Hotline Miami Review

“Follow protocol and we’ll all make it out alive,” says a boss character in one of Hotline Miami’s later missions. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing for him to say to his henchmen. All who hear him probably think it’s good advice, wisdom dispensed to survive an impending attack by you, a relentless killer. So they follow orders and do what they’ve been trained to do. Some stand with guns, some patrol rooms with knives, and all are ready to slash and shoot and murder the intruder in a bloody font of insta-death. Yet none who heard the order appreciate its irony. They don’t comprehend that by following protocol they follow the game rules that you've learned to overcome, and that by complying with their boss set themselves up to have their brains splattered against the wall and organs spilled across the floor.

Dennaton Games’ Hotline Miami is stuffed with moments like this that stir up identity and purpose into a neon-lashed, ultraviolent, self-aware skewering of video game conventions and the nature of entertainment. Lynchian scenes of surrealist intrigue pop up right at the very beginning as masked figures ridicule you about events they never explain, immediately and succinctly establishing a sense of distrust. The nonstop flux of pinks and purples wrapped around the edges of every playable area, the grainy waves washing across the retro visuals and sublime soundtrack where reverb bleeds from fat synths over electronic beats aren’t solely for style, but mesh perfectly with the sense of worming paranoia established through the dialogue, amplifying Hotline Miami’s lonely, dreamlike qualities, where nothing is necessarily certain aside from the promise of a gore-splattered spectacle when a stage is complete.

To compound this sense of distrust, every mission is based on a lie; a phone message asking you to kill for false reasons. There are a few explorable non-combat spaces and each feels like a tease. You have an apartment with an old video game console on the ground. You pick up pizza boxes and VHS tapes and eventually gain a roommate and you can never interact with any of them in a significant way. They are all background elements. They are initially framed as non-essential. The only way to truly interact with the world is to kill. Such is the case with many games, yet few call out the inanity of it so bluntly.

Before a mission begins you put on a mask. Each confers gameplay bonuses and further obfuscates your identity to place emphasis on what you do, not who you are. The overhead perspective serves a similar dual purpose. It enables you to look across vast stretches of each playable area where enemies wait behind doors and breakable windows to kill you in a fraction of a second. The perspective allows you to plan how to move, from which angle to fire a shotgun or toss a knife or stun an enemy by opening a door behind him just as he passes then proceed to wreck his face against the floor. The perspective also dehumanizes your targets by presenting them as only heads and shoulders and weapons, an effect strengthened by their pixelated appearance. It’s not until they’re dead and their bodies sprawl across the ground in full view with blood pooling about them that they feel human and, maybe for a moment, you feel a twitch of remorse.

Yet whatever regret you may have over brutally and relentlessly murdering is immediately neutered as Hotline Miami flashes a giant score bonus over each fresh corpse. Kill multiple people quickly and you’ll build combos. With enough speed and efficiency and recklessness you’ll amass higher scores and unlock more masks and weapons and receive better ratings at each mission’s end. The gameplay is kind of stealth but mostly quick action. You wait around hallway corners for an enemy to walk away then sprint around the corner with a crowbar, break his head, toss the crowbar at the shotgun-carrying enemy in the room’s corner to score a stun, throat rip the guy who just wandered in then pounce on the still-stunned foe to punctuate the spree with a burst of gore, and in those moments of blood-soaked success feel a rush of satisfaction because it could have gone so horribly wrong.

Hotline Miami doesn’t only share the same audio-visual themes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (the director is specifically thanked in the credits), but also the same kind of startling ease of transition between life and death. In general, if you get hit, you die, and if you hit an enemy, they die. The game auto-saves after you change floors of the buildings you assault, but each floor needs to be cleared without making a mistake. Resetting is quick and encouraged, much in the same way as Trials HD or Super Hexagon. Mess up and you can instantly return to the action armed with more knowledge of enemy positions and map layout. Even after you learn everything about a stage, when you respawn enemies may move in a slightly different way and they may not carry the same weapons, so memorization alone won’t result in success. There’s always an element of chaos in the action that parallels the puzzling tendrils of the story. Stringing together a continuous combo throughout a stage often requires frantic improvisation and prevents the action from suffering from too much predictability.

More depth is added through the way Dennaton handles sound. Bats and crowbars are quiet, but guns draw attention. You could run into a room and try to cut everything apart with a shotgun, but in a populated stage it’ll bring in others, some of whom may flatten you before they’re even visible with an unavoidable burst of bullets. To get around this you can target an enemy before entering a room, you can silently fling your weapon to temporarily knock him out, which may give you enough time to punch a patrolling enemy, steal his weapon and murder them both without alerting anyone else. Getting better at effectively juggling these variables, managing sound and line of sight and speed, is a rapid, noticeable process, and the sense of reward for efficiently cutting down all lethal threats is significant because there’s room to slay with custom style.

As the body count rises, the sense of disconnection with the tragedy of what’s happening onscreen grows. You crave more kills to again feel that rush of just barely surviving and seeing those big, flashy numbers burst across the screen with Peggle-like splendor. You begin to think more and more like the serial killer you’re playing and find delight in the purity of the task, not the implications. Yet for all the ways Hotline Miami seems to needlessly pop skulls and spray blood, it does so for a reason.

It’s hinted throughout the early non-combat scenes that bookend missions that at first seem so disposable. Violence begins to infect what initially seems to be a wearying, comically dull routine where you run errands following a successful killing spree. Even as the world around you is corrupted by the grotesque and shop owners carry on disturbingly reasonable conversations with corpses bleeding at their feet, you don’t react. You proceed as usual, mission to mission, a process suggestive of a far deeper and troubling psychosis, again thickening the layers of dishonesty in Hotline Miami’s presentation and strengthening its motivating sense of intrigue. Direct and implied lies are piled up until fantasy and reality are inextricably bound, and Dennaton finds ingenious ways of integrating interactivity and story development to keep you directly involved in the process. While the characters rattle the bars of their virtual prisons, driven to discover some kind of truth under the apparent pointlessness of their missions, Hotline Miami’s hyperactive pacing never slackens as it continually offers the same solutions to all the existential issues raised: keep killing, keep playing.

Verdict

Hotline Miami’s momentum of mystery builds right up to its finale, where snarling cynicism is offered as a justification for why all this machinery of neon fuzz and thumping bass, bright blood and fractured identity was started up in the first place. Yet the justification is also disarmingly simple, the same reason why quarters were dropped into arcade machines built during the late ‘80s era Dennaton Games so clearly reveres. Why bother with Hotline Miami? Because it exists. Because it’s fun. Because it deserves to be played.