Valkyr is a hallucinatory drug afflicting many of the bad guys in Max Payne. The effects of the stuff include nausea, mental deterioration, and grim hallucinations, making you wonder why people would want to take this stuff in the first place - where's the fun? For the most part, Max sticks to the safety of booze and painkillers for his hedonistic needs, but becomes an unwilling recipient of Valkyr when he's caught by the Aesir Corporation and injected with an overdose of it. What follows is one of the more disturbing drug sequences in video-games, in which Max runs through a nightmarish, red-and-green-tinted vision of his own home, finds the bloody crib of his murdered child, and shoots a doppelganger of himself. But proving that drugs can offer moments of epiphany, Max picks up letters that tell him a) He's in a graphic novel and b) He's in a computer game, both of which are true! If only he'd sat down and tried to work out the meaning of this Valkyr-induced vision rather than numb himself with sedatives, then Max could've become one of the few video-game characters to gain an understanding of his own existence! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpUggFc_ISM
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
