10 Video Games That Wanted The Player To Feel Terrible

4. Spec Ops: The Line

The genius of Spec Ops: The Line lies in its devious conceit, by marketing itself as just another third-person military shooter, only to reveal itself instead as a fanged critique of war-as-entertainment.

What begins as just another war game quickly mutates into a deeply horrifying depiction of war's true cost, both in terms of innocent lives and the human soul.

Yager Development strips away the slick sheen of cinematic combat and re-imagines it here as increasingly mundane and unsettling, drawing an ingenious parallel between soldiers who blindly accept horrific orders and players who similarly follow objectives uncritically.

This culminates in a disturbing late-game reveal that the player character is in fact a PTSD-addled husk of his former self, and that no matter how aggressively you fight your way to the end, you're already a casualty of war.

More than anything, Spec Ops actively asks players to consider the ethics of turning warfare into entertainment, such that playing a glossy Call of Duty set-piece hasn't ever felt the same since.