The Hotline Miami collection is a set of games that asks us to confront acts of extreme violence and the pleasure it can give us, when you finish a level you walk through the blood and corpses you defiled, HM1 in particular is really good at getting you into a killing flow state and made me have the time of my life as a result, that’s so evil I love it.

In my opinion 1 excels in its gameplay and presenting it’s themes through gameplay, while 2 tries to go for a more narrative focused experience and drags down the gameplay as a result as their is more story downtime and some stages feel like the narrative of the stage is more important then the gameplay of the stage and I prefer 1 as a result. 1 feels much more tightly designed and focuses a lot more on the chaos of the violence committed.

The presentation is on point in both games. The music isn’t to my tastes, but the vibes it creates is phenomenal.

These issues may be present in 1 and I just didn’t stumble upon them, but in 2 I had to restart 2 levels, once because I clipped into a wall moving to a different screen and second because of a crash that I think was from changing screen before post completion dialogue played.

Overall I don’t think these games are perfect, but it was really nice to play something outside my usual tastes and you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t at least play the original.