Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami is...weird. I started out confused and ended up more confused. You start out with 3 dudes in animal masks speaking in fortune cookies at you. It's all very cryptic, and you're immediately wondering what the hell is going on. You then receive a phone messages telling you to go somewhere and do something that's code for go to this address and murderface every single person. This is how each chapter starts.

When you leave your apartment and hop in your car, you go to a place filled with baddies. Some have pipes or baseball bats as weapons, some have assault rifles or shotguns. You can pick all these items up once it and its owner are parted and use them to kill those that would do you harm, but you have to be sneaky about it. There's no health bar in this game. You get touched, you're dead. And not just dead, you're brutally dead with your blood and guts lying strewn about all over the floor. The same goes for your enemies. It was kind of shocking to see once you knocked down an enemy without his weapon, you could slam his head into the ground over and over till it split open like a pinata. This is a pixel art game, but they get all the gore they can out of it.

Timing is fairly difficult, and the game is pretty unforgiving. Make one wrong step, and you'll get your face blown off by the guy just out of frame. This happens a lot. I think Steam said I died 809 times by the time I finished it. It took me a loooong time to realize how those controls worked. lol #aimlockisyourfriend But, thankfully, the game doesn't overly punish you for death. You simply have to start that section of the chapter over again by pressing R for Restart, and you're immediately back at it. If there were any kind of reload time, experiencing that 800+ times would have been awful, so I'm glad failure was as painless as it was.

As you progress through the game, you realize you can't complete a level without killing every single person. Even in the ones where the last guy surrenders...that just makes it easier to go all Mountain on him and jam your thumbs through his eye holes. Like I said, brutal. The further you got in the game, the more you just accepted this, and I'd pause less and less when such an encounter emerged.

I suppose that in itself could be considered as sort of a critique on violence in video games. The more I was exposed to the violence, the less it bothered me, the less I questioned it. Your character experiences a similar transformation as he barfs all over the place after his first kill, but by the end, killing is as normal as breathing.

Things start getting weird about halfway through the game. You're seeing people you killed outside stores and in your apartment, walking around, seemingly unbothered by the holes in their heads or the gashes in their throats. What's real and what's not becomes a question. What the hell is going on is still a question. After I beat the game and the credits rolled, I was no closer to answering those questions. There was, however, an epilogue after the credits and a chapter named "Answers". "All will be revealed!", I thought. Nah. Not really. More questions just got heaped on my brain about what was actually real and what was the point of all that.

When you've completed the game, you unlock the Steam achievement "That's It?", so it would seem my confused and "Wait...what?" response was totally expected. It appears to be a commentary on violent video games in the form of a violent video game. Touche, developers. Overall, I enjoyed it. Confusion still abounds, but it was worth a play.