GTA 5: San Andreas Stories #1

Please Note: Minor Spoiler Warning

Trevor is by far GTA 5's most psychopathic character, but his dangerous nature gives far more justification for violence than Franklin or Michael. The question is whether you're going to go along with it.

Trevor, as you probably know, is a, umm, complicated guy. He kills people all the time; he has sex with the eyeballs of teddybears, and - most horribly of all - he wears suits that make him look like he's modelling BeetleJuice's new collection. His very first act of violence in Blaine County is to stamp a man to death, right after he's had sex with his victim's girlfriend. He's that sort of guy.

In short, playing as him leads to the sort of horrible nonsense that would get you locked up should you admit to doing it. Which I'm going to do right now (see you in 15-20...).

One of the joys of the Grand Theft Auto series is stumbling across new areas and new territory which invariably contain new stuff to play around with. This sense of exploration is compounded by the fact that, in almost all the games, if you can see it you can explore/drive/kill it. Remember the 747 in San Andreas?

GTA 5 takes this to another level, with more vehicles, more secrets, more of everything to find. There's also far more people to interact with (above and beyond running them over, I mean) on the streets of the city: plenty of them will need your help, and it's not just the homeless that find themselves in need of assistance.

I encountered two such citizens while cruising around in Trevor's horrible, battered old redneck wagon. After a hard day's night of setting up heists and generally being the societal equivalent of a fart in a lift, I ran into two drunks outside a bar. Both were in no fit state to drive, so I agreed to give one of them a lift home. (Moral: friends don't let drunk friends get into a car with the child of Jack Nicholson's Joker and Hunter S. Thompson's Raoul Duke.)

This stranger's house, as pointed out on the map, was in Los Santos, and everything started off well enough. Doing good deeds for strangers in the game can lead to large rewards – one victim you help turns out to be an investment millionaire who will give you stock for your good deeds.

So, when I started driving frat boy home, I did so with nothing but good, if self-serving, intentions. But as I was on the road, a little message popped up saying I could, instead, drop him off at a mountain-dwelling cult. You know the type: the sort of people who, if they offer you a drink, you should definitely say no.

Obviously, I chose to take my drunk friend to the guys in robes and the fierce resistance to normalcy.

Why? Well, it seemed like something that Trevor would do, and I swerved off onto the coastal highway with little hesitation. Ludonarrative dissonance – where a player or character's actions are at odds with the narrative – is something that's brought up a lot where GTA is concerned, and rightly so. Here, no such claims could be made. Trevor's a bastard, I wanted my reward, and these guys would no doubt give it to me. Forget about what they would potentially do to this chump.

Many of you have probably done this exact side-quest: it's not particularly original. But, to me at least, it would become quietly horrifying. By the time I'd hit the halfway point in the journey, the juxtaposition was chilling. Cruising down the highway in the bright morning sun of la-la-land, it looked like an advert for pre-packaged peace of mind. Between drunken boasting and vomiting, the passenger would occasionally say things like 'this doesn't look like the right way'' before returning to moaning about his drinking buddy's kids. Occasionally, he'd talk about what he was going to watch when he got in, what he was going to eat.

Of course, he never was going to get home. I was, in all probability, driving him to his death, like a cab firm run by James Dean. It genuinely unsettled me, in a way that few games or films do. It was the banality of it all: Trevor (me) trundling along without a care in the world, making little asides to his passenger, who was too drunk to care. Of all the things I've seen him do in the game - which isn't all of them, I admit - nothing was as creepy as this little exchange.

My passenger didn't end up making it to his destination. He ended up dead, his body horribly twisted in a ravine halfway up the mountain after a run-in with some local bikers went bad. Seconds later, I ran down back down to the highway below and hijacked someone's car, shooting at least three people in the face as I did so. But for all the high-visibility murder, the explosions, and the rampages, it was this little drive - the sheer mundane nature of it, and the violence that inevitably followed - that remains the most unsettling thing I've done in GTA 5 so far.