The Max Payne games are not scary. The third in the series especially, which took a break from the franchise's usual style (and from its usual development team, with Rockstar snatching it away from original studio Remedy Entertainment) and plonked the conflicted noir police detective in day-glo Mexico, with a mop chop to boot. Where the latest game was more action-packed, however, the first two were dripping with atmosphere to go along with the Matrix-inspired bullet time gunplay. They weren't horror games, but they certainly had a certain dark, grimy charm, with both the storyline and Max's gloriously melodramatic voiceover taking cues from pulp detective stories. Which is what makes the nightmare sequences in the first game hit even harder. The basic story is that Max Payne's wife and child were killed because of his investigations into a new designer drug, and he's haunted by their memories as he tries to get revenge for their deaths. These manifest themselves in playable sections that take place in Max's subconscious, which see him running down endless bloody corridors whilst the warped cries and screams of a baby echo around him. Honestly, if he wasn't having nightmares before, having to play through that would do the trick.
