The Case

There are no clean escapes in Hotline Miami. There is nothing clean at all about Dennotan’s vision of Miami, in fact. Even through the typically detached, low resolution, top down perspective, it contains some of the most gruesome depictions of violence I’ve witnessed. Every building you enter you will turn into a House of Sadism. Hotline Miami is filled with exactly the sort of brutality that critics of the medium associate with our “amoral culture”. In fact, Hotline Miami goes so far to encourage it.

The Trial

While the perspective and violence of HM may initially conjure up the image of the original GTA series, the actual experience is far from it. HM will have you performing the same surgical assault games like Frozen Synapse and the modern XCOM expect from you. Except that HM is an unlicensed medieval mob doctor. A scenario occurs as follows: you breach the door, knocking over an enemy in the process. From there you pick up their dropped weapon, throw it at the armed guard around the corner, punch out the guy coming at you with the steel pipe, pick up the gun of the fallen enemy, shoot the two armed guards coming around the corner, toss the empty weapon at the guy near the door getting back up, rush to the other downed guy and smash his head repeatedly against the floor, then grab the pipe and smash the last guy’s face in with it.

It’s exceedingly brutal as well. Every hit, shot, and cut is accompanied with a sickening sound effect and burst of viscera. At one point there was an enemy crawling along the floor. Performing an execution saw my character straddle the helpless sap, then twist his neck. It was an agonizing sight, and I actually winced upon seeing it. It’s a testament to the game that the violence continued to feel brutal throughout, where most games desensitize you to it by the end.

On the surface, it may seem that Hotline Miami is attempting to sell itself purely on the brutality of the spectacle. Underneath, however, is an arcade soul. Bathed in the neon lights of the 80’s arcade scene, and driven by the hypnotic beats of the music, HM has a mechanical core that pushes you to keep playing until you ace the challenge. The scoring mechanics encourage near reckless momentum, leading you from one pinpoint act of brutality to another, in an effort to chain together a series of kills and keep up your combo. As you play you’ll also discover what almost amounts to stripped down stealth mechanics. Overtaking areas successfully will require you to skirt lines of sight, avoid windows, and balance between the long range efficiency of guns and the need to avoid alerting large groups with the noise. Hotline Miami may not be incredibly complex, but it’s flexible in the ways it allows you to create your death traps, creating mini-sandboxes of violence to explore.

A sandbox is nothing without tools to explore it, of course. In HM these come in the form of various weapons and, at times, the environment itself. As you progress, you’ll also unlock new weapons which are then randomly placed at key points throughout the levels. For the most part, weapons come in three flavours: melee, guns, and thrown. Melee weapons are for getting personal, and allow you to dispatch enemies without a sound. Guns allow you distance, but have limited ammo and alert others to your presence, which is especially dangerous if they are armed as well. Thrown weapons allow you to quietly take out enemies from range, but are are either single use or need to be picked up again. While the locations of the weapons stay the same between deaths, the particular weapon randomizes. It creates an interesting moment to moment dynamic where you need to decide between the immediate danger and what you’ll need five seconds into the future.

It also means a lot of death. Get too close to an enemy--dead. Miss a shot or a swing--dead. Mistime a throw--dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. For every death you cause, you will experience one of your own. This leads to a Super Meat Boy like rhythm of death, experimentation, and memorization as you make your way through the level trying to figure out what combination of actions will prevent you from joining the corpses on the floor. Paired with the visuals and music it becomes hypnotic, almost ritualistic. Within the ambiguously sinister phone calls you receive at home, the surreal intros between levels, and the donning of the reality twisting, attribute changing animal masks at the start of the stage, there is a sinister mental thread. The slight details, such as the way your home changes, humanize the underworld of Miami just enough to make it hurt when it all goes wrong. Then you go from thinking something just isn’t right, to knowing it. What exactly is all this sadism achieving? Is it even important to know?

The Verdict

Hotline Miami won’t give you any answers. Plenty of questions, lots of bizarre images to carry with you, but ultimately, you’re left with a puzzle missing a few pieces. You’ll continue to enact the ritual, reliving moments, returning to perform sadistic experiments with your enemies. It’s sickeningly satisfying, and stimulating to the point where it becomes physically and mentally exhausting to play for extended sessions. It’s got a few bugs as well, as of release Steam integration is a bit iffy, and you’ll likely to come across a few errors in a playthrough. Dennaton have been great at updating quickly, however, and interacting with players through the forums, so take that as you will.

Hotline Miami is at its core a message of ambiguous, sadistic melancholy, delivered in pulsing hyper-neon 50 Deaths-per-Minute arcade gameplay. It’s fucking good. That’s all I’m sure of.

Case Review