“If you want to keep your hands, I want names,” an American spy growls at one point in the new video game Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist. The man he is yelling at is on the ground, arms stretched, wrists trapped between the nearly closed legs of a folding chair. Our hero, the spy, whom we control in most of the game, is torturing this other man for information. He’s worried about another terrorist attack in the United States, which would be the second one in Blacklist.

Torture has long been an element in Splinter Cell games. This long-running series stars the fictional Sam Fisher as that spy. He’s an unsmiling, elite agent with the backing of the National Security Agency who typically dresses in black, drops from ceilings to snap necks and dispatches guards with a silenced pistol.

In these games, torture tends to secure information that might stop a coming catastrophe. Notably, because Blacklist is a video game, the few moments of torture are not interactive. They pass fleetingly and mostly run like a movie. In the folding-chair scene, the game player is given one point of manipulation: choosing whether to spare or kill the man.

The vivid scene is special because of where it is set: a cell in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And that makes Blacklist the first big-budget game to go there, to show players a digital version of Gitmo’s cages and dogs. In the lead-up to the interrogation, we see a generic prisoner in an orange jumpsuit, his head covered with a hood, pushed to the ground by his American captors. The educated gamer has to infer that he might be a terrorist. There’s no sign of a hunger strike.