A story of love and revenge told through ellipsis. A tale of violence reduced to its visceral fundamentals. Abstracted until the literal no longer matters and the work can indulge in the essential symbols and aesthetics.

In my opinion, it outdoes other games released at the time that tried to be self-critical of the mechanics being designed for violence and the implications of such. That because of Hotline Miami’s emphasis less on the shaming of the player, and more on the ways we distance ourselves from our actions in virtual spaces with context and the particular abstraction inherent to the videogame look.

Pushing us out of the comfort that virtuality gives us by constantly involving us, asking us question and calling attention to what we exert. Every time we kill dozens of enemies, having the need to contemplate the destructed bodies of every one of them on our way back to the place that we started in.

Video-game avatars as masks (like those Jacket wears before committing atrocities). Figures we control that serve to express ourselves in a space. Even when the only way that we can see of achieving that expression in the digital being through violent acts. All a performativity that the creators allow themselves to break down. Pointing at its farce and putting it apart so they can directly involve us in a conversation about what makes us wish for enacting these stories.

We might want to moralize our habits of playing through intellectualizing. The actions as means for encountering meaning of any kind, especially if it is irony. That it is okay that I exert violence in a virtual space because the game is making a critique of violence (the military FPS being the quintessential example of this falsity).

However, any of that would be nothing more than dishonest. We are not given a reason by the game of what we did. Nothing that rationalizes our journey, because we were not looking for anything in the first place. We just wanted to indulge ourselves. It is as intellectually unrewarding as that.

In so, the game not only explores exerted virtual violence and our relation to it as perpetuators, but also the futility of our agency in any form of system. We are taking from place to place by the designers to execute a very strict set of actions without possibility for more. We might like to indulge in the power fantasy, but in the end, we are being used by the game. We don’t have a choice over where we will go because it is all designed a priori. Anything we do having been not only considered but also planned. And any illusion of choice is all within the restrictions that the game puts us in. So we can do what they want us to do.

An anxiety that gains a political dimension with how it parallels how Jacket and Biker are used by a group with its own agenda, as if they were nothing more than tools. An agenda that they are not told about. Just doing it because it is what they have been ordered to. If anything, this game shows an understanding of its particular source (Drive, which itself was inspired by Le Samourai) that goes beyond the mere appropriation. That these symbols all served for stories about lonely men defined purely by their labor that are finally confronted with the consequences of their involvement, being left with nothing in the end. Although to this, Hotline Miami adds a viscerality in the trauma of normalizing violence that fits with its conceptual interests.

The only real shame is how this effect is kind of undermined by how there is, in the end, a rational explanation that gives meaning to all of us actions. A revelation that enhances the political side of the story in its usage of cold war confrontations and PTSD. However, in the process also takes away from the abstraction that is part of why this works so well on an aesthetic level. And so it kind of falls in what it tries to critique by giving us the comfort of the reason to justify what we did. Still, the experience of playing the game and getting these conflicted emotions by the situation that we are put in is something that cannot be taken away even by the worst twist (it does make it easier to forgive that when it's a secret ending that you need to find collectibles for, rather than being what you get when you only complete the story). More so with design this polish and an understanding of video-game language this intense.

I am very much sorry for bringing my big pretensiousness to video games too. It's what being bored and not being able to sleep does lmao.

Se eu falar que entendi alguma coisa do que estava acontecendo, eu provavelmente estaria mentindo.

Mas posso dizer que me senti completamente hipnotizado e imerso tanto com a estética e visual do jogo quanto com a gameplay extremamente viciante e frenética.

Mesmo com um nível de dificuldade considerável, não chega nem perto de ser frustrante, tentativa e erro definem bem o progresso, que é facilitado pelo reaparecimento instantâneo após morrermos numa fase, tal como Celeste.

E apesar de ser um jogo curto, as chances de acabar se encontrando repetindo fases e mais fases simplesmente por vontade são altas, o fator replay é muito forte e é um perigo.

It's weird to consider that Hotline Miami might be one of THE most seminal games from the 2010s'. It helped inspire a swath of artists, from game developers to musicians, for the decade to follow.

Do you want to know why I said that it's only "one of" the most seminal games of the last decade? Because Dark Souls has three games in its main series, one game that came before it and a remake of that one game, and at least three games by the same developer that play just like it.

We are no longer in the era of sequels being a neat addition—cinematic universes, television, and live services are all more popular than they've ever been before. Whether or not you're ready to brace a media landscape where the idea of discussion being finite begins and ends with "but I can't wait for the sequel" is irrelevant; this is where we're at, and we're too far in to course correct now.

For the moxie of the developers to not want to squeeze their golden goose too hard, I admire their work. It's not just that they've made two all-time indie classics, the likes of which helped define the scene in the late 2000s'. It's that they made a really good game, let people talk about it until they inevitably moved on, and didn't try to keep its relevance on life support for ten years. Hotline Miami is relevant ten years later because the artists it helped inspire wound up creating games like it, with more to come in the future.

In terms of the game itself, it's about as fast, brutal, and fun as you've been told it is. Its commentary on violence in video games might not be the revelation it once was. But compared to a lot of the meta-commentary that was being made in games at the time, it's surprisingly subtle and doesn't overstep its boundaries. The soundtrack is, of course, magnificent, and I still listen to it daily. Hotline Miami is the kind of game that I stop, start, stop, and then eventually finish just that one more time. Part of what makes that meta-commentary hold up slightly more than it should is that Hotline Miami is a genuinely fun game to play and revisit. Hell yeah, I'll bruise some bad dudes with my free time! Why the hell not?

I've played around three versions of this game, and that's mostly to test the waters. For my money, the best port for this game is on the Nintendo Switch. But the Vita version gets very close! Hotline Miami on the Vita uses the back touchscreen in a way that makes me proud to say that I'm a Vita owner, if only because nothing else feels like it. But it's those joysticks, man. They're too small, and their deadzones are pretty tiny, and my god, you feel it while playing Hotline Miami. It's a little better than the second game on the Vita, though. Good lord, hand me a Switch, and I'll blaze through the first few levels of that game, but I can barely dodge roll to save my life on the Vita port.

Anyway, five stars, and I regret nothing.

I feel like I’m alone here as most people seem to love this game including my friends I’ve made here on backloggd but the game just wasn’t for me.

I played this on PS5 via PlayStation plus and I just couldn’t get into it. I bring this up because maybe the controls are better on other platforms but I hated the controls. They didn’t just feel dated they felt awful. To shoot a gun accurately I had to hold two sticks and press several buttons and that was just for one shot. I had little fun with the gameplay and seemingly random AI interactions. Sometimes they would beg to be killed and sometimes everyone in the house floods on you at once seemingly out of no where. Don’t get me wrong I like challenges but this felt more random than difficult. Maybe I missed the boat on this as it was a big part of the “Indie Boom” and I’m playing it in 2023, I don’t know, I just know this wasn’t for me. Many times I can see why people like something and I don’t or vice versa but I just am not seeing the appeal in this to be honest.

It gets an extra half star because the music is boppin.

Sure, I know that the only winning move is not to play. The cycle of ultra violence is self perpetuating. You are your own worst enemy- a willing genocidal puppet, and the game wants to make that clear. Yet Hotline Miami undermines itself with its complete disrespect of the player's intelligence.

My eyes rolled into the back of my head when, after smashing in a guard dog's head like a wet pumpkin, Hotline Miami gives you an achievement called "Dog Lover."

This kind of wanton ultraviolence is presented as subversive critique, but it is toothless. You have no other way with which to complete the objective than murdering all these people and animals. There is no creative way with which to clear a level- you must kill, and kill brutally. You kill and kill and kill and kill, no other choice in the matter, and then return home to have the game preach to you about how you're super desensitized to violence cause its just a video game. The game maintains this same juvenile sense of superiority for the entire runtime. It seems to believe everyone who plays it is so stupid as to not really understand the weight of their actions.

"Do you like hurting people?" Snore.

The cult of hyper masculinity has been a disaster for the human race, so I can buy that some people will just see this the way they want to see it. Yet, most people with any sense of the concept of ethics will immediately understand this game's repudiation of violence. Thusly, the extremely overt messaging comes off as bitter pretention. It was 2012 when this game came out. It wasn't the first game to present us with the concept of violence against faceless enemies. None of this arrogance feels earned.

Released years later, 2019's Streets of Rogue plays extremely similar to Hotline Miami and it was similarly wont to mock the player for their brutality. In this case, the mockery has justification- for every time you run into a building, swing a knife or firing a machine gun indiscriminately, there were dozens of other ways to solve the problem at hand.

This game thinks it is very profound for playing as an assassin, being told to kill everybody in a building, and having no other recourse than to either kill everybody or not play the game. Even No Russian worked better as a critique, because it didn't make you shoot everyone in that airport. You had the choice to pull the trigger.

I guess Jacket also had the choice not to swing the bat on the 99th dog for that achievement. It would've been nice, in that case, if I actually had to go out of my way to do that, before being derisively branded a "dog lover" for doing what the game is forcing me to do.

Absolutely incredible soundtrack, though.

Both of the Hotline Miami games are very important titles to me. They introduced me to entire genres of music, film, and other video games that have come to be major cornerstones of my taste in art and media. While the dark 80s aesthetic is far more commonplace nowadays, to the point where you could even call it played out, at the time there weren’t really many games with the look and feel that Hotline Miami has. There’s a serene, dreamy feel to the game that’s complemented by the rush of its immersive and addicting trance-like gameplay. The gameplay does have some quirks that can bring it down a bit, but once you get used to those quirks, then it becomes a truly memorable experience that’s hard to put down and really sticks with you.

The game is a top down arcade-like shooter that involves raiding the hideouts of Russian gangsters and murdering every single one of them, clearing them out room by room. Weapons are found on-site. Sometimes you can just find them laying around, but most of the time you’ll be acquiring them from knocked down or killed enemies. Once you’ve taken out everyone in a room, you move onto the next and continue the process until everyone in the building is dead. Enemies all die in one hit, however the same goes for you as well. If you die, you can press ‘R’ to restart from the beginning of the room. There’s no loading times, so pressing R allows you to instantly respawn. This plays a big part in what makes the gameplay so addicting. The adrenaline rush of slaughtering your way through a room with a dozen armed guys that can all take you out in a single hit is intoxicating, and if you screw up and die, all you need is one quick key press and you’re immediately back in the fray. The game’s hypnotic electronic soundtrack and hazy neon visuals really play a huge role in making the gameplay as addicting as it is. The droning, bass heavy beats of M.O.O.N’s tracks not only add to the adrenaline, but also put you in a sort of zen-like trance as you play.

While the game generally rewards a fast, guns blazing approach to clearing out rooms, it is possible to play slow and steady. There’s also a way you can exploit enemy behavior: they’re attracted to the sound of gunshots, which you can use to lure them to specific locations and line them up for easy ambush kills. While I do think that this is a really cool aspect of combat, the consistency in which it works has mixed results. There will almost always be enemies that react to the sound of gunfire, but whether or not it’s the enemies that you expect is a toss up. Sometimes an enemy allllll the way on the other side of the map will react to a gunshot, but the enemies in the room right next to you will just ignore it and continue their patrol route. The AI in general behaves in a really finicky and kind of stupid fashion at times. Enemies on the other side of the map will react to the sound of gunfire, but enemies generally won’t react if someone gets shot right in front of them. I wish there were more ways to influence the behavior of enemies. Maybe frighten them by continuously murdering people out of their line of sight and forcing them to go on a different patrol route. I just feel like they could use some small touches that make them feel a bit more like actual people and less like dumb video game enemies. It would really drive home one of the core themes of the game, which is the desensitization to violence that video games can cause (more on that later).

As you play through the game, you can unlock additional animal masks you can wear which can modify your gameplay. These modifiers vary in terms of their usefulness. They can range from minor gameplay changes, like allowing you to view secrets or increasing the amount of gore to major ones like allowing you to instantly kill enemies with your default melee attacks or muting your gunshots so that enemies don’t react to them. The devs have gone on record saying that the masks weren’t originally supposed to provide any gameplay modifiers, and it definitely seems like this system is kind of undercooked. I honestly find little reason to use any mask other than Tony for the instant kill melee attacks, and the devs have also gone on record to say that they felt like Tony in particular wasn’t balanced well. For my most recent playthrough, I decided to only use the default mask Richard to get what I feel was the intended experience with the game. This is a system that would later be expanded into the different playstyles that we’d later see with Biker as well as the cast of Hotline Miami 2.

There’s a pretty steep learning curve to Hotline Miami. Initially, the game can feel really hard and unfair. However, once you get used to it, it’s really easy to blaze through this game in a little over an hour, assuming you skip the cutscenes. Still, like I mentioned before, the gameplay has little quirks that can play a role in making that initial learning curve in the game a bit unnecessarily steep.The game has a cursor that you can use to help you aim, but the cursor is extremely thin and really hard to see. Eventually I got a feel for where the cursor generally is at all times, and I also frequently lock onto enemies to ensure that my shots hit their targets. There’s also the infamous problem of trying to pick up a specific weapon on the ground when there are multiple weapons in close proximity to it. Unfortunately this is an issue that can continue to screw you over no matter how used to the game you get, and is my personal biggest issue with both Hotline Miami games. Still, once you get over that initial learning curve, being able to blaze through this game so quickly is extremely satisfying, even if that weapon issue never stops rearing its ugly head.

I briefly touched on the game’s soundtrack during combat, but I also really want to highlight the tracks that are used outside of it as well. The track Crush by El Huervo, which plays once you’ve finished a level hits really hard during your initial playthrough. The haunting noise really snaps you out of the hypnotic trance that the gameplay and fast-paced, more upbeat music can put you in. It really forces you to stop and take notice of your surroundings and the horrific violence you’ve committed before you leave a level. Eventually though, you become numb to it and you start tuning it out, immediately heading for your car to exit the level without a second thought. Then on the results screen, you’re treated to the beautiful track Miami by Jasper Byrne, a song that truly feels euphoric to listen to and never gets old. Not only does this song perfectly encapsulate that 80s aesthetic the game is going for, but it evokes feelings of nostalgic comfort. The transition from Crush to Miami feels like you’re going from being sober to inebriated. You forget all about the consequences of what you’ve just done once the pretty lights and music of the results screen comes into view. Even though the vast majority of music in the game wasn’t made for it, the way the developers utilize it to evoke specific feelings from the player is extremely well done.

The game’s story, when taken purely at face value, may not seem like much to most people. It’s not a particularly detailed story, in fact, there are many aspects to the game’s plot that aren’t really elaborated on until the sequel. The protagonist, Jacket, is silent, so you have to infer much of what’s going on based on the actions he takes. However, there are some little details that really add to the story that I feel go overlooked if you’re not paying attention and just rushing to get to the next level. In particular, the subtle changes to Jacket’s apartment as you advance through the game do a great job framing the gradual changes to his life and his mindset. It’s very solid and effective environmental storytelling. I will say that I feel like this game’s story hits a lot harder after playing the sequel, though. Hotline Miami 2 adds a lot of context that Hotline Miami 1’s story is really lacking. 2 also really helps to drive home 1’s themes as well, since it’s a bit more direct with them.

It’s no secret that Hotline Miami was meant to be a critique on the desensitization of violence through video games, as well as using violence and violent fantasies as a way to cope with our emotions. There are a lot of mixed views and responses regarding how effective the game actually is as a critique. This review is already getting pretty long, and I don’t think that there’s room for an in-depth discussion of it here, but as far as my personal opinion goes, I don’t think that the fact that it is critiquing anything becomes explicitly clear until you play the second game. The ways it goes about critiquing violence, namely through the initial feelings the music at the end of each level evokes, as well as very short but notable moments in the story such as Jacket vomiting after he murders the homeless man at the start of the game do clue you in, but they’re a bit too lowkey for their own good, and fail to really drive the point home. I think this makes the violence critique very easy to go over people’s heads as a result. I certainly didn’t realize it myself until I started hyper fixating on the games and reading about the developers and what they intended with them years ago when I first played them.

I think that it might be hard to sell Hotline Miami to new players nowadays. Its influence has been widespread throughout the indie scene, which can make the game and its aesthetic seem far less unique as a result. As someone that was there close to when both of these games were making their impact on the gaming landscape, my initial experience with them really stuck with me, and I’m still able to come back and thoroughly enjoy Hotline Miami today. If you’re not completely burnt out on the oversaturation of 80s throwback media, and if you have the patience to stick with a game with a high learning curve, then I can’t recommend Hotline Miami enough. The gameplay is exhilarating and the vibes are immaculate.

The video game medium has been one of my biggest passions since I was ten. I longed to be a developer growing up, and to this day I spend much of my free time dedicated to an ever-growing library. The Hotline Miami duology was undoubtedly one of the driving forces behind my love; it was inexpressibly important to my teenage years, almost as much as Fallout and LISA. Even now, whenever I think of video games, Hotline Miami 1 and 2 are some of the first that come to mind. To me, they are some of the best ever made.
HLM1 has style, flare, tight mechanics, infinite replayability, and a story unlike any other. Its aesthetics both capture and unsettle you, its violent imagery and over-the-top gore the beautifully ironic antithesis to its themes. There is nothing like it out there, nothing to top what it does - except for its very own successor.


SHORT REVIEW

Visuals: 5/5
Audio: 5/5
Story: 5/5
Gameplay: 5.5/5
Worldbuilding: 5/5
Overall game score: 5/5 [5.1/5]


IN-DEPTH REVIEW

Visuals:
The pixelated, neon-soaked world of Hotline Miami - with colorful blank backgrounds for the buildings to rest upon - add to its surreal 80s aesthetics; the camera slowly tilts back and forth as you navigate levels, giving a dreamlike quality. In this illusive city, you will make your way through base after base of criminal activity, exterminating hundreds of men in a gory cavalcade of death.
The levels are each distinctive in terms of design, and many in art direction as well. No two feel like a copy of another. You visit a hotel, a police station, a club - all with the purpose of killing everything in sight. The top-down view is extremely important in making these levels work so well; being able to look rooms ahead before you go in allows you to strategize much more easily.
The floating dialogue heads are definitely jarring at first, as they're not exactly the most pleasant to look at. But, after all these years, I couldn't imagine them any differently. The ugliness and exaggerated features are infinitely more memorable than another cookie-cutter pixel style. More importantly, they make each character's face stand out, even when you very rarely see faces at all.
Clarity is of massive importance in a game like this, given that you'll die and restart in just one hit. Thankfully, HLM mastered it right out of the gate. Enemies are always in the foreground, with their white suits and thick outlines. Bullets are bright and easy to spot. An abundance of blood signifies which enemies are dead and which you need to finish off.
Everything adds up to the best possible visual experience. You might not expect the style to work so well, but HLM pulls it off without a problem. It fits with the game's story and gameplay perfectly, while also being unforgettable and unique.
Overall, 5/5.

Audio:
I don't think it's controversial to assert that HLM1 has one of the best soundtracks ever put together. Even if you're not a fan of the game itself, it's impossible not to groove to its music (provided by M|O|O|N, El Huervo, Perturbator, and more.) The upbeat tunes that play during most levels sound straight out a flashy 80s movie - while the bizarre lo-fi that accompanies many cutscenes evokes unsettling psychological mindfucks. From the unforgettable Horse Steppin title screen, with its creepy vocalisations and distorted guitar strums, to the purely fun dance tunes such as Miami Disco. Each one is a genius piece of music, and they add up to an absolutely flawless soundtrack, made especially for an already-great game.
The club beats are a huge source of levity during gameplay, too. These energetic and catchy refrains are a big reason why restarting never feels like a chore; because no matter how many times you die, they play on in the background. It keeps your energy up, pushes you to press forward, encourages you to hit that R key no matter how many times it takes.
Meanwhile, the disturbing, slow-paced cutscene pieces set a totally different atmosphere. They give each of the level breaks an uncanny feel, reminding you that what you're seeing is a warped reality presented by a mass murderer.
The contrast of these two audio presentations adds so much dimension to the game, whether you consciously realize it or not. For this reason - and for its amazing quality - it is one of the absolute best soundtracks in the medium, or maybe even of all time. Not many can top it for me.
Overall, 5/5.

Story:
Hotline Miami is the picture-perfect blend of action and surreal dreamscape; Lynch inspires the thematic presentation, while Miami Vice (and other 80s media) shape the aesthetics. Everything about it - its subtext, its gory violence, its eccentric storytelling - reads as an ideal movie script.
Yet, it's not a movie. It's a game. And that's something that's very interesting to me.
There are a lot of people who denounce games as a 'lesser' form of media. They aren't allowed to be art; they're not on that 'level'.
But then, there are instances like Hotline Miami. Examples that plays to all strengths.
HLM1 is a video game through-and-through. A large chunk of your playtime is devoted to the addicting mechanics and moment-to-moment gameplay, which have been honed to perfection. It's already a masterpiece in that aspect. But when you throw in its narrative, it's hard to argue against HLM1 being art. Art that would captivate movie buffs if it were a movie, I'm sure. But, it's not. It's a game. It's ABOUT games.
The setting is Miami. 1989. It's a turbulant time for America. Hot off the heels of war with the Soviet Union, the USA and USSR have formed an uneasy alliance; the two are attempting to prevent an absolute nuclear apocalypse. This is only lightly touched on in-universe, if at all (some information is only mentioned in HLM2), but it is helpful in understanding the framework of HLM1.
A fairly average man - nicknamed Jacket by fans, for his signature varsity jacket - begins receiving strange phonecalls. These calls order him to complete 'jobs' at provided addresses. Suspiciously discrete things, such as babysitting or maintenance.
But, in reality, these tagged buildings are bases for Russian Mobsters. Armed with nothing but a chicken mask, Jacket's sole job is to eliminate every foreigner in sight.
Occasionally, in-between these genocidal excursions, Jacket is confronted by three other masked figures. The first is a woman, clad in a horse head, sympathetic to his plight. The second is Russian mafioso with an owl head, hostile and threatening. The third is himself, wearing the chicken mask that started it all, questioning and stoic.
He slowly uncovers the truth behind not only the phonecalls, but the very reality around him.
Despite having minimal dialogue, there are a dozen different themes to pick apart in HLM1. Nationalism, xenophobia, personal loss, grief, violence in video games. Most importantly, it manages to speak on all of this without ever slowing the pace.
And even though HLM1 has a large focus on fun gameplay, this is not just a game about beating levels. Instead, it pointedly asks you if you enjoy the violent acts you're committing.
"Do you like hurting other people?"
This iconic line is directed towards Jacket, and by extension, you. It is an introspective questioning of how brutal video games have become. Not only do you take part in Jacket murdering hundreds, but you watch as he cruelly bashes their heads in, breaks their limbs, sets them on fire, strangles them, beats them to death.
Still, HLM1 does not fault you for enjoying this. It simply raises the question of its mindlessness; it alerts you to the savage fictional acts we commit without ever thinking twice. It pleads that you to take a step back, and that you think about the kind of person you're filling the shoes of.
"You're not a very nice person, are you?"
Jacket is, in fact, not a nice person. While the fact that he is being forced to do these things is sympathetic in a way, he's still committing some downright heinous acts - and, what's much worse, is that he DOES enjoy them. THAT is who you are playing. Not an anti-hero. Not a valiant warrior. You are not saving the world, or leaving it any better than how you found it. You are a broken man, slaughtering human beings like animals, and your actions to fight against those controlling you might not ever matter.
Overall, 5/5.

Gameplay:
Hotline Miami is one of the rare examples where not only are the story and mechanics perfectly balanced, but they tie into each other in a crucial way. Those questions would not be nearly as evocative if not for the barbaric acts that predate them, after all. As the bodies pile up in Jacket's wake, the tone is set for the themes to thrive.
HLM1's levels are fast-paced, intense, and violent. You - as well as nearly every enemy - die in just one hit. One slash of a knife, one bullet from a gun. There are no drawn-out firefights, no unbearably long bosses.
There is also no brute-forcing your way through; you are obligated to strategize at every turn. The irony is that you're carefully planning out actions which will only take a few seconds to carry out. You go in, and you either kill, or you eat shit.
Thankfully, not even death is a chore in HLM1. When you DO get your head bashed in - and you will, many times - you simply press the R key to restart. No loading screens, no waiting. You are always thrown right back into the action. This allows for the sort of trial-and-error that HLM demands. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that dying is an integral part of the experience.
The trial-and-error is also aided by both forgiving checkpoints and sensible chapters lengths. Each chapter (or level) is broken up into 'floors', each of which provide a new spawn at their beginning. This way, restarting never feels too frustrating. An area will only take a minute or two once properly executed; it's LEARNING how to properly execute it that's the real challenge.
That strategy demanded of you is made much more fun by an abundance of ways to kill. Even aside from the melee/ranged arsenal, there's a dozen smaller mechanics to consider. Punch enemies down to finish them off. Open doors or throw weapons to knock enemies prone. Use enemies as human shields. Shoot through glass windows. Decide whether to sneak around, or use noise as bait.
And although the chapters are linear in goal, many have multiple paths to reach it. The open-ended level design allows you to act out different avenues and ideas; it's really up to you to decide what works best. You are constantly encouraged to change things up and use your brain.
None of this is even mentioning the extra layer that masks add to the gameplay. There is such a wide variety of them, with dozens of different upgrades (and some wacky, fun stuff too!) to change things up. They open the door for all kinds of playstyles, leaving you free to find masks that suit you as a player, or that suit specific levels. They're also very rewarding to collect!
So, even though I do think that the story of Hotline Miami is an underappreciated factor in its greatness, I cannot deny that the gameplay is just as good. HLM1 is a never-ending source of entertainment. Whether it's your first time around or your hundredth time replaying, it's a safe bet that you'll enjoy yourself.
Overall, 5.5/5.

Worldbuilding:
Our viewing of this near-dystopic Miami is constricted, limited to only that which is absolutely necessary. A world on the verge of nuclear war, an uneasy alliance between opposing governments. HLM1 may not spell out very much to its players, but if you take the time to dig just a little bit, some very heavy politics come to light. This society, dressed in neon 80s trappings, is slowly failing.
The themes of war serve as a backdrop for the sadism that HLM1 boasts. You're not just mindlessly killing hundreds of people; you're doing so in the name of nationalist vigilante justice. Your hand is being forced by powerful people dedicated to a cause that is beyond you. Even if you wanted to stop, you couldn't - even if you don't agree with what you're doing, you have little choice. All you can do is play their game and hope for the best.
But Jacket, though a perfect selection for jobs of violence, proves to be too much even for the nationalists to handle. He comes to serve as their singlehanded dismantler (at least, to the extent that we can see.)
Our protagonist's path of murder and revenge is palpably movie-esque, undoubtedly inspired by the likes of The Driver in Drive. But, in spite of his convictions, Jacket's inner monologues reflect guilt and trauma. Don Juan, Richard, and Rasmus accentuate his self-hatred. As time passes, the previously peaceful scenes with Beard begin to host horrifying, undead mafia members. Beard is murdered and replaced by a strange man, aggressive and intimidating.
Most of what we see is Jacket's own perception of events. We're unsure if any of it is accurate - if it's exaggerated, or if it's flat-out false. But, either way, they remind both the player and Jacket himself of the atrocities that have been committed.
It's in this way that Hotline Miami surprises. Despite seeming to be gameplay-focused on the surface, HLM1 sets the scene with a thoughtful and symbolic narrative. The worldbuilding is largely to thank for this; environmental storytelling shines through, leaving excess dialogue unneeded, and allowing the game to ebb and flow at a perfect pace.
Overall, 5/5.

Overall game score: 5/5. Hotline Miami ushered in a new era for the indies, proving that they can be just as good - if not better! - than anything published by AAA studios. Everything about this game is beautifully executed - the visuals, the music, the mechanics, the story, the characters. Maybe 10 years is a bit too early to call something a timeless classic, but I have no doubt that I'll be saying it about Hotline Miami another 10 down the line.

Do you like hurting other people?

Hotline Miami is a top-down shooter developed by Swedish studio Dennaton Games and published by Digital Revolver. You play as an unnamed protagonist, dubbed "Jacket" by the fandom.

You go from level to level decimating the Russian mob, dabbling in a little bit of the ultra-violence. You can beat, shoot or generally maim your enemies until you are the last man standing. You can punch an enemy, leaving them unconscious for a while until you deliver a killing blow, usually by strangling them or snapping their neck. You can use the weapons enemies drop like bats and knives for an easy and swift kill. There are also guns available from pistols, SMG's to shotguns each with their advantages and disadvantages. Do it fast enough and you get more points which in turn unlocks new weapons to be used in the levels.

Play more of the game and you unlock "masks" which give you various advantages like starting out the level with a weapon, making it so dogs don't attack you on sight etc. The moment-to-moment gameplay is fast, chaotic and cathartic. The game gives you several difficult challenges that you need to overcome with patience, quick thinking and sometimes, a bit of recklessness. Memorization and being on your toes at all times are the keys to your success. Death is around every corner and you will die a lot. Thankfully, restarting is quick and hassle-free.

There are a few flaws with the gameplay and these are not easily avoided. Enemy AI is spotty and inconsistent. Normally, enemies react to gunfire but that's not always the case. Enemies that are in close proximity barely react to your shots and enemies from far away do react. These inconsistencies make it harder to employ your strategy if you want to achieve a high-score. Enemies sometimes get stuck in the environment or even go out of bounds. This makes it impossible for you to kill them thus making it impossible for you to finish the level. This happened during my playthrough on a few occasions. There's a problem that arises when you kill a lot of enemies in the same place. They all drop their weapons in the same place and it becomes difficult to acquire what you want to use

Interspersed between levels are cutscenes, detailing the plot and giving a tiny bit more context to your murder spree. Depending on who you ask, Hotline Miami does a lot with its narrative or nothing at all. On a surface level, it is a story about a psychopathic rage-induced maniac who gets strange phonecalls, talking about mundane things like picking something up or coming to work earlier right before getting in your Delorean-inspired car and racing of to the next mission. It's Drive mixed with Scarface. There are subtle little hints that invoke a much larger plot and those details even make a return in the game's sequel.

The game's central narrative is focused on thing you do the most in this game: enacting violence. The game asks you the question: "Do you like hurting other people". The narrative scatters several trails of breadcrumbs in different directions and asks the player where they want to go. You can try to make sense of the actual story in the game, Jacket's path of a violent psychopathic killer or you can explore it's different themes. There is a lot of room for you as the player to fill in the blanks, to derive some sort of meaningful message out of the entire experience. It's as introspective as it is violent.
To me, the game asks the question why we partake in this form of simulated violence, why we do gruesome things to these pixelated mobsters and warns us not to become too detached from it all.

Everything you do in Hotline Miami is to the beat of a stellar soundtrack from a variety of different artists. From the title screen to the end, every track is a banger and perfectly encapsulates the mood in every scene. Hotline Miami's soundtrack is an anomaly when comparing it to other video games. Instead of one or several composers, the soundtrack features tracks from a lot of different artists like Scattle, M|O|O|N, Sun Araw and Jasper Byrd. Sure, other video games have done this approach too but then we're talking about big AAA sports-titles. This is a game made primarily by two guys. The music is there when it needs to be there. It keeps your blood pumping during action-heavy intense shooting sprees, comes to a screeching halt when you have killed the last man standing and it mellows out before and after missions, giving you a brief respite in your appartment, the pizza parlor or the VHS-store. These are brief moments of calm and serenity before continuing your tour of depravity.

Released in 2012 to critical acclaim, the game was a phenomenon when it released on PC first and consoles later. While being influenced by movies like Drive or Scarface, Hotline Miami would in turn, influence a lot of other artists and game developers.
On paper, Hotline Miami can be a lot of things to a lot of different people. Shocking, exciting, unnecessarily violent. But Hotline Miami is greater than the sum of its parts. For videogames in 2012, this game was lightning in a bottle and twelve years later, the synth-wave fueled magic is still here. It's still one of my favorite games of all time.

It's always a strange feeling to have lived through a cultural moment and then try to look back on it with a more critical eye. I doubt many would be willing to argue the point that Hotline Miami is foundational not only for the many games that have followed in its wake, but for the industry as a whole; Devolver Digital as a company would never have gotten anywhere near as big as they did without this, and that means a lot of indie titles would have gone without a publisher. Games in 2022 would look a lot different if they were made in a world without Hotline Miami, for better and for worse.

Jonatan Söderström (aka Cactus) was far from an unknown factor by 2012, but I doubt that many in the wider gaming sphere knew who he was before he and Dennis Wedin put out Hotline Miami. Going through Cactus's back catalogue now helps to illustrate a lot of the punch and weirdness that really made Hotline Miami shine; titles such as Stallions in America and KEYBOARD DRUMSET FUCKING WEREWOLF (all caps mandatory) carry within them the chaotic threads of meaningless violence and frenetic gameplay that would shape Dennaton's debut title. Hotline Miami gives all of these present elements a bit more context and a bit more time to breathe, and that small willingness to just take a break every now and then is the denouement that I doubt anyone could have guessed these games needed to truly shine.

Hotline Miami is important, but you knew that. You've probably played it already, and you're reading through this to get some validation on a game that you loved playing ten years ago. That, or you're looking to get angry at the positive reviews because you hated it. Either way. The game has probably sold more copies than The Bible, and it's been pirated at least half as many times. It was featured as an easter egg in The Last of Us as one of the only surviving PS Vita games. It had an entire DLC tie-in campaign with PAYDAY 2. An entire publishing company exists at the scale it does now because of this one title. The game is as much of a cultural movement as it is fun, and it's really, really fun.

The movement is fast. The guns are loud. Explosions will blow your ears out both in the game and in real life. There are dozens of unique kills and death animations that you'll never manage to see all of in the span of a single playthrough. Thumping bass and twinkling synths guide you through these maze-like buildings, pushing you ever forward through a sea of pixellated gore and viscera. Even if you catch a stray bullet or take a baseball bat to the teeth, you're back up and trying again as fast as you can press the restart key. Hotline Miami guides you into a violent trance.

And then the tape rewinds, and the music stops, and you're left with nothing to take in but a dull drone and the bodies strewn about. Everything you could write about the first "GO TO CAR" moment has already been written and in more detail than you or I could hope to capture, but it's transcendent. It shoves all of your violence back in your face by making you quietly walk through it on the way to your not-DeLorean, and then you get to play pretend with your domestic little life as if you didn't finish massacring an entire building full of people an hour ago. A lot of games that have come out since have tried to pull this trick again, and none of them have ever managed to land the blow in the way that Dennaton could. It doesn't feel obvious here, and that makes the difference.

This isn't to say that Hotline Miami is subtle — Richard the Rooster may as well be looking to camera when he asks if "you like hurting other people"— but it's a game that's willing to trust that you understand the cause and effect of your own actions. Jacket is made a puppet of the phone operators, but he always has a chance to stop, or try to skip town. It's not as if he's trapped in a war zone and desperately trying to escape; he drives from his apartment every night, breaks open skulls with the nearest blunt object he can find, and then picks up a pizza or a movie on the way home. Jacket is shown not to be a complete monster, what with how he cares for Girlfriend and Beard, and (mostly) keeps his kills to Russian mobsters; this is a cold comfort when presented next to his ruthless brutality, and his willingness to shoot first and ask questions later. Innocents die in his crossfire. Jacket is not the kind of person you want to be around, and the mocking of the hero worship of him by fans in the sequel demonstrates that this was an intentional decision. It's a dumb enough game to let you have fun, and it's smart enough to challenge you on your enjoyment. The sequel also does this, but worse. The dichotomy is a lot more convincing here.

Ten years later, Hotline Miami feels as fresh as the day it released, which is something that can absolutely not be said of most of its contemporaries. The influence it's had on the industry thus far is probably going to continue rumbling long into the future, getting less and less obvious with every passing year. It deserves the attention. This right here is fucking video games.

I used to play this on vita and the last couple of levels pissed me off so much that I had to take a break, and seeing that the second one was leaving PS Now soon I decided to play it on a whim, beating it on two sittings and even going for some of the miscellaneous trophies afterward. Playing that, suffering through its hell made me realize that a lot of my problems came from the vita and so I decided to play this on PS4, starting from the beginning and playing through the entire thing until I beat it and now Im planning on going for the platinum. It's a weird thing. I was so adamant on giving these games a 7/10 because they pissed me off twice as much as they were fun. But sitting here having completed both and even watching youtube videos about them I reflect on the experience as a whole and realize I enjoyed them a lot more than I gave them credit for and even though I believe overall 2 was more unique and enjoyable, I had a damn good time with both.

Nancymeter - 84/100

- Takes it upon itself to snub the idea that a game could be interested in anything other than gameplay
- Very much captures the worst of Pre-Gamergate white-male irreverence for the notion that video games should be treated critically
- Makes just enough smart artistic choices to get to pretend it's about American militarism or ""the consequences of your actions"" instead of what it's obviously actually about, which is how cool it is to wear a dog's head mask and eviscerate a guy with a golf club
- Punishes the emotionally invested player
- Actively insults any player interested in lore or coherent worldbuilding
- Treats its one female character as an object to be abused and then murdered to further the protag's blood craze
- Also, the developer sexually harasses women in real life
- Also also, I just don't find it fun

I don't understand why people celebrate this as one of the best indie games of all time and sometimes I feel crazy for disliking it as much as I do.




EDIT Feb 26 2023: I’ve never articulated it as such until now, but I feel confident concluding that Hotline Miami is a successful infiltration of fascist values into a language gamers circa 2013 were amenable to. Hotline Miami is a fascist game. Unfortunately - I am sorry but - I am not interested in explaining this assertion in any further detail in this space.