding that the barrel of the awesome M16 in your [[Bag of Spilling]] was bent in the landing, rendering all of your ammo useless) to discover that your team has failed.

* In ''[[Trace Memory]]'', the protagonist goes to an island to meet her estranged father. She finds out that the owners of the island died decades ago, and her father's whereabouts are unknown.

* The Golems of Amgarrak DLC for [[Dragon Age]] offers a double dose of this trope. Not only are you exploring the fantasy equivalent of an abandoned laboratory where the researchers [[Gone Horribly Right|were killed by their creation]], but you are following in the steps of a previous expedition that attempted to explore the place and were slaughtered.