In the current generation of game consoles developers can deliver stunning graphics and immense worlds to get lost in. Most games are happy to create a fun experience for gamers and their friends, but others get a bit more ambitious and try to provoke an emotional experience. Of these games most have content that will creep us out, such as Silent Hill, or provoke shock, such as the infamous Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 ‘No Russian’ level. This list is for the games that really get under the skin, making players double guess themselves and question their own sense of right and wrong.
#5 – Cannon Fodder
Quite an oldie to start the list, and one that doesn’t directly attack the players sense of right and wrong. Instead it provides a strange contrast between the realities of war and fun, cartoonish gameplay. When booting up the game (back in the floppy disk days) the jaunty ‘War Has Never Been So Much Fun’ soundtrack carries a dark undertone. Amid the missions of little cartoon troops and explosions you occasionally get a wounded soldier left screaming in agony until you put them out of their misery. Then there’s the ever present green hill next to your recruitment office, with the ever growing collection of white crosses representing each of your men who didn’t make it through a mission.
#4 – Manhunt
This seems like an obvious entry, and one that stirred up massive amounts of controversy. The player is cast as James Earl Cash, a death row convict who is dropped into a ‘game’ where they are hunted by waves of psychopaths. Using a range of every day objects from plastic bags to nail guns and hammers they have to kill or be killed. It’s a brutal game where the player is rewarded for skilful play with more horrific death scenes. The involving gameplay made it easy for players to become absorbed in the stalking tactics required to progress through the game. Personally I found this game distasteful, but it was popular enough to generate a sequel.
#3 – Bioshock
On the surface there seems to be a rather straight forward – if demented – choice. The underwater utopia of Rapture has become hell on Earth, over-run with genetically modified psychopaths and the lumbering Big Daddies. Along with the biomechanical nightmares are the Little Sisters, twisted ghouls in the form of young girls who are collecting ‘Adam’, the substance that the genetic freaks thrive on. You can either kill the Little Sisters and get the larger bonus or harvest their Adam for a smaller pay off. The damned things are evil and part of the nightmare, and your on trusted companion is urging you on.
Except everything if a lie. About halfway through the game you learn that you’ve been manipulated into doing the wrong thing. How wrong? You’ve been murdering innocent little girls. Not only that but you’ve been mind controlled by the villain of the piece. Would you kindly feel used and guilty?
#2 – Spec Ops: The Line
Most modern war games try to throw in some anti-war sentiment, whether it’s in the form sacrificing your troops or dropping in random quotes during loading screens. Spec Ops: The Line is an examination of the war psychology first and a game second. On the surface it’s a stock-standard war game, with the player controlling a soldier through a conflict (in this case an abandoned Dubai, hammered by sandstorms) with some NPCs and revenge on the menu. Unlike other games of the genre this one takes its cues from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, forcing the player through the psychological torture of war. Battlefield hallucinations, dark moral choices and getting forever pushed towards the ‘line’ makes the gamer re-evaluate their attitudes towards war and it’s use in entertainment. Unique and startling.
#1 – Hotline Miami
As strange as this is to say, an hour into this game and I felt like a serial killer. You don your mask and creep through a building picking off the inhabitants. Yes, it’s done in twenty year old graphics and the enemies are all Russian mobsters but the swirling acid trip backgrounds and visceral levels of violence serve to whisk your brain into a demented mush. You wind up in a surreal mindset as you rapidly try and retry the rapid fire episodes. By the time the corpses in the characters living room start talking to you things have gone beyond the point of sanity.
