10 Video Games Way Freakier Than You Thought

An important part of video game marketing - and any marketing, really - is to give your target audience an accurate impression of the product.

Failing to do so can result in consumer backlash, where players feel deceived or short-changed by something that wasn't what they believed they were paying for.

But there are also times where artistic ambition wins out, where developers don't want their game to be easily pigeonholed as just one thing or another.

Sometimes developers want their games to be more, adventurously hopping between genres and moods, delivering an experience which can't be fully categorised quite so easily.

In the case of these 10 games, they took the style and tone players expected to see and infused it all with an undercurrent of WTF, from a general feeling of unease to slow-rising horror which exploded in an unforgettable climax.

Whatever the outcome, these games had far more to offer players than their box art or a cursory glance at gameplay would suggest - they dared to get freaky and challenge players' willingness to carry on in the process...

Max Payne was one of the first major video games to borrow The Matrix's ground-breaking "bullet time" stylistic techniques, whereby players could slow time to mow down fleets of armed goons while savouring every last nanosecond of it.

The game was unsurprisingly marketed on the inventiveness of this mechanic as well as its gritty, film noir-inspired detective story, while scarcely little mention was made of its more unsettling, horrific atmosphere.

And so, nobody expected that Max Payne would be a deeply unsettling meditation on grief and revenge, as our insomniac protagonist murders his way across New York City, develops a painkiller addiction, and has horrible recurring nightmares of the night his wife and child were slaughtered.

To make matter worse, the nightmares are actually delineated, frustrating platforming levels separated from the more conventional action, which with their reality-warping visuals and sound are a far cry from the relentless shooting gallery most people were expecting.