Post: #1

Any of you guys played this?

It's not a newly released game, nor is it a sleeper hit, which makes it all the more surprising to me that I discovered it so late. It got a lot of press coverage, plenty of sales, and the killer soundtrack nearly has two million views on Youtube.

I've finished playing it in only two days, basically while I was waiting at the airport to come home for the winter holidays, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. So without further ado:

The overview

You play a mysterious anti-hero in 1980s Miami. He doesn't speak, but he has this effortless sense of style (think Ryan Gosling's Driver in Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive). There's no try-hard or kinda gay or weeabo aspect to his character design such as with Kratos from God of War or Dante from DevilMayCry.

He's pretty unstable. Someone's been leaving messages on his answering machine that compel him to go on murderous rampages where he's directed. He thinks he's being watched and before he can do anything, he's already in too deep, so instead of going to the cops, he gets into his DeLorean and goes where he's told. His destinations are various mob establishments throughout Miami where he must kill every living being.

There's a unreliable narrator element. He hallucinates a trio of people wearing animal masks who cryptically inform him of his role in the greater scheme of things.

In his missions, he wears an animal mask as well. He amasses a collection of them as the game progresses, each one granting a different perk.

And while this is in actuality 32/64-bits like any other PC game - the graphics are all 8-bit, and it is in essence a top-down shooter, with a huge melee emphasis.

Somewhere along the way, the game establishes a meta-narrative. At first, you suspect its existence at the back of your mind, but see more clearly as the in-world narrative unfolds. This is part of the genius of Hotline Miami.

The gameplay

Ironically, I have little to say about the gameplay. It is an ultraviolet, neon-drenched bloodbath from the tutorial level till it's curtains in the avalanche of a finale. The controls, the mechanics are fine. It's addictive. It goes by in a blur.

The feel of it

There's just so many little things contributing to the atmosphere and the feel of the game.

The answering machine's blithe euphemism-laced messages sending you off to conduct your next hit.

"A prank caller is at the phone company. Why don't you head over there and take care of it?"

The trippy questions that the masked people ask you. The kind of sick ominous feeling that they can conjure up with but a line of dialogue.

You'll eventually fall into a rhythm. Start out in the apartment, get your message, head out, return home. On the way back, you stop at the pizza place, the bar, the supermarket, a VHS rental store where the same guy at the counter takes pity on you and gives you free stuff. Something different happens one day - a female junkie/prostitute you save in the course of killing a movie producer affiliated with the mob. She gets one miserable line of dialogue, but you rescue her like a knight in shining armor.

You start out in the apartment like any other day. But today you have a companion. The junkie's awake and in the bathroom. You try and enter, but the door's closed. Because the game is so sparse outside of the set structure, you don't even know what's happening between your character and her. You infer she's locked herself in there because she's scared that you plan to kill her or intend to subject her to some sexual torment.

So you move on. Answering machine, the DeLorean, mission, kill everyone. Stop by at the store, chat with the shopkeeper, go back. Days pass, the cycle repeats. Eventually, she ventures out, no longer afraid. She watches TV. She takes a bath. She sprawls out on her bed, in the same room as yours. You still go to the answering machine, the DeLorean, the mission, kill everyone, but now you have a girlfriend who cares about you. The clutter of the apartment slowly disappears, there aren't boxes of cheap takeout anymore.

You fall into a rhythm. You start getting attached to this girl you white-knighted, and the shopkeeper who's generous to you.

Then the rooster-masked man will say something.

The nature of your equilibrium shifts. Now there's a sick feeling of foreboding sitting in the bottom of your stomach. This isn't a tightly-plotted Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler caper, the game isn't terribly subtle. You know what's coming as soon as you read the text, but you still have nowhere to go but forward.

The suggestions and predictions, the game throws them at you right left and center. They overstimulate you, and force you to push harder through the neon haze, wandering deeper into the rabbit hole in order to find answers. It gets even weirder and more frantic.

Even the cast, specifically the Janitors, the Biker characters, a ninja girl bodyguard - the fact that they are prominent characters and mysteriously show up everywhere is in and of itself stylish in a way I can't describe. I can't quite go with Tarantino-esque, because the developers of this game have more in the way of swank and style than Quentin Tarantino. I'd have to say the only thing I've seen like this would be from Gareth Evans of The Raid 2: Berandal, with characters like Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Boy. Maybe Molly the razorgirl from William Gibson's Neuromancer.

It's really cool.

The gameplay (again)

Okay, I guess I do have more to say about the gameplay.

The soundtrack is so outstanding and integral to the game that it is on some level inseparable from the gameplay. You're spurred on by a thumping baseline, roaring crescendos and sly silverly high-hats - you're absolutely in the zone, studying the movements of your enemies, judging the lines of sight and trajectories, mapping out your plan of attack. It actually eggs you on to rack up the kills. It's fucking scarily effective (I'm looking at you, Hydrogen by M.O.O.N.)

That's what it takes to clear a chapter. You assess each map with wariness. You figure out the patterns quickly enough, but there's always an element of risk and chance. You generally can count on melee kills not attracting attention, but sometimes enemies will move from their standard patrol routes out of nowhere. At some point, you can't pick off all the enemies without getting swarmed, you have to knuckle down and try and sweep four and five guys, each of which can kill you in one blow regardless of weapon. Sometimes that shootout will chain react and draw others into the fight, leading to an epic scramble to stay alive as you empty your gun, retreat, or are forced to dive into an unknown part of the map. It tests your planning, twitch reflex, speed, and improvisational skills.

The game seems like this crass, puerile thing at first glance. How can the ultraviolence not be in anything more than a tool of empowerment targeted at the young male demographic, something in service to a thrilling power trip?

But you really can't play without this niggling splinter in your mind. Hotline Miami doesn't administer the anesthetic of justifications and the inertial narrative drive that shuts off your conscience to the murder.

In Call of Duty, you always pressed forward. Always from one knifefight, one shootout to the next. Always another development, another crisis. Even in games like Mass Effect, this held true as you mowed down geth, krogans, other humans; synthetics and organics alike, just not at as breakneck a pace.

Not so in Hotline Miami.

Because when the last henchman falls, and you retrace your steps to the car, and you wade through the mess of blood, gore, and leaked brains, the soundtrack falls silent, and you see what you've done. You remember which of these cooling bodies were twitching after you snapped their necks, which ones were crawling around dragging themselves across the floor pitifully before you executed them.

Up till the first chapter, everything is cool. A sweet new game, everything's fun and retro, you're eager to see what's next. It looks like some arcade game. Then you bash someone's head in, and the protagonist vomits on the city street. You were already desensitized to the violence, but you realized your character, this nameless contract killer, wasn't. It stopped me cold. I realized I had never seen anything like this simple human reaction from a player in a video game and it sabotaged the adrenaline rush. That in and of itself was powerful in some way.

The game is intense even after the bloodletting is over.

In closing

It's kind of excruciating to play. The extremely direct nature and brutality of the writing (the hobo in the tutorial says "I'm here to teach you how to kill.") makes it uncomfortable to play, and ensures that you don't get lost in that I-forgot-that-this-was-a-game way like you might with The Last of Us for example, yet the story is overpoweringly immersive.

Amongst the mainstream lineup with titles like Alan Wake with similar surrealist tones, none were made with the design goal being the delivery of combination of sustained intensity, weirdness, and dread that Hotline Miami succeeds in. Indie developers have put out things like the Child of Light (?), Limbo, and Dear Esther which seek to enthrall the player with the surreal, minimalist setting and goal, but Hotline Miami is long enough to have real substance.

It's a perfect storm. It's the right length, got the right aesthetic and mechanics, and boasts the precise level of audacity and sheer raw coolness that is required to captivate the player for its mere hours of runtime.

It keeps you free of your normal state of homeostasis for... literally the entire runtime of the game... which I cannot say of any game. o_o I realize that just now. I go back over all my favorite games, like Mass Effect, Final Fantasy VII, The Last of Us, there were always stretches where you were bored and just trying to get through a monotonous part of the game. In Hotline Miami, you are either wired in anticipation, gathering your nerve, frustrated when you die but ready to get back in there (restarting only takes a second), rapt in attention, dying to know more, smiling.

If this were a film with the right director, it would - at minimum - be a monster cult classic on par with Fight Club, and overshadow films like Miami Vice and Drive (even though that last one inspired this game). It's retro and nostalgic. So say the game's fans, I wouldn't know. To me, it's novel and fascinating, and more can be written about it than many recent offerings in any medium, and many old ones as well. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've TLDRed this longer than the game's actual script and don't feel the worse for it.

All in all, it's one of a kind.

Post: #2

It has a 4 1/2 average review on Amazon with more than 100 reviews.

Post: #3

(12-26-2014 07:09 AM)CactusCat589 Wrote:  There's no try-hard or kinda gay or weeabo aspect to his character design such as with Kratos from God of War or Dante from DevilMayCry.