Castle Wolfenstein

METAL GRRRR

Okay, it's more rudimentary than that, but a valiant first attempt at making a game where your primary tactic for escape involves actually not killing people. Your bullets are scarce and you're very likely to fuck up plentifold in your way if you carelessly wipe out your supply and the grenades, which you use for elite troops(the bullet-proof SS). You can stop and frisk enemies at gun point and steal precious ammo from them, and don disguises ala Hitman in an incredibly advanced game for its time.

Still, in spite of all the attempts to make Castle Wolfenstein as Hitmany as possible(meaning you don't want to alarm the guards in any way), the game is best approached as a prototypical Hotline Miami. It's much easier and faster to take the effort into gunning down the enemies with precision, as that way you get lots of loot and the opportunity to open chests safely and plan your next move. As commendable as it is for the creators to try to turn this into a stealth game, the glaring oversight is that it is much more rewarding to play the game in an opposite direction.

And speaking of stealthy play, the chests take a LONG time frame to open. This can be purposefully sped up by shooting the locks, which is just a terrible mechanic generally. You will have to live with having to open chests for many hours to find the secret plans before you escape, but if you try to look past it, it's a computer game that's incredibly engaging for the time sphere it was made in. It's not an mind-numbing arcade port, or a slow and frustrating RPG or an indecipherable text adventure game. It's the real stuff.