Having looked at the sequel Hax Monster steps back to discuss Hotline Miami.
Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: Guest, Review, Video games
This
review contains spoilers of Hotline Miami throughout. If you haven’t
played it yet, all you need to know is that it earns a solid
recommendation from me. However, I want to be free in pointing out
the beauty of the game’s story and the way it transfers it. It’s
cheap, runs on any PC and is short, so there are no excuses: play it
and then come back. For the used interpretation of the plot of this
game I have used something Rami ‘vlambeer’ Ismail’ wrote on the
internet on this game.
One
wonderful ability that I share with any creator of any written text,
work of art or intellectual work in general is that I know at least
one thing about you. I don’t know if your name is Victor or Josh
(although it would be funny if that happened to be the case), if you
like your eggs soft- or hard-boiled or whether or not you just
elected for US president the most unsuitable person for governance
since emperor Nero, but I do know that you are reading my text. And
since I know this text will most likely only be seen on the Sword and
Torch Inn website, I know at the very least that you are using either
a PC, tablet device or smartphone to view my work. I know you are
using an internet browser as well. This might seem obvious, but the
beautiful thing is that I can use that to my advantage.
I
can use the limitations of the medium that is used to transfer what I
have created more effectively. Post-modernistic art tended to do
something like this quite often: reminding the audience, reader or
viewer of a work that they are viewing or reading something to take
them out of the experience on purpose. Another example is the last
song of Slipknots ‘All Hope Is Gone’ record, which purposefully
starts breaking up in a way that sounds as if the CD is scratched to
pieces. Video games offer beautiful possibilities in this area, since
the person enjoying the work directly interacts with it and is
therefore more immersed than Atlantis after a major sewer clogging.
Perhaps the most beautiful example of a game using this for its
narrative is Hotline Miami, without a colon, since the second one
wasn’t called Hotline: Stoke On Trent or something. Although I do
notice I keep making typing mistakes, writing it as ‘Hoeline
Miami’, which could either be an escort service or a company
selling farming equipment over the phone.
Anyway,
Hotline Miami is a high-paced psychedelic over-the-top top-down
violent fighting game where your answering machine cryptically
instructs you to go to various locations in 1980’s Miami and
slaughter armed dudes. Every level starts with you getting out of bed
in your messy apartment, walking over to the phone and receiving a
message that, in convoluted terms, tells you to go somewhere and take
care of business. Then, you proceed to do so and as soon as you leave
the building, blood clinging to your shoes, the game cuts to a shop,
bar or pizza place and lets you do a mundane, every-day activity,
such as buying a drink or ordering pizza. This applies to nearly
every chapter, with the only interruptions being dream sequences
where a horse, rooster and owl speak to you in respectively a
soothing, authorative and resentful tone.
Describing
the gameplay on paper doesn’t really allow me to describe its
depth, not surprising for a two-dimensional medium, so don’t judge
too early if the mechanics I’m about to walk you through sound
extremely standard and boring. You move around the level from a
top-down perspective and can punch enemies to knock them on the
floor. Once they are down you can perform a finishing move of one
brief second. You can also pick up melee weapons which all are
instant kills and can be thrown. Some weapons, like knives, are also
lethal when flung at the enemy. Others merely knock them down. There
are also guns, which have only one clip that can’t be reloaded.
Finally, you can knock people down by throwing doors in their face
and there are windows that your foes can see through. That’s it,
really. One level mixes things up with metal detectors that alert
everyone if you walk through them with a gun but, on paper, the
gameplay is run of the mill at its finest. But ‘seemingly simple’
doesn’t mean ‘bad’. One can easily mock a Barett Newman
painting as something a household painter and decorator could make
within three minutes, until you find yourself in the Museum of Modern
Art, five centimetres away from it, and find yourself inexplicably
drawn in.
The
simple gameplay is what allows the game to convey its message. The
reason for this is that H:M’s gameplay has something in common with
Guitar hero, and not only the fact that you obliterate small,
brightly-coloured objects with satisfying sound as a result. Like
Guitar Hero, you can only play Warmthread Las Vegas by not thinking
about it. If you consciously try to aim your attacks and estimate the
size of your ambiguous hitbox, you will end up with more metal in
your head than Punished ‘Venom’ Snake. This partially has to do
with the behaviour of the AI in that it is impossible to get NPC’s
to behave consistently. Because of this, you can’t rely on a plan
when it comes to luring enemies or predicting their path. Planning,
therefore, is a no-go. The key is to completely trust your intuition
and get into a certain flow and, all of a sudden, everything works
out. You will manage to somehow throw a club in someone’s face
while sprinting through a door, finishing the two enemies you
door-slammed in the process, grab the gun of one of them, shoot an
incoming attack dog and then shoot the first guy you club-faced
before he can get up, all in under four seconds.
But it is more
trance-inducing than visiting a pop-art exhibition while on LSD, also
thanks to the game’s superbly hypnotizing 80’s synthesizer
soundtrack. Then, however, the moment the last lifeless body thumps
to the ground, you immediately come down from your killing spree.
Then the game does something that seems arbitrary but is actually
very important: it forces you to walk back to your car at the start
of the level with all the damage, blood and broken glass still lying
around. Meanwhile, the funky synthesizer tunes are replaced with one
eerie consistent tone. You are confronted with your wrongdoing and
all of it hits extra hard because the game didn’t give you time to
think about it during the fight.
As
I mentioned earlier, after each of these fights you go to a normal
place and do a normal thing and this offers a frame of reference
against which the massacres still stay extreme and horrifying. If
Call of Duty or modern day television taught us anything it’s that
horrifying violence can easily be the norm if it is all you show
(Listen to Tool’s song ‘Vicarious’ or Meshuggah’s ‘Obzen’
if you want to know what I mean), so cleverly Hotline Miami gives us
something to contrast that. But these scenes also serve to show how
your character becomes more and more nutty as time goes on. First,
subtle clues interrupt the mundanity of these little slices of daily
life, but before you realize it you’ll be talking to walking
corpses that may or may not have been killed by you a few levels ago
and that is the point after which there is no return from
Bonkersburg.
As
the insanity piles up and the pixel blood keeps flowing, you are
confronted by the three animals in the dream sequences with your
wrongdoing. But nothing changes. It’s still: another day, another
answer machine, another massacre, another news story that the NRA can
spin to promote gun usage. Finally, you reach the boss of all the
dudes that you bested thusfar. As you walk in, he says he expected
you. Then you shoot him, smoke a cigarette, end of story.
Anticlimactic, isn’t it?
But
wait! There’s more!
As
a short first credit roll finishes, time is reversed and we find
ourselves around the time of the earlier levels we played. Now,
however, the player character is a tough-looking biker, his head
obscured by a helmet. Then some more missions follow as we play as
this unknown character who, maybe because of his sound-isolating
helmet, is no blind slave to the answering machine. He commits his
massacres on his own accord to find the source behind the
murder-messages. After all, this was the 1980’s, where internet
trolling did not exist yet and someone sending you homicidal messages
on a regular basis was actually a thing people took seriously!
The
biker levels are a bit more annoying than the previous ones, since
the biker can’t pick up weapons or guns or throw things. All he
uses is one meat cleaver and three throwing knives that you can pick
up after use. My beef with this is that this goes against the spirit
of the game’s supersonic intuitive gameplay that was the strength
of the previous half. You can’t improvise much and now have to plan
every knife throw because some situations can only be resolved with a
ranged weapon.
But
as soon as you overcome all that you can come to the haunting
conclusion of the messages and that is where the tricks of using your
art form artfully I mentioned earlier. Because the mind-boggling
thing is that the person sending you those answer messages and
telling you to kill is the same person that tells you to kill in Call
of Duty or Battlefield. Is he a boring, stern military commander? Not
at all: the person telling you to kill is, as in any game, the game’s
developer. The biker’s quest leads us to a shabby basement where we
find two figures, looking like the developers of the game. The biker
then asks them if they think this is some kind of sick game, sending
out massacre-encouragements across the city. And the brilliant reply
is: Don’t you think this is a game? You ARE playing a game right
now, aren’t you? Are you having fun? With this subtle but
groundshaking bit of fourth-wall-breaking everything falls into place
and the banality of a game’s developer essentially making you kill
on command becomes painfully clear. With this, Hennes Maurits brings
beautiful criticism towards violence in video games and, considering
the trance it brings you in it its most violent moments, the manner
in which people perceive or deal with violence.
The
game has three big gaping flaws. The first is the mask system.
Throughout all of your genocide runs you wear an animal mask and all
of them, except for the starting one, give you gameplay bonuses that
vary from silenced guns to lethal door smashes. However, there is one
that rules them all, which is the one that makes your fists kill
enemies instantaneously and makes finishing moves instant as well.
The latter might seem pointless, since finishing someone only takes
one second, but the pace is higher than that of a Dragonforce song on
fast-forward and that means that finishers can be the difference
between life and death, and not only the life or death of the downed
NPC.
The second big gaping flaw is the hospital level. At one point
as we still play as the first character, we are arrested and end up
in hospital. There, we have to sneak out without being spotted by
doctors or the police holding us there. I normally wouldn’t mind an
attempt to mix gameplay styles up and it is better to have us leave
the hospital without resorting to cutscene, but the problem is that
Heisslinien Hamburg has controls and visuals only really suitable for
over-the-top violent massacring gameplay and not for sneaky stealth
sections. It would have been better if this sequence had been nothing
more than the player walking through a corridor without there being a
chance of getting caught. One little detail I liked was that, during
this chapter, moving too fast or too much causes your character to
get a headache which is conveyed through visuals and audio in a way
that brings across the feeling of a suddenly rising headache quite
well. I like that we feel some vulnerability for the first time in
the game because that raises the steaks and reminds us of the slight
bit of humanity left in our mute, faceless, nameless protagonist.
Then there is the final flaw and never has such a minor flaw had such
horrible implications as in this case. The problem is that the
beautiful conversation with the ‘developers’ I mentioned earlier
has dialogue trees, which is for the very first time in the entire
game. There seems to be no reason for it and there is no real choice
involved beyond what the characters are going to say next. The
horrible thing is that the grand, revolutionary twist in which the
developers draw the attention of the player to the fact that he is
merely playing a game doesn’t come up if you pick the wrong
dialogue choice. And that is how a dialogue tree can uproot your
entire game in under two seconds.
Videogames
are a beautiful art form and, with their interactivity, can do things
that no other medium can pull off. The problem is that the greatest
works of gaming art created, such as Killer7, Hotline Miami or Spec
Ops: The Line are buried under the endless pile of Call of Duty’s
Battlefields and League of Legends’s. Funnily enough, Hotline:
Miami was itself buried by its sequel. For more information on that,
read my review of that game. It suffices to say that there was no
need for a sequel and that the sequel only goes through the same
motions as the predecessor to ring a few more pennies. It introduced
nothing except poor gameplay design, bugs and a bloated,
inefficiently designed story. And thus the story was concluded of
probably the best indie game I ever played. Let’s enjoy it now
before they release a movie, book, tea towel and maybe also a
constipation aid bearing its name to earn even more money!
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