Hotline Miami: The Definitive Review

A tale of delight and regret

It was approximately 0.5 seconds into my first proper fight in I Am Your Beast that I felt a primordial twang that echoed back to the distant past of 2012. Upon throwing an empty pistol to kill an enemy in my way, I felt the same thrill of hyperviolence, of glorious excess that I’d felt in Hotline Miami. It resonated to the point where I Am Your Beast felt like a genuine attempt to pull Hotline Miami’s two-dimensional kineticism into three dimensions, being the essential binder between Superhot’s first-person superheroics and No One Lives Forever’s cartoon espionage world-building. It underlined how influential Hotline Miami was when it came to bottling that intoxicating hybrid of strategic planning and wild improvisation in anarchic stacked-odds battles for survival. Superhot definitely carries a torch that seems to have been lit by Dennaton Games’ debut, and I Am Your Beast certainly runs with it as far, and as fast, as it can.

Söderström and Wedin’s tribute to the top-down ultraviolence born of the 8/16-bit transitional era has many roots. The genius of Hotline Miami lay in how they were blended with ideas from contemporary player-centred design. In simplistic comparisons of screenshots, you can the primordial seeds in the likes of Gauntlet hybrids like Into The Eagle’s Nest,¹ which played with Gauntlet’s viewpoint and mechanics by rehoming the environment into a Colditz-like prison, introducing the idea of corridor-and-room combat at close quarters. I could argue this finds a precedent in the geography of Paradroid’s ship layouts, which offered this sense of rooms as combat arenas and corridors as semi-sanctuaries that link them. For Hotline Miami’s violence, the lineage is fairly clear. Eugene Jarvis’s Smash TV certainly carries the swagger and the delight in the grotesque that defines the Hotline Miami vogue, even if the intentions are fundamentally at odds with each other. Look closer at Eugene’s ultraviolent bookends to Smash TV and you’ll find Narc and Total Carnage. The latter carries a lot more Hotline Miami baggage than you’d think on first impressions, right down to surreal text in gaudy colour-cycled palettes. Jarvis orchestrates his digital violence to the point of near-delirium; the rocket explosions into crowds of Narc enemies results in severed limbs raining down on the playfield, and both Smash TV and Total Carnage deliberately seek the bleeding edge of ludicrous gibs.² Both make a point of translating the abstract arena play of Robotron into the cartoonish hyperviolence of hypercool movies like Robocop and The Running Man, while rendering it via the lens of deliberate parent-bait like EC horror comics and Garbage Pail Kids’ worst excesses. All of this is foundation upon which Hotline Miami draws, and it has to be noted that Wedin’s choices for aesthetic design seem happily anchored in the functional palettes of the NES and Commodore 64, offering an 8-bit parsimony with a hidden 16-bit flexibility, but nonetheless deliberately stark and as lo-fi as the frequently-lauded soundtrack.

Whatever you make of the reference-steeped hipstercore surrounds of Hotline Miami’s presentation, it can’t be denied that the game has a supreme player experience that alliterates as rapidly as its violence explodes. Intuitive, immediate, instinctive, improvisational. Its tightly-bound knot of a core loop is a genuine masterpiece of predator-prey sensory stimulation, offering a real thrill in the act of killing right up to the very end. Wildly oscillating between making the player the hunter and the hunted, It has a pace like no other by exploiting its reduced-code visuals to get that reptilian hindbrain working at peak performance, popping off snap shots of uncanny grace and fortune in those runs where everything goes right.³ But of course, Hotline Miami is as much about everything going wrong, and the fact it has a specific restart key hints at the modern sensibilities behind the retro exterior. A supremely well-judged lift from Trials HD, the ability to instantly reset after fucking up is the critical cog in Hotline Miami’s adrenaline-dopamine reactor. It’s the metronome for the game’s rhythm until you’re so well-versed, each stage is a performance worthy of any John Woo set piece, or any of their descendants.⁴ Another artefact of modernity sitting alongside the rapid restart is the itemisation of each violent act in the Tony Hawks Pro Skater formalism at level complete. This cataloguing and scoring of your performance adds an extra competitive flair to the game’s charisma - it simultaneously itemises and quantifies your carnage while abstracting out the overall moral balance, marking it all as deliberately, consciously artificial. That said, the aggressively synthetic nature of the game, boosted by its environments and its audio, dissolves into raw instinct when in combat. Yet there’s always space for self-aggrandising chef’s kiss emotes whenever you pull off a run-saving weapon throw or take out distant threats with a blind shotgun blast into the screen’s periphery. And while highlight moments may stick in the memory, the real body of the work is in the unfurling melee. It’s in that woozy sense of chaos that your own implicate order asserts itself, being a kind of puritan cleansing act for a world full of disorder and decay. The criminals(?) you repeatedly kill personify and embody that corruption, and much of the thrill comes from threading a needle of clarity through a despicable world filled with despicable people doing despicable deeds. The romance of the vigilante is undeniable, and Hotline Miami sings the vigilante’s song with quite some virtuosity, even if its story takes wilder turns than you’d expect to cast a deeper sense of grey fuzz and deliberate ambiguity.

It was amusing to read, in period, that Söderström and Wedin constructed Hotline Miami’s narrative to be deliberately ambiguous, in keeping with the game’s formal morality. “I was more afraid of the story not being confusing enough”, remarked Söderström in this Eurogamer interview. In a similar piece for Edge Online, Wedin remarked that “me, I’m into games that are just games”. This ludocentric focus absolutely shines through the narrative cracks in Hotline Miami’s overt storyline, which is deliberately vague, written with the intent of being discussed and speculated over. For me, this seemed abundantly clear, as the game was so focused on the viscerality of action that even language itself seemed redundant. I wrote back in 2012, a month after Hotline Miami’s release that the narrative, including its secret ending character-switch chapter, served as a kind of anti-narrative. A deliberate bundling of reference and facile gesturing to mask the concept that the game isn’t a question giving you an answer, but precisely the opposite. This rings clearly when the game tells you that you must enjoy violence to keep playing it, and in combination with the deliberate ambiguities and unresolved threads that remain at the end, the whole thing coalesces into a more profound a statement on violence and violent videogames than any deliberate polemic could hope to match. My piece makes me cringe now, as it lives on in a Tumblr I wrote for a short while as a kind of continuity for the original Affectionate Diary. But awful as it reads to me now, I think it played a pretty major role in my blagging the review for Hotline Miami 2 with Eurogamer.

I actually hate that review, and it put me off doing professional reviews full stop. I was as conflicted about how to shape it as I was about the game itself. Hotline Miami 2 was nowhere near the sequel it should have been, but nonetheless I did really enjoy it for the most part, and found certain character chapters to be frankly superb in terms of delivering that ‘four I’ combo of instinctual, immediate, intuitive, improvisational combat. However despite the glorious punkish anarchy of the original’s narrative approach, Hotline Miami 2 was absolutely bound by a rigid, over-complex, overly-verbose story. It was a direct contradiction, not to mention the change to a different version of Gamemaker had fundamentally altered the game to the point where mask selection, a key aspect of replay in Hotline Miami, was claimed to be actually impossible to implement. Looking back, Hotline Miami 2 doesn’t sour Hotline Miami at all, but it’s not a game I care to play again. Unlike Hotline Miami, which I downloaded again for this piece and fucking loved every second. In a way, I think Hotline Miami 2 and my review of it are victims of the same uncertainties and same pressure to deliver.⁵ I couldn’t blindly praise it as many did, as I saw quite a bit of betrayal in its reframing of its core violence within a cast of characters, most of which failed to capture the energy or the charisma of the original’s protagonists, and too many of them locked into inflexible modes of violence. There’s always a certain abdication of guilt when you submit your copy and the Editor publishes, because they are the final arbiter for what you wrote and even though Oli was happy enough to publish my review without much editing, I still regret it now. I remember nervously waiting to read other reviews and knew I’d done wrong when PC Gamer dropped a 57/100 score with Chris Thursten’s far less pretentious critique. I found myself far more comfortable with that score than the ‘Recommended’ I’d chosen, but the kicker was that I’d genuinely had a great time! I just hated the structure around it. I felt if Hotline Miami was a 10/10, which was Tom Bramwell’s score, then Hotline Miami 2 was an 8 - or firmly in Eurogamer’s ‘Recommended’ region. Maybe if the game had been nothing more than Beard’s adventures in the jungle and The Son going apeshit then I’d feel more comfortable. I guess that I just ignored what I didn’t like rather than let it mark the game down. That said, a friend - Declan - pointed out that in combat, the timings in Hotline Miami 2 weren’t quite as sharp or as free as they were in the original and therefore it is total shit.⁶ Still, I learned my lesson and never wrote a review for money ever again.

The one unexpected benefit that Hotline Miami 2 brings to the series is that it highlights the glorious purity of the original. As a contrast, the sequel performs admirably as a warning against the pressures of fame, and the desire to please. In the interviews linked previously, both Jonatan and Dennis remark how much they loved fans discussing the lore, or their theories about the lore, on Steam and whatnot. It seems that they over-wrote the world fiction and the narrative of Hotline Miami 2 to either satiate fans hungry for answers or to add more fuel to that particular fire, in the meantime neglecting to recapture the true magic that actually makes the original a 10/10 masterpiece. The sequel is merely good at what it provides, even with its occasional spikes of ludicrous difficulty or opacity for ways to make progress. This probably explains why there was never a Hotline Miami 3, or why the reams of tribute copyist games that followed in its wake never quite lived up to the legend. Hotline Miami was unique because it was made in desperate conditions by two youngsters driven by passion. In a way, it can only be unique and stand alone, even if you tick every box trying to replicate its spirit. There’s a wildness at its core that reflects a true kind of creative madness, a certain brilliance that only comes from serendipity and chance, a moment of youthful explosion captured perfectly for all to see. In that sense, it rides closer to things of accidental greatness perhaps. I think that’s a far more fitting way to look at Hotline Miami, and it’s that sense that its staid and thoroughly conventional sequel pulls into sharp focus. To see Hotline Miami as this soaring, glorious, accidental collision of great things in the right mixture, made at the right time in Jonatan and Dennis’s lives, is to understand the magic as it affects you most directly - unconsciously, intuitively, but fleetingly. And that is perhaps why it’s one of the most romantically violent and profoundly special games ever made.

[21]

1. Pandora's Into The Eagle's Nest from 1987 is a clear inspiration for Team 17's much more influential Alien Breed.

2. Not wanting to turn this into a list of videogames I think are really fun, Rise Of The Triad seemed to embrace that gleeful delight in the grotesque that Eugene Jarvis seemingly pioneered. But if Total Carnage isn't obscure enough for you, check out Gremlin's Deathwish 3 from 1987, a true gorefest of a run-and-gun where not only do you get piles of intestines in you use a rocket launcher, but you can machine-gun elderly women in extremely cartoonish fashion. It also was the first time I remember using a pump-action shotgun in a videogame.

3. Not to mention those fantastic lulls where you can catch your breath before moving to the next claustrophobic arena of death. Or when you're stuck behind a door and prepping to burst through in true action-movie style. The way it captures and personalises the soul of the vigilante action hero in a top-down perspective is almost magical, especially given how flat and empty so many attempts to recreate cinema can feel when rendered in first-person.

4. It's fascinating how deep Hotline Miami's influence goes. Taking inspiration most obviously from the movie Drive, it then goes on to get a glossy clone in the form of the game Hong Kong Massacre, which directly influences the movie John Wick Chapter 4.

5. I was also too sensitive to the comments from people who wanted a different, much more boring review. One thing I was proud of was dropping in my searingly white-hot take that Portal 2 ruins the series, much to the chagrin of a couple of commenters. Well, where's Portal 3 if 2 was so fucking funny and great and not overly drawn out with way too much filler and far too many tiresome gags? Zip it, shrimpy.

6. Perhaps it’s a peculiarity of Hotline Miami that it resonates with Gen-X despite being faux-nostalgic work made by Millennials. Many of my friends have Hotline Miami avatars on Steam and one friend says he gives it a play-through on an annual basis. It does have that sense of a genius game that feels like it could run on ancient hardware if you really wanted it to, and such has a universal, timeless quality. That’s perhaps the mark of the videogame at its most transcendent; that stripped of its narrative formalisms, it retains an essential spirit that burns so much more brightly than the usual fare. A soul that exists independently of cultural markers of quality or quantity. Games like Hotline Miami are the real works of art in our medium, and not for the norms of commodity we’d usually assign to artistic value. It’s for that fundamental, unrepeatable spirit and the way it. Really. Fucking. Shines.