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.

One of the most overrated games I've played. I'm sorry.

This has one of the BEST soundtracks I've ever heard and a style that is still rarely outmatched. However, it has some of THE MOST BAFFLING game design I've seen. In regards of the overall structure, there's barely a sense of direction in-between stages or even IN stages, making it extremely easy to get lost and confused during your playthrough.

However, the thing that easily puts this thing down for me is the combat, where you have to dash towards enemies to knock them down in which allows you to spray them, taking them out. While this was also in the original JSR, a game I consider to be among my favourites, it was never something you had to do, with the final boss being designed in a way that took advantage of the games strengths. In JSRF, you HAVE to engage in forced combat sections constantly in order to progress the game. Not only is this forcing you into a system that is generally not fun to play, it also halts the pacing to a crawl, and makes me much more likely to go and play something else.

Maybe this will hold up better on a replay, like the original, but for now, I don't think it's anywhere near as perfect as I see people label it as. Sorry.