Grand Theft Auto V is the reigning game of all time. One of gaming’s most undeniable cultural exports. An ugly game that casts one unbelievable shadow. A title so massive, it’s become damn near impossible to recreate without burning down your development studio in 2026. Revisiting it in the lead-up to GTA VI’s release later this year has been illuminating in many ways, but the thing I’m perhaps most struck by about the 2013 hit is how miserable it is. What a fascinating thing to exist in the supposed upper echelon of the gaming pantheon.

GTA V is filled with all kinds of missions and objectives—the stuff that modern gaming parlance constantly calls “content.” Really, it turns everything into content for you to check off. It’s got big missions and small ones. Simple, boring ones that occasionally lull you to sleep. Distractions like tennis and drag racing. And, on the other end, massive, multi-part setpieces that get the blood pumping a little more efficiently. A gulf separates these sequences. Sometimes I’m little more than a glorified cabbie, at other times a glorified avatar of the “American dream”—a ball of boredom, rage, and discontent at The Way Things Are, armed with a rifle aimed at nothing in particular.

Lots of it feels utterly meaningless. Stealing the occasional getaway vehicle and quietly parking it in a nearby lot often counts as a mission, one I hate after doing it multiple times in my ~50 hours revisiting GTA V . Not that its more pulse-pounding action is especially noteworthy either.

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