One of the best things about the Max Payne series is its selection of fictional in-universe TV shows. As you rampage across New York City on your bloody, slow-motion quest for vengeance, you'll frequently be stopped in your tracks by something weird, funny, or otherwise interesting playing on a TV set in the corner of a room. Quirky shows like medieval soap opera Lords and Ladies, Saturday morning-style cartoon The Adventures of Captain Baseball Bat Boy, or corny '70s cop show Dick Justice are always worth catching before you reload your pistol and resume the carnage. They make the world feel richer, but serve a narrative purpose too, often reflecting or commenting on Max's own story.
But there's one show, featured in Max Payne 2 that you can tell writer Sam Lake really had fun with. In the Max Payne universe, Address Unknown was a hit series in the 1990s, before vanishing into relative obscurity. It's about a paranoid man being haunted by otherworldly spirits, including a pink flamingo who talks backwards and a menacing doppelgänger. It's an obvious riff on Mark Frost and David Lynch's supernatural soap opera Twin Peaks—a show that has inspired many Remedy games. Address Unknown's moody jazz score, red-draped dream world, surreal dialogue, and sinister tone are pure Peaks. It's a brilliantly observed homage, and it's clear Lake enjoyed channelling Frost and Lynch when he wrote it.
This show is also the basis of Max Payne 2's most memorable level, and one of Remedy's greatest creations—the Address Unknown funhouse. Address Unknown was cancelled when ratings plummeted, mirroring the equally unceremonious cancellation of Twin Peaks, for similar reasons, in 1991. This bizarre Coney Island theme park, built when the show was the most popular thing on TV, was quickly abandoned when the show ended, and now lies fading, dilapidated, and forgotten. In its heyday it was a way for fans to relive the events of the series, but now it's falling apart. You can almost smell the rotten wood. Max is here to track down his ally and lover, Mona Sax, who's been using the place as a hideout.
This is a pretty typical Max Payne level in the sense that it's a linear series of cleverly choreographed set-pieces—although there's no combat whatsoever. The name of the chapter, A Linear Sequence of Scares, pokes fun at itself—as does some of Max's dialogue. "A funhouse is a linear sequence of scares," he monologues in that deep, dry voice of his. "Take it or leave it, it's the only choice given. It makes you think about free will. Have our choices been made for us?" BioShock is often praised for its self-referential commentary on the linear, prescribed nature of video games, where the player is nothing but an obedient slave to the will of the developer—but Max Payne 2 beat it by almost five years.
However, in every other sense, the Address Unknown funhouse is anything but a typical level. Max makes his way through a swirling, psychedelic tunnel representing the show's protagonist slipping into madness, then appears on the streets of Noir York. The city is constructed from boards of painted plywood, with flat cardboard cars juddering back and forth on rails. The atmosphere is deeply weird, soundtracked by the same dark, Angelo Badalamenti-inspired jazz music previously heard playing on the game's TV sets. This stylised, exaggerated version of New York contrasts sharply with the gritty, grounded realism of the game's other urban environments in a way that is incredibly uncanny and unsettling.
Max steps absent-mindedly into a cage and, as the door slams shut and locks him in, is surrounded by a gang of twitching cardboard cut-outs of doctors wielding giant syringes—before being droppe🗹d into an asylum filled with disturbing scenes of patients being mistreated and experimented oꦏn. Later, he appears in an even more stylised, dreamlike version of Noir York, with skewed Tim Burton-esque architecture, giant mouths filled with rows of chattering teeth, and backwards-talking pink flamingos. As you move through the level, the layout is constantly shifting and changing around you, adding to the uneasy, disorientating sensation of being trapped in a feverish, never-ending nightmare.
Then, once you've survived this strange gauntlet, you get a glimpse behind the curtain. Max finds his way backstage, to the workshops and storage areas hidden behind the plywood facade of Noir York. These areas are littered with junk and props, including those syringe-wielding doctors from earlier, stacked haphazardly against a wall—presumably as replacements in case one breaks. Seeing the inner workings of the funhouse is a nice change of scenery. It's also an opportunity for Remedy to show off its, at the time, advanced physics engine, with many enticing piles of precariously stacked objects waiting to be knocked over. Knocking over a stack of paint cans is about as action-packed as this level gets.
The Address Unknown funhouse is only about six minutes long and you don't fire a single shot in it—so the fact people still talk about it today should give you an idea of how impactful it is. It's everything I love about Remedy games condensed into a single level. It's weird, mischievous, and strongly themed, with a dark, surreal atmosphere that makes it unmistakably a creation of the studio. It's also a precursor to what it would go on to do with Control—particularly the Ashtray Maze, which has a lot in common spiritually and aesthetically with this place. Max Payne is mainly remembered for its dramatic slow-motion firefights and comic book cutscenes, but the level design is just as memorable.