Nightmare Fuel / Max Payne 3

• The opening cutscene of the game when starting the first mission has Max walking across an airfield towards a severely burned and wounded man with one of his arms missing and him squirming while moaning weakly in the pain that he's in. Initially, we hear Max monologing about his life going downhill to the point that he lost sight of his ability to tell right from wrong. Playing through the game to the end, we discover that this man is a dying Armando Becker mortally wounded from a grenade blast to the face after Max shot it out of the air. He was knowingly cooperating with an organ harvesting ring and his UFE paramilitary police force are spectacularly corrupt and brutal and thus we understand why Max is contemplating executing him after being an Unwitting Pawn in Victor Branco's power-hungry schemes.
• It doubles as Tear Jerker, but if Max seemed unlucky and broken in the second game...it's even worse now. His depression having now worsened, he's become a full-blown alcoholic, who has not only taken up smoking again, but now his reliance on painkillers through the years has caused to develop an addiction to them, with the years once again giving him no respite at all. It's like the entire world exists only to torture him forever and things only ever get worse even at the bottom of his own downward spiral.
• Marcello's death. The poor bastard is subjected to a form of execution called Necklacing, which means the tires he was wrapped in were filled with petrol and he suffered incredibly from the heat of the flames, the heated tires and the toxic fumes given off by the burning tires.
  • And for that matter the brutal deaths of all the Brancos that Max helplessly fails to save, including his boss, Fabiana and Marcello. They were largely innocent people and they meet nasty early deaths.
  • If you don't see the Quick Time Event coming immediately afterwards, Milo Rego attacks with a machete and will tear out Max's throat with it. Of course, winning the fight just has Max returning the favor, complete with blood-gargling sounds straight from Manhunt.
• The ninth chapter deserves special mention; Max, having failed to save Fabiana, progresses further through the favela, where the UFE have started a brutal war with the Commando Sombra. As he fights through the gang members and dirty cops, he finds the UFE either murdering or kidnapping innocent people living in the favela.
  • One particularly disturbing moment sees Max walking in on a trio of UFE members torturing a random man for information by beating him and suffocating him with a plastic bag. The man is desperately pleading with them and is obviously terrified, but the UFE members, either angry with the lack of useful info or just being sadistic monsters, quickly go back to suffocating him, resulting in his death.. The man's screaming and gasping as he suffocates to death is hard to listen to. Max himself is disturbed by the UFE's brutality:
  Max: Man. I was guessing these guys didn't spend their spare time studying the Geneva convention.
• At the climax of the Panama mission, Max discovers the corpses of the ship's passengers heaped on the roof of the museum, surrounded by a massive pool of blood. It becomes even worse when you think of what they must have gone through before they died. They were most likely marched up to the roof, pleading for their lives before being gunned down by the pirates. It gets worse when you realize that it was all because Marcello and Passos hid the blood money from Victor's organ harvesting ring within the ship, most likely without the boat's owner even knowing about it.
• The Imperial Palace hotel, all of it. Not at all helped by the musical backing, which is made up of a series of heartbeat-like theremin sounds being occasionally punctuated by other dissonant sounds.
• Victor Branco's operation involves rounding up the poor and impoverished and harvesting their organs.
  • As frightening as that is, it's how Max reacts to the discovery of it that is most telling. This is a man who has seen his wife and his baby girl dead, seen most of his friends die in front of his eyes and came face-to-face with the screwed up truth behind Valkyr, and faced it all with a pained but stoic attitude with his anger mostly bottled up inside. Here, he's so horrified it takes him a while to comprehend just what he is seeing when he stumbles across it; after he's had time to process what he has seen, he comes quickly to the conclusion of blowing the whole place to hell (which the Cracha Preto planned to do with explosives when it was time to abandon the condemned hotel).
  • When he confronts the villain Neves who has been overseeing the organ harvesting, rather than going into his trademark Tranquil Fury mode, he speaks and acts in a palpable state of unbridled hot Unstoppable Rage for perhaps the first time in the series. It also crosses into Tear Jerker as he's so broken up that he's willing demolish the structure he's standing right on to ensure that he at least finishes his life stopping this waking nightmare.
• The UFE prison Max goes to after turning himself in. It's somewhere you absolutely don't wanna be in, specially if you're familiar with the brutality of Brazilian prisons, where in most cases the police goes as far as allowing inmates to kill other inmates depending on how bad the crime they've commited was. Knowing Max and the trouble he gave to both the police and the scum of São Paulo, who knows what he would've been put through if he hadn't escaped?
  • The place is so bad that, in the cutscene where Max is taken to be interrogated, they pass through many jail cells, one containing a prisoner who hung himself.
• Brazil is depicted much like NYC in the first game - utterly rotten and corrupt to the core. The whole place is like one huge endless nightmare and every faction seems just as evil as one another. You fight against amateur gangsters from poor slums, and while you'd expect to feel sympathy for their plight...you don't because they're utterly vicious and brutal, with no respect at all for human life. Then you meet a radical Right-wing paramilitary fond of burning people alive and committing arbitrary murder...and many of them are off-duty cops. Even the official special ops police force employ torture and remorselessly slaughter innocent people to sell their organs for cash. If Hell exists anywhere on Earth, the Brazil depicted in the game is probably next door to it.