No, We Won't Shut Up About Spec Ops: The Line

Into The Heart Of Darkness

Everything crumbles before the player as Spec Ops continues. The city of Dubai slowly collapses, its buildings levelled by sandstorms and gun battles; its infrastructure destroyed as its water supply is cut off and the survivors are left at the mercy of starvation and dehydration. The level design is constructed in such a way that the player is constantly descending; ziplining rappelling or outright tumbling down to lower and lower levels even when it doesn't appear to make sense geographically. It is, in effect, a gradual descent into hell itself.

During their descent, Walker's squad crumble themselves, both physically and mentally. Along with their increasingly battered uniforms and grisly injuries, Adams and Lugo gradually lose their resolve and the trust in their captain slowly drains away. From Chapter 8 onwards, Walker hallucinates frequently and his reliability as a narrator becomes increasingly dubious.

Even the game's interface itself feels like it's breaking down later on. Loading screen messages evolve from innocuous tips such as "To avoid fire while on the move, take cover while sprinting" to "If you were a better person, you wouldn't be here" and the now infamous "Do you feel like a hero yet?". The title screen, depicting a sniper watching over the city, gets more and more grim depending on how far the player has progressed: he becomes more watchful and alert, and his corpse is eventually seen being picked apart by ravens. The background skyline begins to burn and several of its buildings are razed to the ground.

These touches, both in the narrative and the meta, make for an experience both unnerving and disorienting, and it may take several replays to fully grasp all the moments of foreshadowing and subtle psychological manipulation - though you can't be blamed for being reluctant to relive it ever again.