While The Walking Dead was noticeably stylistic, The Wolf Among Us has style in fucking SPADES. Seriously, I can't overstate just how much I adore the art style of this game. Aside from a few blurry textures and some seriously questionable anti-aliasing on the PlayStation 4 copy I own, this has held up shockingly well for a game that's almost a decade old at this point.

I also really enjoyed the setting, characters, and plot. I haven't played through it in a long while and am only starting to revisit it now that more footage from the sequel has been released. But if my memories are anything to go off, this not only meets The Walking Dead at certain points but outright surpasses it at others. If playing The Walking Dead was like watching a different version of the television series, The Wolf Among Us is a campy noir thriller stretched out to five episodes in all of its glory.

Really hoping that sequel is good, I have a soft spot for this one.

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.