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Technicolor violence anyone?
Hotline Miami… I feel a bit out of my element here as I lack the knowledge of where to put my gaming thumb on the fanbase of this series. Having beaten the first Hotline, I may be able to start there. HM 1 was a game that celebrated violence, sex, drugs, hallucinations, rampages, rape, cruelty, murder, depression, murder again and insanity to the extreme. What made this all acceptable? Two things: 1. It’s all displayed from a top-down pixelated brightly colored viewpoint, so we as the onlooker don’t quite get a close-up view of it all. 2. It’s presented almost as an art-piece.
Is everything that’s happening within the game real? Is it a hallucination? Is it all happening inside your head and if it is, are you enacting these feats in the real world at the same time? Why are there so many phone calls? Is there actually a phone company that is mind-controlling those it calls to do their bidding? Why do you keep going to movie stores and restaurants after you slaughter dozens of people and order something like Jack Nicholson from The Shining? Are the people in masks real or are they different sides of your fractured psyche? Why is everything in the game so disgusting?
I think I like Hotline Miami a lot more looking back at it than I did when I was playing it. I think back to all the disturbing images, weird dreams and creepy phone calls and I think “you know what, that was pretty cool.” I think while playing it though, I just feel lost, confused, and morbidly interested about all the horrible things I’m doing. Maybe I just don’t get it, or maybe that’s the point. Maybe so many people love this game because it seems to just constantly say, “The world is shit. You’re shit. There’s nothing you can do about it,” and maybe those people connect with that deeply. I can on a certain level but the intellectual part of me is constantly churning away, testing its validity against fact. “Is the world actually garbage? I can’t be sure unless I understand the context of the phone calls. Did I murder a man and take his lady-friend back to my apartment just to have sex with her and then kill her or was that a metaphor for something else? Who are the doctors?”
The game almost seems to mock life itself and perhaps that’s it’s biggest appeal. It takes something that inherently society takes as so precious and treats it as if it is nothing. Who knows. HM 2 picks up more or less along the same vein as the original. In fact, as you can see from the tiger picture a few paragraphs above, the mask-wearers from HM 1 now wear bloodied and beaten masks of their former selves. What on earth could that mean? You still get the phone calls before doing a mission. This time though, as an upgrade to the original, you play as many different people throughout time. Cleverly, the game is displayed in two ways–as a movie set with a director calling out all the shots, demanding that things be more violent, and as a VHS tape that keeps getting rewound and fast-forwarded through time.
Levels feel more detailed and interactable and they might be a bit larger (although that might just be me). There are new masks as well which of course mean new abilities (I was always fond of the hare from 1 myself). While I don’t quite have the same appeal for this series as so many do, the game is Tier 2 as it will still be worth seeing how the psychedelic story continues. Gameplay isn’t so bad either–you’ll die dozens, maybe hundreds of times on the harder levels, but there’s a fast rhythm about the game that almost adds to its drug-themed mess of a nightmare–kill, kill, kill, die, restart, kill, kill, kill, die, restart…
