19 Scariest Video Game Moments Of The Decade (So Far)

11. Realising That You Might Have Lost Your Mind - Hotline Miami

Spoilers below. Hotline Miami places you under the mask of 'Jacket', a hitman who's relayed a series of instructions through phone calls which ask him to drive to a specific location and slaughter everyone present. Business as usual, in other words - or so it seems if you ignore the fact that these orders are given through seemingly harmless (yet endlessly amusing) requests like: "I need a babysitter", "we need you to fill in at reception tonight", and my personal favorite - "we have a date set up for you this evening," (all bang bang, no kiss kiss). It's hilariously surreal, and Hotline Miami goes out of it's way to instill the idea that the only meaningful thing you'll ever do in your entire playthrough is viciously murder every soul who crosses your path. The justification doesn't matter, the only thing that does is racking up kill combos and doing it with style. But what's truly disturbing about Hotline Miami is the increasingly schizophrenic feel of Jacket's POV - before long his usual hangouts become riddled with twitchy, rotting corpses (and some of them even start talking to him). There's an almost nightmarish quality to Hotline Miami's latter half, so that by the time Jacket comes home to find his 'girlfriend' laying in a puddle of her own blood, you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And you thought Patrick Bateman had an overactive imagination.