Sure, I know that the only winning move is not to play. The cycle of ultra violence is self perpetuating. You are your own worst enemy- a willing genocidal puppet, and the game wants to make that clear. Yet Hotline Miami undermines itself with its complete disrespect of the player's intelligence.

My eyes rolled into the back of my head when, after smashing in a guard dog's head like a wet pumpkin, Hotline Miami gives you an achievement called "Dog Lover."

This kind of wanton ultraviolence is presented as subversive critique, but it is toothless. You have no other way with which to complete the objective than murdering all these people and animals. There is no creative way with which to clear a level- you must kill, and kill brutally. You kill and kill and kill and kill, no other choice in the matter, and then return home to have the game preach to you about how you're super desensitized to violence cause its just a video game. The game maintains this same juvenile sense of superiority for the entire runtime. It seems to believe everyone who plays it is so stupid as to not really understand the weight of their actions.

"Do you like hurting people?" Snore.

The cult of hyper masculinity has been a disaster for the human race, so I can buy that some people will just see this the way they want to see it. Yet, most people with any sense of the concept of ethics will immediately understand this game's repudiation of violence. Thusly, the extremely overt messaging comes off as bitter pretention. It was 2012 when this game came out. It wasn't the first game to present us with the concept of violence against faceless enemies. None of this arrogance feels earned.

Released years later, 2019's Streets of Rogue plays extremely similar to Hotline Miami and it was similarly wont to mock the player for their brutality. In this case, the mockery has justification- for every time you run into a building, swing a knife or firing a machine gun indiscriminately, there were dozens of other ways to solve the problem at hand.

This game thinks it is very profound for playing as an assassin, being told to kill everybody in a building, and having no other recourse than to either kill everybody or not play the game. Even No Russian worked better as a critique, because it didn't make you shoot everyone in that airport. You had the choice to pull the trigger.

I guess Jacket also had the choice not to swing the bat on the 99th dog for that achievement. It would've been nice, in that case, if I actually had to go out of my way to do that, before being derisively branded a "dog lover" for doing what the game is forcing me to do.

Absolutely incredible soundtrack, though.

My babysitter's nerdy, eldest daughter played this while making funny voices, so this game gave me something like an IRL let's play experience from my childhood.

Playing it for myself months later, then again via emulation, a decade after that, I can say this much:

A-woop, weew, A-woop, weew, A-woop, weew.