Joshua Trevett is the Managing Editor at Haywire Magazine. He would also like if you listened to his weird music. He’s on Twitter

Here’s a detail I think about a lot: when the character we’re playing as gets injured — shot, let’s say — what does it feel like? There are games where taking just one bullet will really leave us hurting, or outright zero out our health; most of the time though, we can shrug off a lot of hot lead before we begin to worry.

How much do we care about this? For most it doesn’t seem to do much damage to the “power fantasy,” if that’s what we’re here for. Of course, making a hail of gunfire something players can stand up to confidently is an effective way of keeping the action flowing. If we’re looking to take part in a credible narrative though, one which is reinforced by its visuals, it might start to feel a little off. John Wick looks bulletproof because he avoids ever being shot, and if he were to take one to the shin, Keanu and the script would surely work to sell that injury until it’s been treated. In videogames, we don’t usually get that.

And that’s not necessarily trivial. How a character fights should tell us things about that character. But instead, videogames with lots of guns going off tend to show their hand: we weren’t supposed to think much about the times we slipped up. Those moments are treated as narratively invisible. What’s revealed about a character when they practice casual immortality is that on some level, they were only ever in this story for our own convenience and enjoyment. They’ll take the punishment happily, hardly even noticing.

What makes an Arthur Morgan or Master Chief so capable of winning every fight they get into, even against overwhelming odds? Usually, it’s this unspoken invulnerability. The only character trait reinforced by the rote action of these games is that which is nearly universal to player-characters: that they’re here to bear the brunt of every bullet we fail to dodge.

The Metal Gear Solid series has memorably taken a look at this. In Snake Eater we have to scroll through a detailed menu to extract the bullet from Snake’s body. Disinfect and bandage the wound, all that stuff. Obviously this is still a little toothless compared to the real thing, maybe even slightly tedious, but it does some work to make wounds feel significant. Engaging with that system calls images to our mind, of Snake hidden in the woods, spending hours tending to his battered bod. And so whenever we’re hurt, the game takes that as an opportunity for a little bit of storytelling, a gesture towards Snake’s coming into his own as a man of the wilderness.

But the fifth game in the series is even more interesting. The Phantom Pain stars a very different Snake, and approaches this problem in a very different way. Our “Punished” Venom Snake is introduced to the story in a catastrophic explosion which he somehow survives, his body continuing to function despite the shrapnel lodged in it. His face is cut up and changed without his consent. Then he has to make his way out of a paramilitary nightmare in a hospital. And that’s just the beginning of the punishment he’ll inevitably take.

More than other games in the series, MGSV is focused on continuous time, the drudgery of wetwork. Gone are the manual savegames and Euro Extreme auto-fail difficulty levels of prior entries, and with those, gone too is the gentle suggestion that the more-real version of the story being told is the version where Snake was hardly ever seen and hardly ever had to fight, much less get shot. In Phantom Pain, every attempt at stealth that goes a bit awry is autosaved, committed to. You can’t simply go back a few steps to undo each gunfight, you’d have to restart the mission from the beginning. What use is a super-soldier if he can’t even be depended on to kill someone?

To this end, Venom Snake can and almost certainly will soak up an awful lot of 7.62 without complaining. Of course replaying missions to get them done in a perfectly sneaky manner is possible, even encouraged by the bite-size ratings given at the end of each level, but the knowledge that earlier missions can always be gone back to and tried again with better equipment means that while learning the game, it makes more sense to simply take the blows and move on. This is doubly true of the free-roam mode, where each bit of action is just something that happened, with no start to go back to for a second attempt.

I’ll sum it up this way: in MGS2, players might practice the tanker mission enough to eventually be able to clear it perfectly from start to finish, and that Foxhound-rank playthrough will in some sense become the most canonical run, the one that best resembles the legend of Snake as described by the game. In MGSV, that practice takes place within the story. Even when we go back to earlier missions, we’re not truly turning back the game’s persistent clock: both our new equipment and the pain suffered to get all that stuff comes with us. And gradually we’ll get better at the sneaking bit.

I’d argue that here, what’s usually an apparent contrivance actually resonates with Venom Snake’s character perfectly, and that the game even makes his bulletproof nature an essential part of the story told through play. This is a Snake who starts out the game never having been Snake before, who has to walk through the desert and through hails of gunfire before he begins to embody that legend everyone’s always holding him up to. It doesn’t matter that he’s not really that good at sneaking, because he’s extremely good at taking punishment. That punishment is what’ll forge him into a true Snake.

It takes him a while to show signs of leadership, too. When he finally does, he doesn’t much break his characteristic silence, but rather makes his point using the language he knows: he breaks up a fight between his men by taking one of their knives and plunging it into his own heart. It’s Ocelot who pulls it out of his nominal boss’s chest, with the quip, “These are bad for you, you know.” That’s the glibness of the man who orchestrated Venom’s hellishly painful and dissociative existence, who somehow knew that this quietly malleable individual had that mysterious, animating force behind him which would allow him to bear the torture of becoming the new Snake he needed.

But to observe this resonance requires being mindful of the absurdity in the first place. It’s important to remember that meaning is made everywhere in a work, sometimes especially in the places we’re not supposed to look. Sometimes it’s crawling on broken ribs through the tall grass, leaving behind a trail of blood.