One of my colleagues mentioned that the game seems to have “it” – that confluence of aesthetic currency and a cultural moment that can propel an entertainment into the glare.

Tarantino touches abound, from the animal masks you can wear (they bear names like Dennis and Aubrey) to the shopkeeper who is a dead-ringer for Eric Stoltz. The soundtrack thrums and gnarls Pitchforkianly and you could just about take a screenshot of any second of the game and enlarge it and put a frame around it and hang it, pixelated coke piles and all. The credits appear to be in some kind of mirror-image Cyrillic script. The whole thing, blown out and off-center, looks like a bootleg VHS. Then I left the sound on and everyone kept working, and I felt validated. When I booted up the game, he came over and watched it and pronounced it “very cool”. They work with big boys and influence minds and look good doing it. We share our offices with what must be described as a very cool design firm. That said, let me try to gain your trust. If you have fond memories of the games I’ve mentioned Hotline will scratch that itch, but do no better.Īs an aesthetic document, Hotline is unimpeachable, and please do not just take a video game writer’s word for it on the subject of aesthetics. Your instruments of destruction are suitably diverse and if it’s your thing, the ultraviolence is up to snuff, at that sweet spot of disgusting and hilarious. The gameplay, which is diverting and tense but hardly worth talking about, involves butchering hundreds of white goons in identical white silk suits, and the occasional black goon in a black silk suit. This game finds you playing as a nameless thug who receives cryptic phone messages urging you to go to places and kill. Because Hotline takes as its inspiration games that are themselves commentaries, however crude, on media and pop culture, it is not enough to say it is Grand Theft Auto, but in Miami. At a certain level of abstraction, it is enough to say about Limbo that it is Mario, but thoughtful and beautiful. These comparisons will be correct but not sufficient. Hotline: Miami, the new game from Jonatan Söderström, will draw comparisons to the original Grand Theft Auto, and the preposterous early 1990s arcade shooter Smash TV. These games are creative iterations of games their creators played growing up, often spectacularly creative ones, but still, iterations.

The gloss may be mechanical ( Braid, Fez to a degree, QWOP) but much, much more often, if we’re being honest, it is aesthetic ( Limbo, Journey) and/or ironical (say, Super Meat Boy, and frankly, irony is an aesthetic gloss). Most independent success stories in gaming start with a shopworn genre (the platformer, or the space shoot ‘em up, or the racing game) and add a gloss. Though their ambitions may be radical, independent games have a conservative sphere of reference.

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