9 Gaming Moments In 2015 That Made You Uncomfortable

3. Hotline Miami 2 Rape Scene

The Hotline Miami games have prided themselves on being unapologetically gratuitous. The top-down shooter lets you gouge peoples' eyes out, blow brains out across rooms and shred up every super-pixellated enemy you meet in al manner of gory ways. Yet all this fitted well with a game that's presented as a kind of delirious, Miami Vice-flavoured nightmare, and the fact that the gameplay made these acts of violence extremely satisfying. While Hotline Miami 2 is flawed in many ways, the 'rape' scene near the start of the game is a dark piece of meta-narrative that's one of the year's most discomfiting - and ingenious - moments. You get the choice to skip the act of sexual violence before it happens, but of course you won't, because you want to see all that the game has to offer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ertr6xa_8R4&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dertr6xa_8R4&has_verified=1 Then, when the very basic animation occurs and your character's trousers creep down as he mounts a maimed woman, you feel filthy and ashamed for having clicked the 'yes' button, and a little angry at the game for having shown you into this action. But very quickly the camera pans away, the cameraman shouts 'Cut!' and it turns out that you were just filming a scene for a movie... within the game. Does this make the implied rape scene okay? Are you absolved for essentially instigating sexual violence? It raises a thousand unsettling questions that aren't easy to answer, and horrible though it is, it was also one of the cleverest, most impactful gaming moments of 2015.