Mafia III is teeming with vile racism and horrific violence, but none of its distressing moments are as unsettling as its ability to make these extremes feel normal. A pulpy revenge tale set in an ersatz 1968 New Orleans, it drags players into an unceasing spiral of death and destruction so monotonous that all your face-stabbing and head-stomping, the brutality of which is shocking at first, becomes routine labor to be mindlessly accomplished in a murder-happy fugue state. That the gruesomeness grows dull and natural is nothing new for video games, but there’s an extreme tedium to Lincoln Clay’s war against the Marcano crime family that is more resonant than the numbness of Mafia III’s Grand Theft Auto-biting brethren. There’s hardly ever a reason to step back from this violent campaign and examine what you’ve done, a single-mindedness that reflects Lincoln’s own. But when the game does take the time to shake you from that homicidal trance, it does so with meaningful interventions that bring Lincoln’s disturbing blindness and selfish motives into question.
More disquieting is the game’s depiction of racism. You’re playing as a black man in the American South during a time where hate and prejudice were (even more) the norm. Mafia III uses the explicit horrors of this reality—America’s reality, both then and now—to fuel Lincoln’s bloodlust. I’d be lying if I told you there weren’t a thrill to it, knowing that the men you’re mutilating are racist pigs. But there’s also a cheapness to some of its tactics. Given the time period and the subject matter, you expect to hear racial slurs a certain amount and in certain contexts. It’s there to bring a verisimilitude and a constant reminder of the hate Lincoln and black Americans are up against. When used well, like in a scene where Lincoln is about to execute a gunman who refuses to call him anything but “nigger,” it’s a powerful tool for building to a quick catharsis. But there are far too many instances where the game is content to awkwardly slip that word in just to get quick rile. It’s meant to demonstrate how despicable these mafiosi are, but it comes off as a cartoonish and cheap way to get the blood boiling.
Mafia III also takes time to surface racism’s more subtle forms, and it’s in these moments that it becomes a powerful and relevant mirror. New Bordeaux, the city in which Lincoln is rampaging across, is home to segregated businesses whose owners will threaten you if you wander in. A senator’s campaign has plastered its posters all over the city, promising the same old implicitly racist “defense of traditional values” that has defined American conservatives for decades. No matter how good of a citizen you’re being when you walk or drive past a cop, they will always eyeball you, and an indicator shows up on screen to make you aware of their gaze. If you commit a crime in a black neighborhood and someone reports it, you’ll hear a lackadaisical call go out over the police scanner asking the fuzz to show up “if y’all have the time.” They’ll start investigating eventually, probably after you’ve escaped, but you better believe if you commit a hit-and-run on the idyllic avenues of suburban Frisco Fields, the cops will be all over you in a hurry.
These simulations of the more subtle racism millions of Americans experience all the time are infinitely more affecting than some cartoon mafia don vomiting slurs in the privacy of his office. That they’re treated as a normality—something horrible that’s always there, that you can’t overcome, and that you’re just forced to get used to—is the most painful and real part of a game that’s daring enough to color its big-budget revenge tale with a true political stance. The developers at Hangar 13 also deserve credit for recognizing the opportunities an open-world game provides for illustrating this kind of racism and deftly wringing new meaning out of the tired genre. There’s less power in forcing the player to walk into a whites-only bar, for example, than there is in letting them accidentally stumble into one.