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.

Adorei o jogo, trilha sonora fenomenal, gameplay muito divertida e extremamente difícil. Me diverti em cada momento do jogo, desde a sua historia misteriosa, até a frustração de perder algumas vezes, tudo nesse jogo foi incrível.

História
Nada muito revolucionaria e bem misteriosa, tenho algumas teorias dela, mas não é o foco do jogo.

Gameplay
O melhor do jogo, é simples, mas é extremamente boa. Diversas maneiras de passar os capítulos e segue aquela dinâmica de tentativa e erro que eu adoro. A estética é linda e tudo é muito bonito e original no jogo.

Trilha Sonora
Outro ponto fortíssimo do jogo, já conhecia algumas musicas de Hotline Miami mesmo sem ter jogado. A musica se encaixa perfeitamente com a gameplay e com a estética do jogo, além de ficar na cabeça.

Pontos positivos e negativos
+Gameplay muito divertida
+Trilha sonora fenomenal
+Estética impecável

Conclusão
Hotline Miami foi incrível e adorei cada momento que joguei ele. Com sua trilha sonora impecável e estética magnifica, o jogo é muito bem feito e divertido. Nota 9/10.

Overall a good concept but I didn't really like the execution. The game is extremely frustrating for many reasons, such as :
- the terrible aiming and how precise you need to be to hit with guns
- hell, even melee weapons sometimes, why can't the character redirect himself with the left joystick like it does in the non combat areas???
- janky IA that randomly doesn't notice shots
- a screen that easily becomes unreadable AND enemies constantly out of your sight
- enemies that are so similar you can hardly tell which weapon they're holding
- the instant reaction speed of enemies and their 100% precise aiming
- the disastrous boss design (thankfully there's only two of them)

It feels very cheap to die when it's so easy for it to happen and how things are outside of your control. It also doesn't encourage me to learn and better myself at the game, I'm done playing it once.

The story part feels pretty poor, while it's interesting the execution is also mediocre. After playing Katana Zero, I'd say that game is a straight up upgrade in every concept that Hotline Miami wanted to execute.

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.

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.

Hotline Miami é sem a menor dúvida um dos meus VIDEO GAMES favoritos.

Com uma mecânica viciante, uma estética retrô futurista estimulante e uma trilha sonora banger, hotline miami conquistou-me sem muito esforço. Antes de começar a jogá-lo eu estava esperando um “twin-stick shooter”, mais voltado a ação que um shoot 'em up proporciona mesmo. Mas indo sentido contrário do que eu esperava, o jogo se mostrou mais como um quebra cabeça que me forçava a repetir várias vezes uma mesma fase a fim de encontrar a rota a qual eu melhor me adaptava.

Todo esse processo de ter que experimentar até encontrar o melhor caminho e a ordem correta de quais inimigos priorizar é 100% beneficiado pela sonoridade que adota não unicamente, mas predominantemente, estilos como synthwave e darksynth que colaboram e muito com a imersão e estado de flow que só é quebrado ao fim da fase, quando a música perde espaço para um súbito ruído branco que te acompanha até a saída do estabelecimento, momento o qual você se da conta do estrago que cometeu violentamente quase que sem nem perceber.

Eu sinto que este estado de flow que o jogador se imerge é usado pelo próprio jogo de maneira cínica como uma arma que dispara em formato da clássica pergunta “você gosta de machucar outras pessoas?”. Uma tentativa de nos provocar a refletir se somos mentalmente insanos por sentir tanto prazer ao cometer os vários assassinatos durante toda essa viagem. Te provoca ao mesmo tempo que seduz todos os seus sentidos, te forçando a esquecer da violência e encarar naturalmente o que está em sua frente de maneira fria e mecânica, como um puro arcade mesmo. Durante esse flow, a última coisa que você se importa é com a violência. O que você quer é curtir o som e terminar essa fase de video game.

A minha resposta para essa pergunta é: NÃO, eu não gosto de machucar outras pessoas (e sei que machucar as pessoas não funciona assim).

Mas sabe do que eu gosto? Eu gosto do que Hotline Miami me proporcionou quanto a diversão, desafio e exposição a artistas musicais como M.O.O.N, Jasper Byrne, Scattle, Perturbator e o queridíssimo El Huervo.

~

Minha humilde presença na internet entrega o quanto gosto desse jogo, então não é mistério para ninguém a razão das 5 estrelas. Por tanto recomendá-lo e por ter usado em meu perfil durante muito tempo uma arte do Jacket usando a máscara Richard (uma máscara de galo), recebi o apelido de Cabeça de Galinha, o qual eu acatei e guardo com carinho haha 🐔.

Terminei hoje, achei um jogo do caramba mas não mesmo assim não compreendo o porquê de colocarem num patamar tão, MAS TÃO ALTO, mas tudo bem.

Quero deixar claro que hoje era pra eu ter metade das conquistas, mas acho que o save não salvou infelizmente.

Enfim, é um jogo extremamente divertido, você vai passar raiva algumas vezes (milhares talvez) mas é recompensador e tem um fator de replay ABSURDO.

A trilha sonora por si só é uma maravilha, a história é mais ou menos confusa (mas não tão difícil de entender), a jogabilidade é bem rápida e o jogo te recompensa por isso.

Recomendo qualquer um a jogar, muito obrigado ao meu mano BIRD, por ter me dado o jogo de presente 😘🤝🫶

(É bem provável que eu tente o 100% desse aqui)

What is Hotline Miami?

This is the erased "R" button on your keyboard.
These are burst eardrums from an incredibly cool soundtrack, tracks from which you will put on the ringtone, alarm clock, organizer, the sound of turning on your PC, and even ask God to play it for you on your deathbed.
This is a twitching right hand, from any flicker on the screen.
That feeling of ecstasy when you finally beat this damn level for the 1324643rd time and crushed hundreds of skulls with your crowbar.
It's stylish, smart and mesmerizing.

What is Hotline Miami?
This is agony, pain and violence - wrapped in a graceful aesthetic package, on which a crimson blood stain spreads.