Manhunt

The defining input is a held button. Creep up behind a Hunter in Carcer City, line up the kill, and the longer you keep pressure on the trigger the further the on-screen reticle darkens from white to yellow to red, each stage buying a slower and more elaborate killing. Release early and it is over quickly. Wait, and the camera cuts to grainy camcorder footage while a voice on the other end of your earpiece purrs approval. That one mechanic does more characterising work than any cutscene in the game.

Rockstar North built this in 2003, between Vice City and San Andreas, and it plays like the studio deliberately stripping away everything expansive about Grand Theft Auto. No open city to wander, no radio stations, no side distractions. Instead: corridors of rubble and chain-link, gangs of scavengers and skinheads patrolling fixed routes, and James Earl Cash, an executed convict pulled off the gurney to perform for a pornographer-director named Lionel Starkweather. You move between shadows, throw bottles to pull enemies out of position, and hide against walls until a patrol turns its back. It is a stealth game about patience, and it punishes impatience with immediate death.

The supporting systems are thinner than the central one. Combat in the open is stiff and unreliable, the firearms in the later levels feel like an admission that the sneaking had run out of variations, and the enemy AI is transparent enough that once you learn the alert cones the tension leaks away. Bag over the head, jab, walk away. The rhythm becomes routine well before the closing chapters.

What has not faded is the presentation. The audio design is exceptional for its generation, with enemy chatter that mutters and taunts and reveals exactly how much they know, and PS2 owners with a USB headset could talk into the microphone to lure Hunters toward them, which was a genuinely strange use of the hardware. The visual filter, the deliberate video artefacts, the framing of every execution as captured footage: it is all pointed at making the player complicit rather than heroic.

It was banned, pulled from shelves in places, and cited in a British court case that had nothing to do with it. The controversy has mostly outlived the argument. Played now, the shock has dulled but the discomfort has not, because the game never lets you forget that someone is watching the tape and enjoying it.