Twisted Storytelling (and Black Ops 3)

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is normally not even a game I'd give a second look. Big-franchise first-person shooters these days are built heavily around multiplayer and have a reputation for single-player campaigns that are short and/or lacking in other ways. BO3, however, came out just in a time frame where I looked a little more closely than usual - still not enough to buy in, but I ended up watching a campaign play-through. In the end, I'd say it was interesting enough for me to watch, but not so interesting that I feel I would have rather played it myself.
It did, however, get me thinking about ambiguity and unreliable narration in stories.
These are things that can add a thought-provoking slant on a story, but only if they're done well. The Sixth Sense qualifies in my mind as "unreliable narration" to good effect. Inception was more fun than mess to me, and definition ends on an ambiguous not that's option to audience interpretation. Both of these caused me to think and consider what I had seen, and I feel that's what those techniques are going for.
Poorly-executed, however, the audience is left asking "what just happened?" with no real satisfaction.

The CoD:BO3 campaign puts the player in the role of a soldier for the "Winslow Accord" in a near-ish future. The initial mission introduces a few critical NPCs, primarily Hendricks, who seems to the player's superior here, and Taylor, leader of a squad of cybernetic soldiers. The two are shown to have history together, and I got that Taylor sort of blamed Hendricks for the injuries that led to his cybernetics (which in turn led to a failure of Taylor's relationship at the time). The player is brutally beaten down, but pulled out and selected to be Robocop (well, pulled into the cybernetic soldier program). Hendricks apparently volunteers for the cybernetics, himself.
Then... thanks to the magic of a Direct Neural Interface, the player is pulled into training scenarios and guided by Taylor and his squad in some combats modeled after things that happened already, learning about new abilities along the way - pretty standard FPS fare, though it's all "virtual." After that, there's a time lapse, showing the player working with Hendricks on multiple operations over a series of years before things pick up again.
The player and Hendricks get back into things working with a CIA operative who happens to be Taylor's previous girlfriend. They find that Taylor and his squad have apparently gone rogue and killed some CIA connections, so the pair starts following their trail, looking for reasons why and how to stop them. They sort of find the former in a covered-up, early DNI experiment that apparently used people against their will, leading to a large number of deaths and the creation of some form of AI - which in some way jumped to Taylor and his team via their DNI's. So as Taylor and Co. are behaving erratically and revealing all sorts of Accord secrets, the player and Hendricks seek to hunt them down while experiencing glitches and hints they will eventually succumb to the AI as well.
The AI itself is nothing unique in storytelling, and it seems to be looking for some sort of answers as to its reason for being, but ultimately it just seems to be driving people toward the killing of those behind its creation. All sort of unclear. People die. The player shows some sort of romantic involvement with the CIA agent. The final confrontations are clearly in a virtual reality and in beating the AI, the player actually has help from Taylor in the end.
After after the big climax, the player has to reboot his/her DNI to clear out the remains of the AI and walks out of the final area to be asked by a soldier what his/her name is. "Taylor," the player responds. Roll credits.
There's interesting stuff in there, with questionable moralities and the real vs. virtual. Fertile science fiction ground. But the way its implemented feels... inconsistent. I referenced both Sixth Sense and Inception earlier as positive examples, and I think part of what makes them such was how they establish certain rules (dead going about their lives without realizing and the layered dreamscapes respectively). BO3 really doesn't establish any framework beyond how the DNI can show things that aren't real. There's no indication to the person playing the game as to what is real and what isn't beyond the blatant - I find it reasonable to assume the chick floating across a WW2 battlefield is probably not real in the game world.
Because of that, I'm left thinking "wait, what just happened?" Two main possibilities came to my mind.
1) Taylor's mental/DNI "ghost" is now in the player, perhaps as one of multiple personalities or the only one. This seems clearly possible, but feels "bad" to me because Taylor's presence before was sort of martyr-ish and it devalues the player in my mind.
2) TWIST! The player was Taylor all along! That's... sort of loosely possible, but only if you accept that everything in the campaign is jumbled out of order in a weird mix of perspectives and hallucinations. The early-game bits of the relationships between Taylor, Hendricks, and the CIA agent as well as a few scenes through the game sort of hint at this, but you have to throw out just about everything presented in the game as "real world."
Neither of those come together as really viable. Being unable to find a solution to the question left me unsatisfied rather than contemplative. I find that to be narrative failure.
Though... from searching around, it sounds like the game designers "hid" in the bunch of text preceding each mission an explanation that requires some careful pausing and reading - That Taylor's first interface with the player led to playing through a version of Taylor's own experiences with people shifted around while the player character actually died on the table. Hendricks and Taylor were the ones that hunted down another rogue squad, but the player characters' DNI/death-addled mind pushed Taylor and his squad into the target role while reliving events through the connection. That... seems the most obscure, but most plausible scenario. It fits things reasonably well.
Even so, it comes back to "it was all a dream," which is a pretty tired trope that drains a lot of the weight out of a story. So while I believe that may well be the intended "truth" of the story, it still strikes me as not good.