One of the games Iâm most looking forward to this fall involves wearing disguises, infiltrating strongholds and taking out assassination targets in as smooth a way as possible. No, Iâm not talking about Dishonored (though that game looks perfectly fine), Iâm talking about Devolver Digitalâs Hotline Miami, a new top-down killfest from artist Dennis Wedin and game developer Jonatan âCactus.â Söderström.
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The gameâs retro art style feels alive; Wedinâs environments are delightfully seedy, and everything in the game just feels off somehow, the stinking underbelly of a city that has no overbelly to begin with.
And man, the soundtrack is incredibly good. Itâs a wet, thrumming mix of fantastic electro from a bunch of great electronic music artists.
A bunch of stuff from the game is by M.O.O.N.:
As well as Sun Araw:
And Perturbator:
With more music to come, including some stuff by Jasper Byrne, whose terrific horror game Lone Survivor has one of the best not-yet-discussed-on-Kotaku soundtracks of the year.
Hotline Miami itself is a top-down shooter something like Smash TV or the early Grand Theft Auto games, though with fewer (and more lethal) enemies. The story is a David Lynchian mystery setâwhere else?âin Miami, in which you play a psychopathic killer-for-hire who wears animal masks and lays waste to even the most dangerous enemies. (The animal masks give specific power-ups. Theyâre also really creepo.)
In practice, Hotline Miami moves fast: really, really fast. Walk into a room and youâve got a split second to take out the guard looking at you, or youâre dead. But death and restarting are part of the game, and youâre expected to spend a long time perfecting your approach. The kills are brutal, bloody, and wildly entertaining in a grindhouse sort of way, and the game itself is fast and fun as hellâfaster than anything Iâve played in a long time, due largely to the speed of the mouse and keyboard combination.
You can get a pretty good sense of it from this trailerâeach mission starts with you getting a weird message telling you to go to a place and get a thing, or off a guy⊠the usual thing. Whatâs unusual is how each level plays out, and the gameâs overall pastiche. Itâs the coolest Iâve felt playing a video game in a long time, and I canât wait to see how the whole (twisting yet coherent) story plays out.
The team at Devolver Digital has also just announced that Hotline Miami will be playable at Gamescom, and will be released on Steam; big news for one of the most interesting indies Iâve played this year. Games like this deserve a wide audience, and itâs great to see that Hotline Miami will have a platform worthy of its cold-hearted, psychotic thrills.
