Killer7 is not a great video game, but it is so staggeringly creative and so politically astute that it deserves your attention. It is surreal, it is frightening, it is disorienting, and its mood swings from bleak to giddy and back without any regard for the sensitivities of its players. If you play late at night, you will wonder if this is really happening or if you are hallucinating.

First, the parts that make sense. It is sometime in the near future. After a brief time of global harmony, a monstrous and savage organization called the Heaven Smile stages a massive suicide bomb attack at the UN, turning the goodwill and plans of thousands of diplomats into bloody ash and throwing the globe into panic.

No one really knows what the Heaven Smile want, besides terror. The best guess is that there isn't anything else. Their faces twisted into horrifying grimaces, their eyes buggy and strained, they wander through public spaces seeking out victims, alongside whom they will blow themselves up.

This is new territory for art in general, but it is completely uncharted for video games. Suicide bombing is at once baffling and terrifying, and somehow it dredges up uglier emotions and dread that gnaws deeper than any of the terror tactics of decades past ever could. We want to know what could possibly motivate anyone to do such a thing, and there is no answer, because the mindspace that asks the question has nothing at all in common with the mindspace that sets off the belt of explosives. Trying to understand suicide bombing is like trying to imagine what it is like to be a bat.

Killer7 hangs on this point. We are curious, and we want desperately for someone to tell us what's going on and when will everything be OK, and there is no answer, and everywhere we turn we encounter something else that makes no sense and grins at us with another flavour of nihilistic bloodlust. Heaven Smile is unknowable.

We play as the Killer 7, seven highly-trained assassins who may just be multiple personalities in a single head. We don't know. Some of us are brutish and good with heavy guns. Some of us are quiet and small. All of us are named "Smith." When one of us dies, another comes along and collects the body (which is a paper bag dripping blood), and nurses us back to life and health in front of a glowing television set.

TV is the seat of power. We use TV to switch from one personality to another, and we use TV to trade bombers' blood for new skills and more vigorous health. TV is a vending machine dispensing mother's milk.

The play experience is highly disorienting. We walk forward by pushing a button, and when we come to a crossroad we can sometimes choose a direction, but mostly we just stomp ahead with brazen confidence. Our gait belies the turmoil in our heads. The Heaven Smile bombers are nearly invisible, so perfectly do they blend in with the darkness. They hide in plain sight, and only when we pay close attention can we even point our guns at them.

The floors and the walls are all the same colour. We navigate by looking for shadows. Sometimes a man in a red suit with a mask drops down from the ceiling to offer advice. His hands are tied behind his back, and he speaks in a honking garble of nightmarish sounds, but somehow we understand him. A rope pulls him back. We carry forward.

In a few years, all this will probably seem quaint and pretentious and, if things are looking up in diplomatic circles, cartoonishly bleak. But today, in the first decade of the 21st century, it has the power to chill, and to nauseate, and to terrify. It is a game utterly of its time. Its ugliness is beautiful.