Metal Gear Solid 3 - Snake Eater

There is a menu in this game where you treat your own wounds. Cuts need disinfectant and a bandage, bullets have to be dug out with a knife before the hole can be stitched, burns want ointment. It sounds like busywork on paper, and for a few hours it is, until the habit sets in and you start reading damage as something with a cause and a cost rather than a bar that refills. Konami's 1964 prequel took a series built on corridors, cameras and radio codecs and moved it into a Soviet jungle where none of those things exist.

What replaces them is camouflage. Two slots, uniform and face paint, and a percentage index in the corner that rises or falls depending on whether your pattern matches the mud, foliage or concrete you happen to be lying in. Prone in the right leaves you are effectively furniture. Stand up in a black wetsuit in tall grass and the guards will find you in seconds. The stamina gauge underneath it pulls in the same direction, draining as you move and forcing you to hunt, trap and eat whatever crawls past, which is where the title comes from and where a great deal of the game's grim comedy lives.

The boss fights are the argument for the whole design. The End, an ancient sniper with a moss-covered ghillie suit, turns three linked forest areas into a patient search where you track footprints, listen for his breathing and try to spot a glint before he spots you. It can take an hour. It can also be skipped by shooting him during a cutscene, or by leaving the console alone for a week so he dies of old age. Almost nothing else in the sixth generation was that confident about letting players break its centrepiece.

It has aged unevenly. The original PlayStation 2 release keeps the fixed overhead camera the series had used since 1998, which is a poor fit for dense undergrowth and long sightlines; Subsistence added the free camera later and the game is plainly better for it. The close-quarters combat is fussy, the inventory demands constant pausing, and the codec conversations run long even by Kojima's standards.

What holds is the writing. Snake Eater ends on a Cold War betrayal played straight, without irony, and the last twenty minutes earn a silence that very few games of its era went looking for. You put the controller down understanding exactly what the mission cost, and who paid.