10 Weirdest Genre Shifts In Video Games

Have you ever seen Funny Games?

Michael Haneke's horror-thriller sees a family devastated by two homicidal maniacs, with the movie's USP being that the killers are very much aware they are the bad guys in a horror movie. They know that they wouldn't exist if people weren't fascinated by horror, so they justify their actions as simply giving the audience what it wants.

Intentionally or not, Modern Warfare 3 pulls off a similar trick.

Infinity Ward's threequel has an early scene where the player is put in the shoes of a family dad vacationing in London with his wife and daughter. This abrupt foray into walking simulator territory is cut cruelly short when the family are killed in a terrorist explosion while posing for a family photo.

Exploitative? Yes. The player's fault? Absolutely. Not only does the game give you the choice of skipping the scene, if you insist on seeing it you become fully complicit in the family's murder.

Any player who's been following the game's plot will know that the trucks the family pose in front of have been rigged to explode. The game makes no secret of the fact that the bombs will go off the second the family are moved into position, making the player complicit in their execution.

Man. And you thought Spec Ops: The line was a headf**k...