Video game critic Cameron Kunzelman remembers the early 2010s as a reflective period. Ten years ago, then, the question “Do you like hurting other people?” was on the tip of many game maker’s tongues. Hotline Miami shares just as strong a kinship with two big-budget shooters released in 2012, Spec Ops: The Line and Far Cry 3, games that explored similar ideas of player agency (or the lack thereof) in relation to on-screen violence. In 2012, the game arrived as the blood-splattered yin to Journey’s meditative yang if it didn’t stretch the boundaries of video gaming like Jenova Chen’s outward-looking, nonviolent classic, then it reflected the medium’s impulsive id back at itself (which would become a major theme of Devolver’s output). “ Hotline Miami is an immaculate super-violent top-down action game,” said Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer. “It’s pure, unadulterated nihilism with a candy-coated shell,” wrote Alex Navarro at Giant Bomb. This cocktail of metafictional thrills, arcade violence, and arthouse visuals led Hotline Miami to become a gigantic indie success (to date, the game and its 2015 sequel have sold more than 5 million copies across several platforms), and judging by the slew of reviews it received at the time of its release, one of the most warmly regarded.
When the last enemy is dispatched, you must walk past the veritable mortuary that you’ve just created, lamenting not necessarily the loss of virtual life, but the quiet emptiness of the virtual space. One of the game’s very best tricks is the silence it leaves at the end of a level. It feels so good-until, of course, it doesn’t. The more damage you do, the more points you earn, and the more the screen fills up with spurts of blood whose bright red hue evokes the schlockiest of ’70s slasher flicks.
The game is carnal in its virtual bloodlust, numerically and visually rewarding a varied approach to the act of killing in the form of points as pulsating club music soundtracks the wanton destruction. Part of what makes Hotline Miami great is the way it revels in the queasy space between the feelings of the protagonist and that of the player-indeed, the way it mixes them up.
#Spec ops the line no sound in cutscenes Pc
In the ultraviolent top-down shooter, which came out on PC a decade ago this month and helped propel publisher Devolver Digital to industry stardom, this question is directed toward two people: the protagonist (who has made a habit of homicide) and the player (who one would hope has not). Moments later, the player seemingly offers an answer by bludgeoning an unsuspecting goon into pixelated oblivion with a baseball bat before unleashing a spray of bullets through another cartoon foe’s body. “Do you like hurting other people?” This is the provocative question posed to the player of Hotline Miami by, of all people, a dude wearing a chicken mask in the middle of a dream.
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