It gives me a headache in all the right ways, baby. Punishing difficulty, ear pounding soundtrack, and that oh so enticing call to ultra violence. Hotline Miami rings you up and asks if you'd like to jump down the rabbit hole into the garden of madness. It draws you in and then after all the chaos and bloodshed is finished, makes you look upon the misery you wrought. "Do you like hurting people?" A question that I never thought too hard on as an early teenager. Only years later did it finally click with me what Hotline Miami was trying to tell me. The violence gets you nowhere. It's fueled by unchecked PTSD, mass xenophobia, and pure rage. It feels good in the moment. Hell, it's fun. But what are you left with afterwards? Nothing but the droning of an emotionless score as you walk past the bodies back to your car. Rinse. Repeat. Hotline Miami is perhaps the greatest piece of anti-violence media ever made. The fact that so many players don't see or outright ignore the themes of this series says a lot for the state of media literacy. Maybe we're too hardwired to violence. Maybe we're just a bunch of animals fighting.