I finally checked out Hotline Miami (and its sequel) after buying it on Steam nine years ago. And, who’d have guessed, the game that came highly recommended to me way back when is really good! It’s a hyper-violent, top-down twin-stick shooter that rewards bold strategies and improvisation as the player shoots, punches, and clobbers their way through various levels where one wrong move quite literally means death and a restart. The result is a tight, fraught game that harkens back to older games like Contra with both its lo-fi pixel graphics and one-hit-one-kill nature. It’s hard, but in that wonderful sort of way where I’ll spend a half hour trying to get through one two-minute level. So yeah, gameplay’s great, but the story is… fine.
Ostensibly, it’s an excuse plot to justify why masked-men are shooting up mob-bosses in Miami, alongside some fun conspiracies. A little deeper under the surface there are questions about why there’s such rampant violence and why the player character is doing this. It’s a grand idea, but I don’t know if it works. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some introspective plotting and interrogating the player’s connection to violence in a game. Metal Gear Solid did it, The Last of Us does it, and Spec-Ops: The Line makes a meal from the player’s willingness to engage in war crimes. Hotline Miami feels half-baked in comparison.
It’s probably unfair to compare an independent game to those blockbusters — Hotline Miami is far smaller with neither the budget nor the ambition of those other games. But the other ones mix their attitude towards violence into the gameplay in a way that Hotline Miami does not. Metal Gear Solid 3 gives you non-lethal options and confronts you with every soldier you chose to kill. The Last of Us has enemies beg for mercy as you kill them, taking the wind out of your sails. And Spec-Ops: The Line uses the trappings of a typical 2010’s military shooter to thoroughly deconstruct those military shooters. Nowhere in the actual gameplay does Hotline Miami’s questions of violence come up — if you skipped every textbox you’d miss it entirely. It’s also frustrating since Hotline Miami’s gameplay is so very good that those questions of morality just bog it down.*
So we’re here again in that tension between gameplay and story, and in this case the tension detracts from the overall experience rather than adds to it. But beyond all that, I love playing Hotline Miami, so much so that after beating it the first time I played right thought it again (this time, skipping most of the story). It’s so much fun to play and such a pleasant challenge. Checking online, there are folks out there who love the plot and its intricacies, so it’s very possible that I’m the problem here. And that’s fine, because Hotline Miami, for me, is a game where I get to John Wick may way around and that’s great.
*Hotline Miami didn’t set out to be a meditation on violence: by the creators’ own admission, part of the reason for the narrative was that they “…didn’t want anyone to encourage anyone to commit any real acts of violence” (x). Which is a whole additional question that I’ve gotten into before that’s beyond the scope of this post
Essays, Not Rants! 