Hotline Miami

Who all has played these games, and what did you think?

If they're not both in your top 10 favorite games of all time, you're wrong and you're a bad person.

They just get everything right. The music is amazing, the story is amazing, the gameplay is amazing. The basic premise is that you're essentially a serial killer. Each level begins outside of a building, and your job is to kill everyone inside of the building.

If they kill you, you hit R, and you're instantly outside the building ready to go in again. The game is crazy fast-paced. It's actually designed to make you get angry and sloppy. It's beautiful.

Here's the review I wrote for Hotline Miami 2, which has a lot more details:

----------------

There were times while I was playing this when I literally felt like I was on drugs. I don't mean that the game is super trippy (it is), and I don't mean it's an intense experience (it is). What I mean is that I had a physical reaction to playing this game that felt like some kind of drug I'd never tried before. I was outwardly calm, had no emotional affect, but on the inside I was on fire with some kind of adrenaline rush unlike any I've ever had before. But at the same time I was completely calm. I kept oscillating between them in my mind as I played. "Am I okay? Oh my god my brain is exploding. No I'm okay, this is weird. What's going on. HOLY SHIT MY HEART IS GOING TO FLY OUT OF MY CHEST. This is a really weird thing for a video game to do to me."

I can break down into words why this game is good, and I will. But I can't give the game any higher recommendation than "it literally made me feel like I was on some kind of drug."

Okay, so, here's the rundown.

If you played hotline Miami one (which you ABSOLUTELY should.) you understand the basics of this game. It's a top-down bloodbath. You walk into a house, there are people in the house. You kill all of the people. Blood is everywhere. Sometimes you die. You hit the R button. Instantly you're trying again. And again. And again. The whole thing is so fast and twitchy. The game actually tries to make you go just as crazy as your character is supposed to be. The game WANTS you to run into rooms throwing fists and bullets randomly until for some reason it works. It's a twitchy, maddening experience. A successful run through a level can be completed in about 2 minutes. But each level will take you about 20-30 to get through without being shot in the face by a Russian mobster or a street hoodlum or a cop or whatever.

Mechanically, very little has changed, save for a few things being tightened up. Which is good. The first game was one of the greatest produced in the current renaissance of Indie gaming. But, if I may be so bold, I believe the sequel surpasses the original.

It took me 13 hours of play, which I squeezed into 3 days, to beat the game. I didn't want the game to stop, but at the same time I kept thinking "I MUST be near the end by now. There's no way the game could keep going." And yet it goes on, and on, until suddenly it doesn't and you're just not ready for the rush to be over.

After the fucked up, drug-addled story told by the first game, a person could be forgiven for thinking that they knew what to expect here. But everything is on its head. There are more protagonists in this game than I was able to count. The game switches between them rapidly, and between segments in the storyline like it's fucking Pulp Fiction. Now and then you're a mental case getting phone calls telling you to kill people, just like in the first game. But you also fall between being a soldier in a fictitious Cold War brush conflict, a cop, a group of teenagers who just want a bit of the ol' Ultra Violence, and a journalist whose just trying to piece the whole thing together. Nothing that's happening to you ever makes any sense until you have a chance to look back on it with 3 gameplay hours of hindsight.

The soundtrack to this game is going to be my favorite album for awhile. I don't have the kind of vocabulary a person needs to really describe music. But you will NEVER mistake this game's music for anything else. It's both incredibly distinct and unlike anything you've ever heard before, but also evocative of the mid-80s early-90s, when the game is set.

The visuals cross over from being "graphics" to being "art." Pixel art games are a bit of a fad to be sure, but you can always tell the difference between people who are just trying to jump on a bandwagon, and people who have a legitimate passion for the visual medium of pixels. Again, my vocabulary for describing visual art is insufficient. But most games simply don't pack this much visual information into each individual pixel. And the colors are so bright and vibrant. It's glorious.

Heads up if you do play it: the game can be used with controllers, but WASD and a mouse really is the way to go here.

Play this game.