Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® Shadows are your weapon

The heart of Splinter Cell is its light. Every shadow comes from a real source, and you can shoot out a lamp, flip a switch or wait for a patrol to pass before crossing a lit corridor. Flip on the night vision and the world turns green while enemies stumble around in the dark you made. You creep along walls, hang from pipes, peer around corners, and move at a pace slow enough to hear footsteps through the floor. Getting spotted usually means trouble, so most of the game is spent pressed against brickwork, watching a guard's flashlight sweep past a metre away. It is a slow burn, and the tension is the point.

Missions give you options. You can knock a guard out and hide him in a shadow, or take him down for good. You can grab someone from behind and interrogate him for intelligence, or slip past untouched. Ammo and gadgets like stun shocks run short, so wasting them hurts later. Objectives can be met in more than one way, which makes a second run through a mission feel genuinely different. The story carries you along too: cyberterrorism and international tensions build toward a global catastrophe, and the writing earned its own award back when the game launched.