It wasn’t meant to be like this. It was supposed to be routine—sneak into the Camp Omega detention centre, locate the prisoners, extract them, and bail. Simple. “This is an infiltration mission,” Miller told me rather condescendingly over the walkie before I set off. “You’ve got to stay out of sight.” 

Easy for him to say, sitting in his cosy Militaires Sans Frontières operations centre goodness knows how many miles away from the frontline. Me, I’m out in the field, holed up behind this conveniently placed stack of plywood in the pissing rain after mistakenly shooting a soldier in the arse with a real bullet instead of a tranquilliser dart. 

As I peer through the chain link fence ahead, guards pace frantically in all directions. It’s gonna take more than a cardboard box to save my backside this time, I think to myself.

It’s at this point that Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes—like every other Metal Gear game before it—encourages you to lay low. However, I have Pao’s FPS Mod. As the name suggests, it swaps Snake’s default third-person view for a first-person gun-in-hand perspective. Standard stealth is still possible, but Ground Zeroes’ confined and contained grid-styled map, with its multitude of narrow indoor and outdoor corridors, sporadic watchtowers, and occasional plazas, makes for the perfect FPS battleground, one which confidently stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the war-torn annually-updated blockbusters of the day. 

And so I break cover. With my assault rifle raised, I zigzag between jail cells, supply tents and parked four-by-fours, popping shots at oncoming soldiers and dropping sharpshooters from their nests above. I take out several sentries with a well-placed grenade, vault over a fence and catch another off-guard with a fatal blow to the back of the head. I sprint into the camp’s central thoroughfare and leverage the bullet-time Reflex Mode upon detection with a succession of well-placed knee and skull shots to the steady beat of the Bloodstained Anthem—the omnipresent soundtrack to my remorseless slaughter.

This all-chaos approach is of course possible within Ground Zeroes’ non-modded state. But Pao’s first person perspective creates a much tighter field of view with less spacial awareness—which in turn not only makes twitch shooting almost essential at times, but also a lot more fun. This is especially true when Snake enters the game’s boiler room area and CQC makes way for point-blank shotgunning. And there’s something to be said about watching your foes crumble right before your eyes.

Enemies fall. I save Chico. I save Paz. I leave countless lifeless bodies in my wake and get the hell out of there. Not quite what Miller had in mind, but job done all the same. 

Add all of that to the series’ cultured alternate timeline and future-dystopic slant on society, war and the world, its mechanical quirks, wonderful visuals and array of deadly weapons and intricate tech, and I’d argue Ground Zeroes viewed through Snake’s eyes is one of this generation’s preeminent first-person shooters. Tactical espionage operations it ain’t, but there’s much fun to be had in making Snake a ruthless cold-blooded killer.

Brazzers, the folks that recently stepped up their gaming parody output with an Overwatch porn ripoff, are back with something, well, even more obvious: Metal Rear Solid: The Phantom Peen. Finally, a porn film designed to satisfy those of us with a very specific fetish for consensual fulton-play. 

Check out the trailer above for a mostly safe-for-work (depending on where you work) trailer featuring decent cosplay, awful acting, and terrible dialogue (what did you expect?). See below for a sample of the dialogue excellence on offer. 

The most striking thing about the trailer is its attention to reproducing details of MGS. The codec sequences look like codec sequences, the tiny UI frills like the orange triangle denoting tagged enemies are there, and the world map even reflects the actual interface from The Phantom Pain. That said, I'm not sure whether I'd press pause in the middle of a sit down with The Phantom Peen to prep a scathing indictment of its numerous inaccuracies. Priorities, you know? It just looks like someone on the crew is actually a real fan of the series. So I guess there's that.

While we won't be reviewing The Phantom Peen in the coming days (unless Tim decrees a change of editorial plan), but The Phantom Pain was our Game of the Year back in 2015. If any of that greatness rubbed off on the porn parody, perhaps one of you will let us know.

Now that our game of the year awards are out of the way, we can get to the serious stuff: ventilation shafts. They’re a pillar of modern game design, shunting players from one level to the next, telling spy wannabes that a square aluminum tunnel is all espionage requires, and giving the hunted a temporary haven from their mouth-breathing pursuers. The most iconic protagonists in PC gaming depend on inexplicably designed air convection systems to save the world time and time again.I'm going to revisit a few of the most recognizable vents from PC gaming history and evaluate them based on rules I’m making up as I go. One lucky duct will win the coveted PC Gamer Gust of Approval for best vent.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution 

Gif sourceThe original Deus Ex invented the concept of ventilation shafts, and as a result is exempt from competing. Unfortunately, further iterations of ventilation shafts from the new handlers at Square Enix didn’t do much to blend them into the environments or make them feel like genuine air ducts. Instead, they serve as well-lit (somehow), long graves where you hide your dead. How many bodies can you fit in an impossible space? Deus Ex: Human Revolution steps beyond the veil.Even worse, the vents aren’t in compliance with the ASHRAE standards for acceptable air quality. According to section 5.1.1 of the guidelines, “Where interior spaces without direct openings to the outdoors are ventilated through adjoining rooms, the opening between rooms shall be permanently unobstructed.” These dead bodies are breaking the law.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

They are deeper, wider, and more Jensen-sized. Seriously, they’re massive. And they’re always hiding behind vending machines and small crates, leading directly to and fro with plenty of slats along the way just in case you need to see where all the guards are hanging. Subtlety doesn’t circulate in the near future, I suppose. Air isn’t getting through those suckers in a sensible way. It’s a fact: these vents blow.

Watch Dogs 2 

Pitiful, but so pitiful, I can’t help but love it. There’s been no effort made to hide that this vent in a multi-billion dollar tech company building was built specifically for drone passage. (Just a heads up, this is how you get raccoons.) Watch Dogs 2 makes little effort to mask its videogame vents as anything but transparent chunks of level design. It’s one of the bigger problems I had with the game, that it promises options for infiltration, but vent layouts are so arbitrary and assured to lead directly between points of interest that they start to feel like a big billboard, stating ‘Sneak here!’

Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes 

Gif sourceOK, so it’s more of a drainage system, but it might also push some air around. Note the more rectangular design gives the impression that they’re a tighter fit than most videogame vents, which makes for a more immersive ventilation shaft experience. Were I in a crime film, I’d consider using such a discreet, small passage as a good place to hide the murder weapon. Were I in a videogame, I’d glitch through the floor and fire my weapon with reckless abandon. In conclusion, I love the compress of MGS5’s passages, but otherwise, they rarely make sense. Often, they’ll just lead from a hole outside a building in a direct line inside. You’re going to get raccoons, damnit.

Half-Life

So very, very dark. Like a damn vent should be! If I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief that these big metallic crawlspaces are mean for air circulation and not hiding headcrabs, I want them to at least distract me with tension. The vents are otherwise featureless, vanilla shafts. Four walls, grey, nothing particularly special about them. At least they acknowledge you’re going to get critters with such impractical vents, even if they’re interdimensional face suckers.

Half-Life 2

Talk about sequelitis! No innovation. Expect more flat, boxy aluminum textures, more headcrabs popping out to say hello, and most grievous, of course, are the impractical air convection layouts. The thought makes me shiver, not because it’s abhorrent, but because damn, it’s cold in here, Gordon!

Batman: Arkham Series

Gif source

Gotham’s vents are comically large. Bruce Wayne isn’t a small man, especially with an extra few inches thanks to bat ears. And crouching isn’t easy in all that armor—it’s going to bunch up, Bruce. I’m sorry but your tummy is getting pinched beneath those plates. God forbid you drop a quarter. To accommodate all that batmass, the vents essentially serve as a venue for badguy shadow puppets and an echochamber for the Joker’s prolonged loudspeaker monologues. They’re a nice place to hide in if you’ve been spotted, but their design won’t win any awards from us. Often they serve as a comically short passage between two rooms, ensuring the only air they’re circulating is Wayne’s big ego.

WINNER — Alien: Isolation

We praised Alien's production design during release, and Creative Assembly's extraordinary attention to environment detail extends to the design of its vents. The aperture entrance to each vent is accompanied by a slick cylindrical animation and shrill soundbite that sounds like a sword being pulled from its sheath. Foreboding, a bit, considering there’s probably a hungry alien in there.Isolation’s detailed lighting and shadows give the impression that Sevastopol is a hulking, intricate tangle of retro-futurist industrial design. As you crawl through every vent and maintenance shaft, you’ll get small glimpses into the guts of the station, a smoky mess of pipes and dim lights and scattered tools. The result is a space station that feels so vast and cobbled together that its tiny passages and maintenance systems feel plausible. Vents that don’t make sense, make sense on Sevastopol.To the team at Creative Assembly, you’ve creatively assembled good passages behind the walls for players to bonk around in that don’t feel like a mad maintenance man’s pet project. Your congratulatory PC Gamer Gust of Approval should make it your way soon.

We’ve been playing stealth games for decades now, infiltrating military bases undetected, choking henchmen from behind and packing ventilation shafts with their naked unconscious bodies. But making sneaking fun isn’t easy. Full spatial awareness, how to communicate your visibility, and reliability of tools and AI behaviors are a hard thing to pin down. Luckily, these games pull it off without disturbing a single dust mote. They’re the best stealth games you can play on the PC right now, and what we recommend for players looking to get their super quiet feet wet. 

Deus Ex

Deus Ex' sandbox structure made it a landmark study in open-ended design. The large environments and varied upgrade tree are designed to give you ways to solve tasks expressively, using imagination and forethought instead of a big gun. Nearly every stealth game on this list borrows something from Deus Ex, and it’s easy to see why.

Deus Ex pulled off experimental, player-driven stealth design in huge, tiered environments. It was the cyberpunk espionage dream, and for many modern developers, it still is. The last two entries in the series, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, play with similar, more streamlined design, and while we recommend them as well, they still can’t brush with the complexity and novelty of the original. If you’re not big on playing old games, install some mods like Deus Ex Revision, and give it a shot.

Hitman

After Hitman: Absolution, it seemed that Blood Money would stay the golden standard for silly stealth sandbox shenanigans indefinitely, but IO Interactive surprised us all with Hitman’s new episodic format. For the better part of 2016, we were treated with a new level every month, each featuring a different setting, layout, and pocket universe of NPCs going about their clockwork lives. Agent 47 is the screwdriver you get to jam in wherever you choose. Watching the mechanism break around you (and reacting to it when things go wrong) is central to Hitman’s charm.I like the way Phil put it in his season review: “Strip away the theme and fantasy, and you're left with a diorama of moving parts—a seemingly perfect system of loops, each intersecting to create a complex scene. It's left to you to decide how you want to break it—whether it's by surgically removing key actors, or by violently smashing it all up with guns, bombs and a stuffed moose.”

Supported with a steady stream of updates, including temporary Elusive Targets and remixed levels, it’s still possible to play the entirety of season one in new ways (and season two is already in development). We might be getting a steady stream of Hitman forever, and videogames are better for it.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

In the years since Chaos Theory, Splinter Cell and the majority of stealth games have veered from a focus on purely covert scenarios, and it’s easy to see why. Chaos Theory is a complex, punishing stealth game whose gratification is severely delayed (for the better). Getting through an area without a soul knowing takes pounds of patience and observation, and getting caught is not easy to recover from. It was a slow, arduous crawl, but a crawl unlike any other in the genre, with a level of realism we haven’t seen since. 

Accompanied by a Sam Fisher at peak Jerk Cowboy, as difficult as it was, we laughed through the pain. The multiplayer was also a bold experiment in asymmetry at the time, pitting Sam-Fishery spies against first-person shooting soldiers in a tense game of hide and seek.

Thief 2

Alongside Deus Ex, the Thief series introduced new variables to stealth games that have since been adopted as a standard nearly across the board. Using light and shadow as central to your visibility, Thief made stealth much more than the visible-or-not dichotomy of implied vision cones. 

The Thief series is still unparalleled in the subtlety of its narrative and environmental design. Jody Macgregor sums it up in a piece on the very subject: “Thief II ramps up the number of secrets within each level, but even with as many as a dozen hidden rooms and stashes to discover their placement is always just as subtle. A shooting range conceals a lever among the arrows embedded in the wall behind the targets, a bookshelf is slightly out of alignment, a glint of light pokes through the edge of a stone in a wall. Compare that to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which sometimes hides one of the many ducts you can climb into behind a crate but more often plonks them into the corner of rooms beside a neon sculpture.”

The first two Thief games are interchangeable as the ‘best’ for most players, so be sure to play them both, but the second takes the cake as a best-of recommendation for working out some UI and AI kinks from the original. But with both games, install a few mods and it’s fairly simple to make them easier on the eyes and our modern design sensibilities. 

Mark of the Ninja

The biggest challenge facing stealth games has always been how to communicate whether or not you’re visible to enemies. While we’re still working out the kinks in 3D games, Mark of the Ninja solved just about every problem with two dimensions. 

Through clear UI cues, it’s easy to tell how much noise you’re making, whether or not a guard can hear it, and what spaces in the environment are completely safe to hide. There’s almost no room for error, at least in how you interpret the environment and your stealthy (or not) status within it. Accompanied by swift, springy platforming control and a robust ninja ability upgrade tree, by the end of Mark of the Ninja the challenge reaches high, but so too does your skill.

Dishonored 2

What surprised me most about Dishonored 2 is the density of its level design. Like other stealthy immersive sims, it features huge levels with any number of potential routes for getting through, but Dishonored 2 is the first to make me want to see every inconsequential alleyway. Nearly every space is as detailed as a room in Gone Home, decorated with natural props and people that tell a specific story. 

There are more systems and choices than ever, and while you explore, how you dispose of or sneak by guards is a playful exercise in self-expression and experimentation. Emily and Corvo have their own unique abilities, and a single playthrough won’t get you all their powers. Summon eldritch tentacle arms to fling psychically chained enemies into the sea, or freeze time and possess a corpse during for a particularly, uh, daring escape. Just make sure not to miss Sokolov’s adventure journals, they’re a treat.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

I think The Phantom Pain’s appeal is best summarized by how everything going wrong typically means everything is actually going well. Samuel’s anecdote from his review is a perfect example: “I forfeited a perfect kill-free stealth run of one mission because I couldn’t get a good enough sniper angle on my target before he took off in a chopper. Sprinting up flights of stairs to the helipad, my victim spotted me just in time for me to throw every grenade in my inventory under the chopper, destroying it, vanquishing him and knocking me over, before I made a ludicrously frantic escape on horseback. It was amazing, and I’m not sure it would’ve been vastly improved had I silently shot the guy and snuck out.” Wish I could’ve seen it, Sam.

For a series to go from weighed down by cutscenes, spouting nonsense about nuclear war and secret Cold War contracts with a few simple stealth sequences to a full blown open world stealth sandbox masterpiece (and on the PC too) was quite the surprise. As a silent Big Boss, there are hundreds of hours of wide open stealth scenarios to tackle in MGS5, despite its thinner second chapter. Systemically, this is one of the most surprising stealth games ever made, and as bittersweet a swan song as Kojima could leave us with before departing Konami for good.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

It took me six months to finish Amnesia. It doesn’t allow you to play stealth games the way you’re used to, and by removing old habits, so goes your sense of security. The sanity mechanic intentionally denies you your habits by distorting your view and slowing down your character while looking at a patrolling enemy monster. Lovely, beautiful, safe, warm light also plays a part. The darker an environment, the sooner you’ll lose sanity, but if you whip out a lantern, guess who’s going to spot it? That gross bag of skin patrolling the halls. The enemy AI isn’t particularly smart or surprising, but in an atmosphere as rich as Amnesia’s you’ll think they were put on this earth to hunt you down, specifically. If you can stomach the scares, it’s a must.

Alien: Isolation

More than an incredible homage to ‘70s futuretech and the world of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece in horror, Alien: Isolation’s chief antagonist is a major step forward in first-person stealth horror design. The alien is a constant, erratic threat. It actively hunts you, listening for every small noise and clue of your presence, hiding in wait above for a sneak attack or—what’s that sprouting from your chest? Nice try. But besides the accomplished alien AI, Isolation makes good on its 25-hour playtime by constantly switching things up. 

As Andy Kelly wrote in his review, “In one level you might lose the use of your motion tracker. In another, the alien won't be around so you can merrily shotgun androids like it's Doom 3. Then your weapons will be taken away, forcing you to make smart use of your gadgets. It does this all the way through, forcing you to adapt and readapt to different circumstances, using all the tools at your disposal.” Alien: Isolation is both a striking, authentic homage to the films, and a consistently creative stealth gauntlet. If you don’t mind getting spooked, don’t miss it.

Invisible, Inc

Invisible, Inc nails the slow tension and tactical consideration of XCOM, but places an emphasis on subversion of enemies and security placements rather than direct confrontation. You’re not an overwhelming offensive force, and getting spotted almost always spells your doom. 

Chris puts it well in our Best Design award from 2015: “To the stealth sim, it introduces completely transparent rules. You always know what your options are, what the likely results of your actions will be, and your choices are always mitigated by resources that you have complete control over. There’s no chance failure, and very little trial and error. You either learn to make all of these totally-fair systems dance, or you fail.”

The turned based format means you get unlimited time to make a decision that would take a split second in a real time stealth game, but because of the extra space for consideration, Invisible Inc. piles on the systems, making every infiltration a true challenge, but one comprised of fair, transparent rule sets. Dishonored may test your sneaking reflexes, but do you have the deep smarts to be a spy? Invisible, Inc will let you know one way or the other.

I once crossed a river on horseback and thought for certain I would die. It rained the day before and the runoff made the water deeper and faster than usual—some grade-A drowning material. But Monty carried me. He waded up to his neck and carried me through the brute force of thousands of pounds of hurtling water like it was nothing more than a mud puddle. When we reached the other side, he turned back towards me, snorted, and took a dump.

At that moment, I knew I would become a videogames writer.

And no one understands the value of a loyal, healthy horse companion better than PC Gamer. They’ve helped us scale vertical cliffsides in Skyrim, disable tanks with their poops in Metal Gear Solid 5, and be less angry than normal when we couldn’t fast travel The Witcher 3. They’re also very pretty and I like the noises they make. 

But the time for sharing the love is over, as we've decided to declare the best horse in PC gaming through rigorous horse analysis. Tuck that shirt in, champ your bit, and let’s ride.

Round 1: Gait

The Appaloosa Horse Club—who sell some great Appaloosa-themed Idaho license plates, by the way—are my go-to for equine facts and criteria for showmanship and competition. To have a baseline acceptable gait, and I’m judging by Western style riding standards, a horse must “move straight and true at the walk.” Some horses, in games and real life, skitter at the sight of a small rock or pull over to snack on tall grass whenever they like. They’ll zigzag on easy terrain and take alternate paths on a whim. The perfect videogame horse knows where you want to go before you do. It can’t turn on a dime, but eases into your key presses without hesitation, and won’t tear off into the woods without checking with you first. Riding a horse is an exercise in trust, and if your horse is coded to be an erratic jerk, there’s nothing true left to walk for.

Roach: If Roach’s gait were true, I’d trust her, but damn, if I give Roach the smallest bit of leeway, she’s happy to take me on a trip down whatever fork in the path she feels like while clipping every fruit stand and fencepost on the way. 

Battlefield 1 horse: With reliable, steady gaits and just enough resistance on the reins to make them feel alive, the Battlefield 1 horses are great companions to ride. But in the trenches their surety and truth dissolves into nothing. Once they’re stuck in a trench, their otherwise reliable trots trot off while I jam the keys and fruitlessly try to lead them by the reins with my gun hands. War truly is hell.

D-Horse: It’s hard to properly assess D-Horse since most of Metal Gear Solid 5’s terrain is fairly flat, but even at top speeds, D-Horse keeps a steady back. When it comes to obstacles, though, D-Horse is a fickle creature, uncertain where to go or what to do with the slightest bump in the path. There’s a reason you can send D-Horse into the sky with a fulton parachute on demand. 

(Winner) Skyrim horse: Skyrim horse does not falter. They’ll try to climb cliff faces, invisible walls, visible walls, and even fly with the right console commands. (Every good horse knows a few console commands, eg AddShout Giddiyap, ModApple +1000, AntialiasMane_ON.) Problem is, they move like personal gravity isn’t a thing, trotting in a floaty way that highlights how their pace doesn’t match the length of their gait. But an odd, unrealistic gait doesn’t matter so long as it’s true and straight, which makes a loose adherence to gravity a pretty handy tool against mountainsides in your way.

Round 2: Mane attraction

Let’s talk about hair. There are a few traditional ways to groom and prepare a horse’s mane, and while they all serve a specific purpose, there is one objectively best way to do it: braiding. It utilizes the horse’s natural mane to make an impossible maze of mesmerizing, twisted strands while also keeping the hair out of way of riding implements and impacting the horse’s performance. Other methods include pulling or thinning, in which the mane is trim that still has weight and substance, but barely fills out half the nape, which is a horse crime. Banding uses rubber bands to make your horse look like a big joke, one tiny clump at a time. In a videogame, a mane shouldn’t make you laugh, it should make you feel unworthy and grateful because it doesn’t matter if you have level 99 dragonbone armor—you only look as good as your horse does.

Roach: In the complex horse lexicon, roach actually means to shave a poor creature’s mane down to its neck. But in The Witcher 3, Roach actually has a fairly lengthy mane. Geralt is definitely going for irony, but to use an otherwise healthy horse’s mane and its identity as the butt of a joke shows the two have some work to do before they can even take mane fashion seriously, let alone riding.

Battlefield 1 horse: A thinned mane isn’t a great starting point for this war boy, but with some subtle hair physics and a few longer loose strands, it looks like the Battlefield 1 horse has had a few weeks to let things grow a bit wilder than normal. If only a little wild was enough.

D-Horse: With a pulled and thinned mane, D-Horse won’t stop any single horses in their tracks, but his hair is functional and sleek despite its simple, compromised design. That said, after completing the game you get can equip the optional Furicorn skin, which gives D-Horse a demonic obsidian mohawk. It’s not exactly elegant and there’s no subsection in the Appaloosa Horse Club Handbook stating criteria for ideal rock spine arrangement, but it’s 100-percent better than roaching the sucker.

(Winner) Skyrim horse: Mods don’t disqualify horses from presentation categories since combing through arcane folders and unzipping files requires the exact same skillset as running a comb through a horse's mane. And with a few mods, you can give your Skyrim horse the braided mane they deserve. I can’t find a mod that does that, which falls to the community, but I understand the difficulty of making something so impossibly perfect. The potential for one to exist is enough for Skyrim horse to take the cake here. The Immersive Horses mod is a good starting point, bringing new breeds, commands, and some gorgeous natural manes to the table.

Round 3: Life Force

You won’t find this section in the Appaloosa Horse Club Handbook, but I have no doubt it’s a regular topic of debate among the board at every monthly potluck (Deborah makes some mean scalloped potatoes). When a good horse trots into a room, people turn their heads and recognize that yes, this is a horse, four legs, hooves—the whole rigamarole. A great horse trots into a room, though, and people know it without looking. They feel it. Also, they smell pretty bad, so that helps. But the ideal horse should carry an unseen energy, an inner glow that says, I’m a horse, my legs are big, and rivers are very easy to cross. Sidenote: can I have an apple? In videogames, this comes across best when a horse behaves like it isn’t a wire mesh and a few shades of brown.

Roach: There’s life force in Roach, but not in the ways that align with horse excellence. Were Roach to attempt what insiders call the ‘Triangle of Truth’ by walking the perimeter of a triangle in alternating walks and trots, he’d no doubt veer off path and into a pile of monsters, then get spooked and rear back, knocking Geralt to the ground. It’s a good demonstration of personality and life, but not in the ways that make a virtual horse an excellent riding and emotional companion. 

Battlefield 1 horse: The Battlefield horse has some pretty good idle animations. It whinnies, shakes out its mane, and flicks its tail. But you could drop a nuclear bomb half a mile away and they wouldn’t flinch. During a terrible twist in which I turned on my own horse, convinced they were a robot or phantasm assuming the visage of a horse, I held a flamethrower to their face and emptied the fuselage. What I found inside was unspeakable.

Skyrim horse: There’s no need to peer inside the Skyrim horse’s head to know it’s an empty vessel. While it’s the most mobile and powerful of every videogame horse, it sacrificed soul for functionality and took on the traits of a big hunk of styrofoam in the process. 

(Winner) D-Horse: I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday (not apples or barley, so what could it be?), but I can recall something someone said in a film theory class I took nearly a decade ago. Showing someone on the toilet in a movie is one of the most effective tools in establishing the diegesis, or universe, of the film. Doing so implies that this person ate off camera, went through the digestive process, and had to perform a mundane, regular, and highly relatable ritual. Similarly, by showing us D-Horse defecating and letting us use that to spin out jeeps so we can parachute them into the sky is key in establishing the sense that Metal Gear Solid 5’s world is a real place, as ridiculous as it is. Thanks to a stinky keystone I can envision D-Horse as a creature with its own desires and daily minutiae, and a livelier companion to spend time with beyond simple transportation and daily horse proximity needs.

Final Round: Graphics

For the final round, we’ll be reviewing what makes every videogame horse really stand out: the graphics. Graphics, as the Appaloosa Horse Club defines them, are “the polygons defining the wire mesh of a horse, the textures defining the color and features of the horse, and how those elements are in conversation with one another.” A few pages later, they summarize, stating each horse, “...should look pretty rad at 140Hz.” We couldn’t agree more, but it’s also one of the more difficult categories to rate, since every horse is beautiful, unique, shining, and eternal, and as such should be graded according to its own scale and not in any competition at all, actually. Oops.

Roach: Very Polish-ed. Huge, detailed muscles, but has a head that clips through physical objects, including its own body. Not a great look for a horse.

D-Horse: A very regular model with light contouring to give the impression that this horse could be lifted into the sky via parachute with ease. Good butt.

Skyrim horse: With a few mods they can look real enough to reach out and touch, or like a sabertooth tiger wearing cyber armor, a very rare horse indeed.

Battlefield 1 horse: Looks like a very realistic horse from the outside. Cosmic horror on the inside.

Winner: All horses

PC Gamer's pick for Best Horse goes to...

Skyrim’s horses take the cake, despite having dated animations and eyes deader than a mudcrab. They win because they’re the most expressive and diverse of the bunch thanks to mods. Granted, it’s never about what you want, but what you can do for them.

If a horse wants to be a flaming hell skeleton, it can. If it wants better animations, it can have them. If it wants a lush river of a mane, no problem. What color? We have them all. Skyrim’s horses can grow to the size of a mountain and snort to slay dragons. They can be smaller than an apple, which is sort of every horse’s dream, really. They can become deities of Skyrim, perfect in every way (except for the smell, that’s always going to be part of the deal). 

The only thing modding can’t do for a horse is program it to respect you, but a real horse’s mind is just as insurmountable, deserving of dedication and patience and no other expectation than for the privilege to simply get to and fro. Also, the Battlefield 1 horse was pretty cool, but I just couldn’t get over how creepy their eyeballs look from the inside.

I played Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain for about 30 hours in order to write my review. Over a year later, I've managed to put in another 60 hours on top of that, some of which had a purpose, but a lot of which could also be categorised as dicking around. Long after I'd cleared the final mission, 'The Truth', which I think everyone hated except me, I found myself going back to the occupied sprawls of Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border to perform hit-and-runs alongside my fictional dog, or to clear out outposts in record time by arcing grenades from atop hills and cliffs. Before I knew it, I'd played MGS 5 even more than GTA 5, and had long forgotten what Snake was even doing in Afghanistan. Something about deleting language and skeleton men? I dunno. Someone wore a bikini, it made no sense.

MGS 5 has a near endless nature to it that I love. While playing through the story lets players get to grips with the majority of basic weapons and upgrades available to Snake, the coolest toys are deliberately put out of reach within the game's vast upgrade trees, or gated behind objectives in specific side ops. This progression system gradually empowers the player like a great RPG does, expanding from a limited suite of useful weapons to a vast armoury of explosives, firearms and novelty costumes for Snake and his allies.

As a result, it's simply not the same game after 90 hours as it is after five or ten. Your understanding of how MGS 5's stealth and combat systems grows as your arsenal does. For the Ground Zeroes prologue and the first few missions of The Phantom Pain, I remember everything feeling a little overwhelming as I learned how navigating the world worked, and how the AI behaved. The game slowly builds up your confidence by letting you experiment with more and more toys to find your ideal loadout.

By my 90th hour with the game, I carry a robot hand the Hand of Jehuty, from Hideo Kojima's own cult mech PS2 series, Zone of the Enders that can drag a pursuing soldier from 20 feet away to Snake in a daze, so I can immediately knock them out. I own a Parasite Suit, which emulates the supernatural abilities of the game's irritating skull soldiers. My fulton recovery system, which once yanked soldiers into the sky for extraction, now opens a portal through time and space to deliver a goat back to my base. At this point, my Snake is basically a superhero. Not just because of these novel upgrades, but because the game essentially requires you to teach yourself how to use them effectively.

The journey to unlocking all of this has been a slow burn, but also exciting. With no narrative thread to follow anymore, every side op is an opportunity for experimentation. I play The Phantom Pain like I play GTA that attitude of, let's take all of these toys out for a spin and see what sort of trouble I can cause. You couldn't really play the previous Metal Gears in the same way, since the levels were narrow and linear by design. Few sandbox games are constructed to be played from as many angles as this, and I'd personally argue that none are as precise to control or as customisable.

Metal Gear Solid 5 is designed to be living and endless. It's a truly generous single-player game that still challenges you to experiment with your strategies, and I think its best moments come well after the credits.

When most games end, they attempt to wrap up the plot with a neat bow, completing character arcs and leaving plot threads tangled ever so lightly, just to leave enough ambiguity open for a potential sequel. It s nice! I like it when games feel self-contained, when I can go to bed at night with the entirety of the experience neatly laid out in my mind s eye like an intricate quilt of motivations and rising and falling action. I don t have to think anymore, it s over with, resolved. But the games that push back against resolution and bury themselves in my subconscious are the ones that stick, for better or worse. Some defy the expected structure of the game and cut things off before they get started, others spin out into surreal nightmare experiments that would keep David Lynch up at night. Because we re directly involved with pushing the game towards a conclusion, it s when they attempt to subvert and rattle my senses rather than ride along with them that I feel most vulnerable and why I ll always fear Regis Philbin. Find out why in our list of some of the most abrupt, bizarre game endings out there. Spoiler warning: it should be obvious, but we re going to talk about some of the most surprising moments in these games, and some are fairly recent, so proceed with caution.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain 

I remember being pretty dissatisfied with the ending of Metal Gear Solid 5, but in the rearview, I think it s only because it comes after a slow, repetitive second act when compared to the first. But the big twist is actually pretty cool. In the end, it s revealed that the player character was in fact not Big Boss, but the Phantom , an MSF medic that the original Big Boss used as a front to work behind the scenes. After the helicopter crash in Ground Zeroes, Big Boss took the opportunity to use hypnotherapy and plastic surgery to make you a spitting image of him. As a metaphor, it s a sweet gesture, one that indicates MGS players were an important force in the long term success of the series, and for lore aficionados, it plugs in a few plot holes in its half-century span.

The Stanley Parable - the art ending 

In a grand test of patience (and the essential act of playing a videogame), The Stanley Parable s strangest ending involves pressing a big red button to prevent a cardboard baby from entering a fire. A few hours in and another button is thrown into the mix, this time preventing a cardboard puppy from drowning. Juggling those two buttons for a few more hours will reveal the true meaning of art to the player if they re patient enough. It s an interesting test in player motivation, and unsurprisingly, it didn t take long for someone to get through it. Anything for art.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire - Regis flips

Who knew trauma could come in a cereal box? Regis Philbin, host of the once popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire provided his voice and likeness for a free CD version of the game that came with General Mills cereal for a limited time back at the turn of the millennium. But CD Regis has no chill. It s not just during the player select screen that he runs out of patience with lightning ferocity, Regis loses his shit if you take long doing nearly anything at all. If you don t type your name, he ll type Kathie Lee and the questions will be easier, and if you don t answer during the Fastest Finger contest, Regis gets angry and turns the game off. If I spent my formative years living in a dark cell full of Honey Nut Cheerios, I m not sure I d have the greatest disposition either, I suppose. Just leave Kathie out of this.

Far Cry 4 - finished in 15 minutes

During the earliest moments of Far Cry 4 you meet Pagan Min, the murky, unhinged antagonist. After a tense scene at the dinner table, he ll leave to attend to an urgent matter. Most players typically bail at this point I mean, Pagin licks your mother s ashes off his finger. I d bail too. But if you wait it out 15 minutes or so, he ll return and take you to your mother s grave, which is where you wanted to go in the first place. So you spread her ashes, feel feelings, and then Min asks if you re ready to shoot some goddamn guns. Credits roll and the game ends at which point most folks take Min s advice and start over. I do wonder about the one person that found that ending and returned the game, or possibly felt like it worked and never touched Far Cry 4 again. If you exist, email me.

Silent Hill 2 - Dogs rule the world

There isn t much to say about the secret dog ending in Silent Hill 2. It s baffling. By finding the Dog Key and entering the observation room of the Lakeview Hotel, James opens the door to find Mira, a shiba inu, operating a series of buttons and levers. He breaks down, in disbelief that a dog was behind the series of nightmarish events that led him to this point. It s popularly considered a joke ending, but I ll die on the canon hill. I mean, the credits are a dopey montage of clips featuring characters from the game set to a song sung by the powerful pooch in a series of barks and yips. It s adorable, and given the context, absolutely horrifying.

Dishonored - a foiled plot 

OK, so this one isn t a fair entry since it requires taking advantage of some game-breaking glitches, but it s too funny to leave out. At the beginning of Dishonored, Corvo is framed for the assassination of the empress and kidnapping her daughter. The event sets up the rest of the game, a dozen or so hours of infiltration missions set across Dunwall. At Summer Games Done Quick, speedrunner DrTChops showed us how he could prevent the assassination and kidnapping from happening at all, as broken as his method might be. Watch the video to see him work his way toward the assassins before they initiate their attack and kill them, at which point the screen kicks to black. It s a silly Groundhog s Day solution to a problem that doesn't really need solving, and a funny demonstration of games can be entertaining long after their intent has been exhausted.

Start the video at 16:42:00 to see for yourself.

Furi - life in paradise 

Before attacking The Stranger, the sixth boss The Song gives him a chance to hang out with her on her floating island Oasis for eternity. If you walk on by, she ll get angry and attack you, but if you hang out in on the island for a while, she ll thank you, talk about your lovely future together, and the credits will roll. For a game all about intense, intimate combat, I was pleasantly surprised to find an option hidden in the halfway point that rewards the exact opposite.

Portal 2 - Space! 

Portal 2 s closing moments acknowledge that there s no such thing as a perfect ending. There will always be loose threads, plot holes, and burning questions, so Valve opted instead for a soothing salve: the musical number. After defeating Wheatley by shooting a portal on the moon and banishing him to space as if this ending wasn t rad enough GLaDOS returns to her big robot body and instead of killing you, asks to be left alone. Freedom is imminent, but on the elevator ride up turrets big and small and leopard-printed sing a final farewell song before you re coughed up into a field of golden wheat with a scorched companion cube for company. Hooray? Hooray.

Inside - the blob

I think about Inside on a weekly basis now how it uses a slight, subdued color palette and precise animations to communicate more powerful bits of body horror than the best in the biz. Whether it s the shake of a dog s head as it rips at the leg of a small boy or the light crunch and irregular fold after miscalculating a dangerous leap, Inside knows how to do discomfort. And no moment demonstrates it better than the final 15 to 20 minutes of the game, where the player character is subsumed into an amorphous blob of writhing, moaning limbs. You help the blob escape the facility, bursting through panes of bulletproof glass, over an unlucky person or two, and eventually through the outermost wall of the facility, limbs scraping and clawing and twisting all the while.

To see such a confusion of familiar human pieces and pained voices come together as something inhuman, and then to help the horrifying inhuman thing achieve a goal is one of the more trying exercises in empathy I ve experienced in a game. And it worked. After escaping and rolling down a forested hill, the blob comes to rest on the beach. The voices go silent and the limbs go limp. A ray of light splits through the clouds, the waves gently lap at the shore. I felt relief for the creature, glad it finally had a chance to rest. The credits roll and it s over. Why do I feel good?

Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy - uhhh 

I played this game from tip to toe in one or two sittings when it came out and I still can't parse what's going on here. It s hard to believe that the amazing opening diner sequence wasn t even close to an indication of what was coming. In the span of a few hours, Indigo Prophecy went from covering up a unintentional murder with police on the way in a timed, consequential adventure game format, to whatever this is. There s flying dudes with some cyber powers I think. They fight in the air and shoot colored lines at one another. Something about figuring out what to do with his new cyber powers, a big storybook tree, and the credits roll. Someone please translate.

The Witness - Urine Jug: Origins

I have to hand it to The Witness. For a game all about drawing lines, it really carries the theme through in the true ending. After riding the Wonka elevator into the sky and getting the credits, if you continue in a new game, a certain sky-themed puzzle might pop out at you from the very first room you start in. Theoretically, you can finish The Witness in the first minute of playing it. After you figure it out, a door opens and you get a behind the scenes, upscale-hotel-looking tour of a previously invisible building. There are some audio logs lying around that speak the credits aloud, and at the end, well.You pass through the darkness and into the real world via a short video shot by a camera attached to Jonathan Blow s head. He meanders around the development studio, noticing patterns from The Witness all around him before looking up into the sky as the shot fades to white.