Hotline Miami

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IamLEAM1983
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Hotline Miami

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

I'm 29. My memories of the eighties are pretty damn hazy. At most, I lived them through the vicarious filter of the nineties' syndicated TV shows and leftover aesthetics that permeated the earlier years of that decade. I do remember that the magenta and fluorescent yellows and pinks didn't really fade out of style until 1994. I spent most of the first half of the nineties seeing kids dressed in those gaudy Vuarnet shirts and hearing my parents stick to radio stations that passed the best of what the previous decade had to offer. Bonnie Tyler, Pat Benatar, STYXX, Bryan Adams, et cetera. Their World Music fixation didn't develop until 1995. Prior to that, I was mostly living my nineties ten years behind everyone else, except in the classroom and recess yard. It was pretty trippy at times.

2011 gave us Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, a movie that doesn't quite seem to be set in the eighties, but that does espouse some aesthetic leanings of the period. Letter jackets, magenta logos in slightly jagged cursive, an ethereal Synthpop end title track... The only things it was missing were drug references - specifically cocaine - white blazers and pastel shirts. That's where Dennaton Games' Hotline Miami comes in.

The first thing you'll notice is that this is an unabashedly retro twin-stick shooter. Everything we've come to associate with retrogaming nostalgia is present, from really obvious scanlines to intense aliasing and an exclusive use of pixel art. It's not designed to be pretty, it's designed to feel like you're back in 1989, probably coked up like nobody's business, and slotting quarters down some sort of Hellish arcade cabinet designed by David Lynch. Your character remains ostensibly nameless and takes orders from an answering machine that keeps picking up none-too-subtle hit requests. Every time you finish a mission, you're treated to a slice of normalcy. You pick up a pizza at the parlour, you rent VHS tapes or go down shots at the bar - but something's bound to jump out at you. Something that makes the whole thing feel inescapably wrong. The soundtrack and visual design seemed to work together to give you the obvious impression that your character isn't all there to begin with, and some vignettes between chapters further that impression.

Obviously, you've come for the good old ultraviolence. The missions themselves treat you to a floor plan and a smattering of top-down enemies, all looking exactly the same. Your job is to take them out. Why? Your character doesn't know. You don't know either. The answering machine told you to. The catch is, everyone in this version of Miami is of the one-hit-kill persuasion. That includes you. The only way you can hope to survive is if you take the time to learn the enemies' patrol routes and overall choreographies, and learn to exploit everything each stage puts at your disposal. This includes guns, bats, iron bars, katanas, pots of boiling water, shotguns, windows, your fists and feet - virtually anything that could be used to murder someone's face, directly or indirectly.

The end result is you dying, over and over, until you've finally managed to memorize the enemies' patterns for the entire level. Luckily, death isn't much more than a minor setback. One button press sends you back to the beginning of the floor you're on. You lose any progress you would've made, but the game is so fast-paced that this doesn't become an inconvenient. It's actually more of a reprieve. Dying means you have a few minutes to yourself to think about your next attempt.

Once things do click, though, you're in for a borderline balletic showcase of blood and gore in pixellized form. Enemies die in crimson showers and leave wide splatters around their heads or torsos. They'll sometimes attempt to crawl to a nearby weapon or take a few seconds to stop moving after being clubbed to the head one too many times. Hotline Miami is unapologetic, and it doesn't dither around with finding ways to make it clear that you're playing as an unhinged sicko. It's basically a "de-made" Manhunt, awash in everything negative we could possibly associate with the eighties.

Before long, the jacket-wearing protagonist's reality starts splintering. Store clerks will speak to corpses, a man with a partially exploded head will spew insults at you just outside your apartment building, your own flat becomes littered with leftovers from your killing sprees - it does have quite a few touches that remind me of Brett Easton Ellis' classic novel, American Psycho.

The game isn't afraid to question its own purpose, either. It'll ask you if you enjoy killing people, and if you know exactly why you're doing all this. You obviously don't. Ryan Gosling's character in Drive is stoic and detached, there's a bit of a concern that he might eventually lose it, but there's always a sense of direction that's present. The phone messages give you the impression you're essentially aimless, however. Who knows if you're actually receiving them? Maybe it's all in the protagonist's head, for all we know. Why is the game's title translated in Cyrillic, on the first screen you see? Why Russian?

The game answers all these questions and in doing so, shows us how the medium is still able to create screwy, unique experiences without necessarily relying on fake glitches. Sometimes, all you need is for a set of aesthetics, gameplay elements and music production to come together flawlessly. Even if you're not going to play this one, Dennaton Games' Soundcloud account is worth checking out, just for the game's soundtrack. It's neurotic, nervous and twitchy when it needs to be, and hazy and detached when the mood calls for it. M.O.O.N.'s "Paris" is especially worth checking out.

At less than ten bucks a pop, this is a little indie title you have to try out.
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