SUPERHOT.

What matters is what happens between these two words.

SUPERHOT.

It wants to peel back the layers of your skull.

SUPERHOT.

Feast on my flesh until nothing remains.

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3 thoughts on SUPER[SUPER]HOT.

Mind - Katana reveals all; the swift executions and parry-play are at the essence of what works within this new framework of roguelike repetition because it prevents the action from jerking-off in bullet-time. The staccato begins to act in service of rhythmic motions where physicality is no longer a disembodied affair of firearms and trajectories locating the feedback loop in the anonymity of manikins instead putting our ever-fragile avatar at the center of the violence in ways that renders the thrills of deletion by putting emphasis on the cut. Distances and deflections. How to bridge the gap between the two. Invoking. Channeling. SUPERHOT.

Control - Hacks.exe; they elevate the core systems without rendering the whole ugly. It’s impossible to escape the allure of the metagame. “Killheal.hack” and “Lightreflex.hack” are kings. And kings do not matter in sequences whose escalating difficulty so clearly correlates with the aesthetics of kinesthesia - strategies are established in style before substance, a perfect action-run framed in replays, so challenge is (and must remain) a modular canvas here. Strong back-half. Exhausting waves met with zen. Repress the urge to shatter - obsidian is thy weapon. Sliced rubies and broken ores. A mist of forms. I wish the experience went further. I wish I didn’t have so many choices. I wish I could look somewhere else than myself by being tied to the grazing of bullets and the compression of space. At its purest SUPERHOT triggers like a reversion of time itself; me, knowing the momentum of damage and enemies so completely that I can speedrun the game. Play it, actually, at a regular pace. Ain’t that something. A slow game, but present.

Delete - Self-vore; masturbartory reflexivity bores me. But SUPERHOT was so close. Its gradual subtraction of every expansions made to the original concept pushes past the cringe by committing to a proper state of powerlessness. But at the end of each stage, when vision itself has been euthanized and verbs stripped away from the player, we’re given the option to give up. Press [E] to access the text. The game should have left us to rot in there. Let the player figure out new ways to still assert dominance over its environment in the absence of tools to do so. The game’s not inventive enough - in both mechanics and level-design - to do that. A shame. All that’s left, then, is a language only dispensed by the screen - our usual one-way mirrors. Ten minutes of me pressing [E] to get the syllables drooling out of my mouth. Sweet nothingness lost in Amygdalatropolis. Yelling that same sentence into the void.

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

[Just a hollow sense of progression and power]

HOT.