http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2007/06/25/vs-mode-on-manhunt-2-round-1-fight.aspx
I have a lot of thoughts about the game that I want share with you, I hardly where to begin. The thing you know the least about my Manhunt 2 session is how I experienced the first level, because it's the only one I played when you were in a different room.
The first level of Manhunt 2 is the only one that matches the description most reporters--including myself--have used to explain the game: it has the player controlling Daniel Lamb, escaping an insane asylum where something has gone horribly wrong, the helpful voice of a guy names Leo accompanying him with each step. We'll talk more about this level later, I'm sure, but rest easy knowing I experienced its highs and lows. I got Daniel urinated on by one angry inmate still behind bars. I discovered another who had hung himself. I performed my first stealth kill--with a syringe--and watched Daniel vomit because of his quick-passing guilt. I learned to sneak around and figured out how to get past some characters without killing them. I learned the motion controls and swiped the Wii's movement-sensitive remote sharply one way then another to knock a man's head off with an axe. I made my escape. I played the part of a crazy man.
It was dark. It was brutal. It was horrific. It implicated me as a role-player in some vile actions. It was all exacerbated by something that may have been intentional or may have been a programming bug or been intentional, I don't know. The Wii remote has a speaker, and about halfway into my progress in the level, the remote started emitting crackling static. The pattern of the static kept switching. It didn't seem to relate to any particular action on the screen, and it bothered me. It made me uncomfortable, physically, because it was annoying. It was as if I played half the level while sitting on a thumbtack. The interactivity and design of the level kept me engaged and wanting to know what I was going to have to do next. Some would say that qualified the level as being "fun." But my innate discomfort because of the static--to say nothing of other elements in the level--prevented me from getting any joy from the level. Instead, I played it... perturbed. It made me feel a little crazy, like an asylum inmate.
I was so taken with Manhunt is because of what you mentioned in your opener: the man who has rescued you from execution and brought you to the abandoned town of Carcer City, where you must kill or be killed, all for his amusement. And as you point out, he gives you orders through your earpiece. He tells you where to go. He tells you what to do. He tells you what minimum level of violence he'll accept in the surveillance camera-meets-snuff film killings that you must commit for his pleasure before he will open the doors or gates that will let you proceed to the next area. He sounds awfully familiar, doesn't he? His name? The Designer--I mean, the Director. Yes, at the heart of Manhunt is a brilliantly twisted joke. Rockstar grabs the translucent veil of mildly disreputable innocuousness in which most action titles cloak themselves, tears it open and exposes the sinister truth that lies just beneath the surface: in an awful lot of videogames, the developer and the publisher are asking you to virtually kill an awful lot of virtual enemies, over and over and over again. Manhunt is just more honest about this than most, and cleverly, brutally so to boot.
There is also alot of info about the AO rating as well.
