You press a button, and the beat drops. Forward you fly, straight into the perilous unknown, beats pushing against your eardrums as you push back against the controller. Tempo and harmony swim together, and you lose yourself in the rhythm of play.

2012 has been a fine year for video game music. The finest in recent memory, I'd argue. We've seen soundtracks of every shape, size and tonal color, compositional collections complementing games that have incorporated harmony and discord in ingenious, exciting ways.

Granted, my affinity for this year's music is at least in part because it was the year I started running Kotaku Melodic, and so my awareness of all things musical and video gamey has been at an all-time high.

But as the list below demonstrates, this year was something special any way you look at it. It was a year in which game design and music composition moved ever closer, where composers and instrumentalists played vital roles in development teams, and where game-makers demonstrated a greater than ever understanding of the many things video games and music have in common.

Here, in no particular order, are our picks for the best video game music of 2012.

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Gravity Rush

I was expecting to like Gravity Rush, but I wasn't expecting its soundtrack to cast quite the spell it did. Sweeping and old-fashioned, Kohei Tanaka's score conjured old Hollywood in a way that few games even attempt. It mixed Django-esque gypsy jazz with rambunctious orchestral arrangements to build a tone all its own. I chose this tune, "Gravity Days," because it so well captures the soundtrack's charm. Though it was hard not to pick, "Pleasure Quarter," which marked the moment when I truly fell for Gravity Rush. The color palate switches; neons dot the night sky, the violin kicks in, and Kat takes flight.

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Hotline Miami

Even among this heady list, the Hotline Miami soundtrack stands apart. Assembled by a collection of artists, it channeled the 80s-tinged, neon-drenched funk of the game perfectly, and is entirely listenable on its own merits. This track, "Miami" by Jasper Byrne (whose soundtrack to his game Lone Survivor is also outstanding), perhaps best captures the energy of the game. But other tracks from M.O.O.N., Perturbator, Sun Araw all elevate Hotline Miami to a level of deep, almost filthy glamor.

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XCOM: Enemy Unknown

It's not an easy thing to make a turn-based game seem fraught and action-packed, but XCOM: Enemy Unknown managed it with energy to spare. Part of that is due to the game's brilliantly tense mission design, but some credit belongs to Michael McCann's brilliant score. McCann lent XCOM the same futuristic flair for the dramatic that he brought to last year's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and his combat music gets me pumped like no other. Mix that with the eerie, keening sounds of a quiet ("too quiet") battlefield, and you've got one of the best strategy soundtracks in recent memory.

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Botanicula

Few game soundtracks have ever charmed me like Botanicula's. When I first played the game, I described the it as weapons-grade joyfulness, and it hasn't lost an ounce of charm. And the soundtrack is a huge part of the game. Crafted by the Czech duo DVA (who make a surprise appearance in the game), the soundtrack relies on a combination of strange homemade instruments and human voices. DVA also created all of the sound effects in Botanicula, and the resulting soundscape blends sound design and music into a ramshackle jamboree of hums, whispers, grunts, bangs, clangs, and whistles.

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FTL

I came to FTL a bit late. Though I'd been assured of its quality, I hadn't found time to play it until a few weeks ago. And Ben Prunty's cool, beautiful soundtrack grabbed me with a qucikness. The most remarkable thing about this track, "Civil," is how immediately iconic it becomes. Specifically, the chord progression at 1:38. The moment I first heard it, I thought "That right there is the core of this entire game." And so it is. The more I've played FTL, the more I've come to appreciate Prunty's range, but it always comes back to that moment in "Civil." His work invokes the best soundtracks of the past while conjuring something new, and it fits marvelously with the thoughtful, methodical pace of FTL.

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Max Payne 3

I can only hope that Max Payne 3's soundtrack is the start of a trend. Rather than hiring a traditional film or game composer, Rockstar tapped the noise-rock band HEALTH to create the soundtrack for Max's return to glory. It would appear that after hiring the band, Rockstar got out of the way completely and let them do their thing. The result is one of the most uncompromising, exhilarating action game soundtracks I've ever heard. It's drenched in sweat, and at times feels like the music of Death Itself. It flattens the competition, a collection of compositions so distinctive that it enhances every moment of the game it accompanies.

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Xenoblade Chronicles

Jason Schreier: I had some issues with Xenoblade Chronicles, the Monolith-developed RPG that came out back in April for Wii—yes, Wii!—but its soundtrack, composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Shimomura, Manami Kiyota, and ACE+, is undeniably stellar. From peppy jazz beats to gentle guitar strums, Xenoblade's music is eclectic, sweeping, and catchy as all hell.

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Mass Effect 3

The Mass Effect 3 soundtrack needed to achieve the impossible: Tie together one of the most heralded video game trilogies of the current generation (with one of the best series-wide soundtracks) and give us closure. And, somehow, composers Clint Mansell, Christopher Lennertz, Sam Hulick, Sascha Dikiciyan and Cris Velasco did just that.

It's fitting that a large number of musicians was required to tie Mass Effect room together: The series has seen a number of composers over its five-year run, voices that always managed to combine into a cohesive whole. Best of all, the Mass Effect 3 sound designers even managed to contribute, weaving the music from past games into the ambient sound of several scenes, knitting together a aural tapestry that transcended backing tracks. This piece, "An End Once and For All," was the only one I could choose as emblematic of the Mass Effect 3 soundtrack. It's the rare piece of video game music that sounds exactly as grandiose as its title claims, and it achieves that not with the synths for which the series became known, but with a solo piano, eventually augmented by an orchestra. We'll miss you, Commander.

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Sound Shapes

Sound Shapes is an odd duck for this list, since it doesn't have a "proper" soundtrack per se; the game is its own soundtrack. But the game's levels, which essentially re-imagine sequencer nomenclature as level design, are laid out in a way that lines up with today's remix/mashup culture and allows players just enough control to put their own spin on things without undermining the compositional intent of the musicians. This track, "Cities" by Beck, is the most well-known from the game, but all of them—crafted by musicians like Jim Guthrie and Deadmau5, stand on their own. It's a soundtrack you have to play, and for that alone, it's worthy of mention. The fact that the music is great on its own merits only sweetens the deal.

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Dyad

Dyad is another game inextricably linked with its soundtrack. Part chaotic racer, part simulated drug trip (or, accompaniment to actual drug trip), David Kanaga's score dips and dives, accelerates and drops out, all in line with the motion on screen. By the end of the game, play and music have blended together into a kaleidoscopic, occasionally nightmarish, entirely unforgettable experience.

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Fez

I found Polytron's Fez to be a pleasant surprise—the game had been hyped for so long that I wasn't sure what to expect. But when I finally played it, I found that the colorful, dreamily nostalgic game was both smaller and more specific than I'd been expecting. Rich "Disasterpeace" Vreeland's soundtrack was a big part of that, a lush and consonant blend of synths and plinky electronic drums that conjured wide spaces, bright skies, and was surprisingly naturalistic for a synthesized soundtrack. And that the audio tracks are laced with hidden symbols and secrets of their own is a bonus of the best sort.

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Persona 4 Golden

Okay, yes, Persona 4 is really a game from 2008, and doesn't quite fall under the purview of this list. But 2012's PSVita "remix" Persona 4 Golden features several new tunes from series composer Shōji Meguro, and it's all so damned good that I felt like I couldn't leave it off. Persona 4's mix of complex jazz, triumphant pop, and weirdo ambient music feels more hip and present than most any game soundtrack. By the end of my first time through the game, I was entirely in love with the whole thing. Honestly, these songs are Inaba to me. This track, "Make History," is the new battle music for Golden, and alternates with the original theme to keep things fresh. I have fought hundreds of battles in P4, and this music feels as fresh now as it did the first time I heard it.

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Journey

What more can be said about Austin Wintory's Journey score? I know I said up top that these are in no particular order. But. Wintory's achingly beautiful work sets a new standard for the emotional heights video game soundtracks can achieve. Journey wound up being a profound experience for me more times than once. Wintory's music is a large part of why.

Journey's score has been widely celebrated, and is the first game soundtrack nominated for a Grammy award. Every accolade it gets is deserved, not simply because the music is good (it is), but because it's uniquely informed by ThatGameCompany's design, and as a result stands as Journey's beating heart. Noble cello themes and resonant alto flute melodies evoke the seemingly endless loneliness of the desert; our slack-jawed wonder at the sheer scope of this endless basin of life. Soundtracks like this come along once in a great while; we may not hear its equal any time soon. But that's okay. These compositions aren't going anywhere, and thanks to them, Journey will remain a classic for many years to come.

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So there you have them: Kotaku's picks for the best video game music of 2012. Of course, we may have left off your favorite, so I hope you'll all share your favorite tunes from the year in the comments. (I thought we had a great collection in our reader's choice post last week.)

For now, let's just take a moment to plug in some headphones and reflect on a fantastic year in music.

The litter was calling me, like granulated pieces of my broken past.

But pooping on the floor was all I had left. They'd taken everything else from me, that night my world came crashing down. A knife in the dark, a cold table. My manhood, gone, along with the rest of the garbage.

Her scent is what brought me back. That hint of sex, and cheap perfume, that told me she was out to get laid, and wouldn't be back to feed me until morning.

Cat Payne [DesertRat22225]

Games take us to all manner of fantastical, unlikely places. But as good as video games have gotten at accurately recreating a space-marine shootout or a mountaintop dragon battle, there's one thing developers are still learning how to create: A dance club.

Many games try to create thriving urban environments for players to occupy, and there's nothing that says "thriving" and "urban" like a packed, sweaty dance club. Unfortunately, until very recently, games have been very, very bad at rendering realistic dance clubs.

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This scene from Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (a game which I love, I should say) best exemplifies the sort of awkward, embarrassing antics you'd see in early video game dance clubs. There just wasn't enough processing power to make the club as hazy, loud, or crowded-feeling as it needs to be to be convincing. I love dancing at The Asylum, but mostly because it's so endearingly goofy.

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There's nothing sadder than an empty dance floor, though, as evidenced by this video from Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's like being at an unpopular kid's Bar Mitzvah.

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I remember playing Mass Effect 2, when I first arrived at the Afterlife bar, I was incredibly impressed with how alive it felt. (Now, when I visit, I'm more aware of how empty it is.) Still, it's a pretty good scene, if only in how it builds up to the entrance to the club.

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I liked the vibe of The Hive in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The audio may not have been quite right, but it conveyed an icy, cool energy that worked with the game. Don't know how I feel about the random chicks gyrating around the place, but hey, no video game club is perfect.

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Rockstar have long understood how dance clubs feel, once again demonstrating their preternatural ability to be ahead of the curve on this sort of thing. Even with its now-primitive graphics, Vice City's Malibu Club is a pretty convincing club:

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It paves the way, of course, for the much more convincing clubs in Grand Theft Auto IV and its expansion chapters:

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The dance club scene in Max Payne 3 may represent the pinnacle of video games' representations of dance clubs so far:

Nice. The thrumming bass, the way that dialogue instantly gets cut out and muffled, the fact that you can't understand what the hell anyone is saying. There are some shortcuts—see through the smoke and mirrors of the lens filters and fog machines and you can tell that the dancefloor animations are somewhat repetitive and limited—but all the same, this club feels more authentic than any before it.

A huge part of creating a convincing digital dance club is the music and more specifically, the way the music sounds. It can't just be the regular background music that plays during the game—music in a club is thrumming, physical, oppressive. You can't hear anything over it, and as a result everyone is shouting. On top of the pounding bass, there's a high-frequency scream of reverberating voices. It's not an easy thing to get right, making it all the more remarkable when a game does.

I turn it over to you—what are some of your favorite video game clubs? Any classics that are worth mentioning?

Taking a page from LA Noire's case notes, Rockstar's Max Payne 3 will on August 28 be adding something called "Noir Mode", which is a tidy term for "playing the game in black & white".

It fits with the game's noir overtones, I guess, but given so much of Max Payne 3 is spent in the ridiculously over-saturated Rio, it seems almost a crime to rob your eyes of the city's lush colour palette.

The New Jersey sections, though? Well, they're just about perfect for it.

This video starts off slow, showing you just how depressed and lifeless poor Max is, but it really picks up once some of Max's, um, "friends" come around.

Max Payne's life might be full of misery, but at least the special effects are pretty awesome.

Max Payne: Bloodbath [YouTube]

I've seen it far too many times. A video game character leaps from the top of a staircase, flying through the air, guns blazing. One enemy drops to the ground, then two, then three! Behind him, a grenade explodes, laying waste to the spot where he was just standing.

Bullets whizz through the air, metal-jacketed death buzzing past like so many hornets. By the time he hits the ground, everyone in the room is dead. He stands up, dusts himself off, and without a word... just keeps on truckin'.

Dude. Not even a word about the fucking amazing stunt you just pulled off?

Sometimes I want to grab video game characters and shake them.

Video game characters rarely seem like they're having a good time. They never seem overly impressed by the incredible odds they're overcoming, the amazing battles they're singlehandedly winning, the ridiculously difficult acrobatics they perform so regularly.

Max Payne, Marcus Fenix, Lara Croft, Rico Rodriguez, the GTA heroes… they rarely if ever seem all that stoked about the incredible moves they execute on a regular, sometimes minute-by-minute basis. Would it kill them to seem at least a little bit impressed by their own badassery?

The scene I described up top was more or less a scene from Max Payne 3, a game in which constant, insane action sequences are always followed by Max brooding to himself about how much of a fuckup he is.

A friend and I were having a laugh the other day over a scene that happens near the middle of the game. Max is sneaking up on some goons in a parking garage, at which point his voice-over sarcastically mocks his "trademark grace" as he knocks over a barrel and gets noticed. Immediately after doing that, he proceeds to do the most hilariously graceful and amazing thing I've ever seen, shooting a valve, grabbing a chain that then HAPPENS to start pulling him up to the ceiling because he shot the random valve, and then mowing down like eight dudes in slow-mo on two separate levels of the garage before landing... and going about his grumpy, hungover day.

If he had ended that sequence with the voiceover, "Okay, maybe I'm not so graceless," I would have been on the floor laughing. Instead, it was just gritty business as usual.

I'm not asking for a constant string of meta-commentary or anything. But would it kill video game characters to just occasionally mention how completely rad the thing they just did was? One of the most fun things in a video game, particularly a cinematic action game, is that sense of "Oh holy eff, I just DID THAT." And yet the characters never share that with us, they grimace and frown, they smell the fart and go on with their lives.

When a character in a game does respond to what just happened, it feels disproportionately refreshing, like a sip of water in a desert. At the end of the amazing collapsing building segment of Uncharted 2, Nathan Drake laughs and says, "We were almost in that!" More recently, in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, there's an early scene when an insanely powerful airdrop wipes out a horde of advancing soldiers, and the soldier I was controlling wryly muttered, "Well… that worked."

The fact that I laughed at that (pretty dumb) line indicates how much I want someone to acknowledge what's happening on screen. Why don't more games do this kind of thing? Is it simply that the events of a game are so outlandish that writers fear that acknowledging their awesomeness would serve to make them seem silly? I don't think it would. These kinds of video games are supposed to be awesome. It's okay to have some fun with it.

Look, I know. "Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions." In movies, on TV - this kind of stuff happens all the time. A cool badass character does something badass, and by definition he has to act all cool about it. It's what we expect of our cool badasses!

But there are moments, great moments, when that cool veneer cracks—think Neo saying "Woah" or "I know Kung Fu" in The Matrix. In the (fantastic) Disney film Tangled, there is a hysterical scene in which the character Flynn winds up in a sword-fight with Maximus, who is... a horse.

"You should know that this is the strangest thing I've ever done!" Flynn enthusiastically shouts as he parries the attacks of a sword-wielding horse. Ha! That gag and the lines from The Matrix are so great because for a few brief moments, we the audience are let in on the joke. The writers take a moment to tell us that it's okay to be super jazzed about all the awesome stuff happening on screen. I'd love to see more games do that.

I mean, if I single-handedly wiped out an entire platoon of alien soldiers, then hopped onto the side of one of their tanks, fought my way to the cockpit and piloted the thing off a cliff before leaping in slow-mo to safety at the last possible second, I think I'd do what any rational, red-blooded human would do: Look around frantically and shout, "TELL me someone saw that shit!"

Then I'd probably call my mom.

"Mom, you will not believe what I just did. Okay wait, let me back up. There's something you should know about me: Turns out, I AM AWESOME."

And yet it is. This video by Michael Shanks (the same man behind that great Box-Art Brawl video from last week) depicts the high's and lows, mostly lows, of Mr. Max Payne's day-to-day life.

Yes, it's a joke that's been done before. Perhaps too many times. And yet the execution here is pretty damned funny.

(See what I did there, with the "Execution?" Oh, yeah.)

Welcome to "Backhanded Box Quotes," a collection of super pissed-off user reviews from people just like you! Whoa, whoa, don't take that personal.

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor

Released: June 19.

Critic: JabbaTheSlush (Metacritic)
• "[T]his is a solid one out of ten."
Score: 1 (out of 10).

Critic: Kadeemluvmusic (Metacritic)
• "... [a] bad flavor of a chocolate Call of Duty mud cake."
Score: 0.

Critic: somebody worried (Amazon)
• "This review is based off of 4 youtube reviews, and about 8 magazine reviews as I do not own a Kinect."
Score: 1 star.

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Max Payne 3 (PC)

Released: June 1.

Critic: diesbildnis (Metacritic)
• "[E]ssentially Duck Hunt 2012 with swearing and long cut scenes."
Score: 1.

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Gravity Rush

Released: June 12

Critic: ilikeeverything (Metacritic)
• "I really like this game because it feels French and I kinda like French things every now and then like French fries. "
Score: 0.

In addition to my job here at Kotaku, I work very hard on a bestselling, fictional series of video game novelizations. Last year, I published a gripping, lusty novel based on The Witcher 2. This year, I've been hard at work putting the finishing touches on my next novel based on Max Payne 3, tentatively titled Max Payne 3: The Flesh of Fallen Angels: The Novel.

Would you like to read an excerpt? You would? Okay! Here you go, an excerpt from chapter 9 of the book, in which one New Jersey mob boss hatches an insanely ambitious plan to kill Max. I hope you enjoy it.

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"They killed my son! They killed my boy!"

Boss Anthony DeMarco was furious, inconsolable. His son Tony was dead at the hands of some ex-cop deadbeat named Payne. In one instant, the DeMarco family line had been snuffed out, and Anthony had lost a son. Payback was going to be a bitch.

"We are gonna get this guy, this... Payne," DeMarco fumed. "We are going to make him pay, Tommy!"

Tommy Marcotti looked his boss. In his fifteen years serving as the DeMarco's top lieutenant, he'd never seen the old man like this. Boss DeMarco was so furious he was drooling on himself, so mad his hands were shaking.

"Okay, boss," Marcotti said. "We'll put all our boys on it. Let's come up with a battle plan. We've got some intelligence that Payne is visiting his dead wife's grave at a graveyard in Jersey." Marcotti pulled out a overhead map of the vast Jersey graveyard that the DeMarcos kept on hand.

"There may be another guy with him, some guy named Passos. So, two of them. We'll send out Bobby and those two boneheads he hangs out with to take Payne out at his wife's grave."

"What about if he gets past them?" DeMarco asked, his voice still edging into a scream. "Then what?"

"Take it easy, boss," Marcotti said. "We've got all kinds of contingency plans." He pointed to a spot on the map. "We'll have five guys backing up Bobby's three guys, so there'll be eight guys at the first part of the cemetery. Then we'll have five more guys backing them up, and Tony B. will be on triple-backup in a car, in case they get through those first guys."

"Okay," DeMarco said, "but what if they get by all of those guys?"

"Past the grave is a rotunda," Marcotti explained, tapping a circular shape on the graveyard map. "So, we'll stack up Benny and his boys near stairs leading up to it. Benny's got a huge grenade launcher, and he's got six guys with him with four more for backup. So in addition to the fourteen guys we first sent after Payne, we'll have eleven guys with Benny at the rotunda."

"Twenty-five guys.," DeMarco said, his shoulders loosening a bit. "Keep going."

"We'll have ten more guys pull up behind the rotunda and fan out from there, with five more guys behind them."

"So, a total of forty guys so far?"

"Yeah, give or take."

"I don't want you to underestimate this fucker," said DeMarco, standing up. "He's pretty dangerous."

"We ain't gonna underestimate him," said Marcotti, reassuringly.

"I do have one question," said DeMarco, who seemed reassured. "What's to stop Payne from just running out of the graveyard in a different direction?"

"That won't happen," said Marcotti.

"Okay," said DeMarco, lost in thought. "You've convinced me. Go on."

"There's another rotunda after the first one," Marcotti explained, "So we'll send Junior and his boys there. He's got eight guys, all armed to the teeth, so between the nine of them they can probably hold the rotunda. We'll have a backup team of five in place, though, in case something goes wrong."

"After that," he continued, pointing to a building on the map, "there's an approach to a mausoleum. I'm gonna plant Frankie up top with a high-powered sniper rifle, so he can take Payne out if he gets past the fourteen guys at the second rotunda. But just in case, we'll put eight of his boys down in the building below."

"But what if Payne gets past them?" asked DeMarco.

"Well, we'll have three more guys hiding inside the building in case Payne and his friend go inside. Which brings me to the next part of the plan. We'll catch 'em at the Mausoleum and bring them to you, just like you wanted. Piece of cake."

"Good," said DeMarco, his eyes widening. "This is the good part. I wanna watch those fuckers beg."

"So," continued Marcotti, "while all our guys were fighting at the grave, and the first rotunda, and the parking lot, and the second rotunda, and the mausoleum, you and me set up the gravesite like you wanted. It'll be real dramatic. Once the boys at the mausoleum capture them, they'll bring them to us there, and you can make them dig their own graves."

Marcotti laughed. "It's gonna be some poetic justice, boss." DeMarco looked pleased.

"Just in case you leave them alone and they somehow escape," Marcotti continued, "we've got another contingency plan." He drew his finger down the map towards the southern end. "We'll have five guys stationed in the parking lot outside of the main building, which is where they'll come if they escape the gravesite. Then, we'll plant some guys in the Morgue beneath the main graveyard building. Seems fittin', no?"

"What seems fittin'?" asked DeMarco.

"The morgue. It's fittin' because if they go to the morgue, they'll die there. Geddit?"

"Wait," said DeMarco. "Why would they go into the morgue? Why wouldn't they just run for it?"

"Stop overthinking this, boss," said Marcotti.

"Once they're in the morgue," Marcotti said, "we'll have three guys try to head them off in the operating room. If they make it past those three, they'll probably head into the chapel to make a phone call. That's when we hit 'em with the big guns—we'll send in about fifteen to twenty more guys to take them out."

"So, ninety-four wiseguys to take down these assholes, then," concluded DeMarco, counting on his fingers.

"Yeah, boss," said Marcotti. "It seems like a solid plan to me."

"Maybe," said DeMarco, standing up. "Maybe. Don't forget: This is Max Payne we're talkin' about. He's one tough sonovabitch."

"We pull this off," Marcotti said, allowing a smile onto his face, "and there'll be nothing standing between us and the Punchinellos."

"Easy now," said DeMarco. "We're just one family. We ain't the goddam National Guard."

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Will the DeMarcos emerge victorious? Will Max and Passos somehow survive the attack and live to fight (and fight, and fight) another day? Will Max Payne's enemies ever run out of dudes for him to shoot? Fine out in the next chapter of Max Payne 3: The Flesh of Fallen Angels: The Novel. Maybe. Or maybe not.

Ever since reviewing Max Payne 3 a while back, I've heard from commenters and others that Max "feels" different than he used to in his older games, which were made by Remedy Entertainment.

Max's words sprang from the mind of writer Sam Lake, who also served as a model for the renegade cop. What's most interesting about the Max Payne comics published by Marvel, then, is that they represent a partnership between Sam Lake and Rockstar's Dan Houser, the men responsible for Max Payne's past and present. They're damn good comics, if you ask me.

The series so far represents a blend of both men's sensibilities, which feel less disparate than some would say. It's a bit of Lake's quirkier, more literary Max as he becomes the rundown wreck he appears as in Houser's more cinematically-minded Max Payne 3. It's a great use of comics as an interstitial tie-in.

Comics based on video games can be really, really bad. Sure, they might be able to replicate the look or expand on the worlds seen in titles like Gears of War, Mass Effect But it's a hard proposition to recapture the appeal of those games in a static medium.

It's great, then, that the art by Fernando Blanco manages to make Max's shoot-dodge look like it does in that games, but slightly more toned down. Blanco also recreates the gritty, smoky noir-inflected feel of the games, but pays special attention to the emotions on these game characters' faces.

These comics actually serve as pretty good primers for Max Payne 3, if you're coming in cold. Readers who haven't played the first two Remedy-developed Max titles get the basics: Max was a tough-guy cop who busted sellers of a drug called Valkyr but lost loved ones along the way. But, the best possible reading experience here comes after finishing the story mode of Max Payne 3 and seeing where the panels fit in with the gameplay.

You see one character from the Hoboken flashback levels of Max Payne 3 in some less explosive moments, which retroactively adds a nice bit of tension to what eventually happens in the game. And some sequences get lifted wholesale from the games, too. But it doesn't feel lazy. Instead, Max's depressing solo drinking feels even weightier

I liked Max Payne 3 mostly it felt like a character study of a man in deep decline desperately clinging to the only thing he's ever been good at: shooting. (Mind you, I don't love the game's story.)

After the Fall and Hoboken Blues feel like part of a larger whole and prove to be vital parts of a portrait of what it looks like when a man falls into the worst pats of himself. They're free so definitely take a look.