Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami
Hotline Miami cover artwork by Niklas Åkerblad
Developer(s)	Dennaton Games
Designer(s)	Jonatan Söderström (Programmer/Artist) Dennis Wedin (Artist)
Engine	Game Maker
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release	23 October 2012
Genre(s)	2D top-down action
Mode(s)	Single-player

Hotline Miami is a 2D top-down action video game by Dennaton Games, a team composed of Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, who had previously collaborated on Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf. The game is being published by Devolver Digital and was released on 23 October 2012 for Windows. The game has been described by the developer as a "top down fuck'em up", blending top down perspective with stealth, extreme violence and surreal storytelling, along with a soundtrack and visuals influenced by 1980s culture. The game itself was heavily influenced by Nicolas Winding Refn's neo-noir crime drama film Drive (2011); the director is specifically thanked in the credits.

Plot

Hotline Miami makes extensive use of an unreliable narrator, and many events occur seemingly out-of-order.

In Hotline Miami, the player takes the role of an unknown man. (He is frequently nicknamed as Jacket by fans due to his distinctive letter jacket, but he is never referred to by this name or any other name in the game.) He is plagued by visions involving three masked strangers who ponder about Jacket's identity and his actions. Jacket wakes up in his apartment on April 3rd, 1989. He receives a message on his phone about a package of cookies and how he should read the list of ingredients. Jacket finds the package outside which contains a animal mask, 'Richard', and instructions to go retrieve a briefcase at a certain location while eliminating everyone there. Jacket continues to get more of these messages and continues to follow their orders. Between each "job" he stops at either a bar, pizza place, deli or a video store. At each store the same man works there who gives Jacket everything free of charge while making comments about the murders; over time, these encounters become increasingly surreal and distorted. Following a voicemail directing him to the estate of a movie producer, Jacket rescues a hooker and brings her home. Jacket begins a relationship with this woman and continues to murder mobsters and the request of the ominous messages.

While clearing out a Condo of mobsters, Jacket receives a phone call to come to the phone company's office. When he arrives, he discovers a Biker investigating the company files, and the two begin to fight. At this point, there are two divergences in the game's events.

Jacket's interpretation

Despite the Biker's protests, Jacket kills him with a golf club before returning to his apartment. At this point, Jacket's version of events become increasingly distorted, with dead bodies of the men he's killed beginning to appear around his apartments and local businesses, without his girlfriend or the clerk noticing them. Jacket continues with his murders and almost gets caught when SWAT raids the building he was fighting in. After Jacket escapes from the police, he stops at the deli only to find the body of the Biker on the floor. The clerk tells Jacket that "none of this is real," and with a flash of static the Biker is gone and the man is oblivious to what just happened. Shortly after, the clerk is found dead in every store he worked in, replaced by an aggressive bald man who gives Jacket nothing.

Jacket continues to murder people as the messages ask when one day he arrives home to find his girlfriend shot dead in the bathroom. The murderer, Richter, is found sitting on Jacket's couch in a rat mask. He shoots Jacket in the head after briefly acknowledging him. Jacket then gets out of his bed to find his corpse on the floor and the man with a chicken mask, Richard, now sitting in Richter's place. Richard, who earlier pondered about Jacket with two other masked people, tells Jacket this is the last time they will meet and that Jacket will never see the full picture. Jacket's clothes turn into hospital clothing as he sees himself sitting in a hospital bed. He falls to his knees and tears his own head off.

Weeks pass, and we see Jacket in a hospital with a police officer and a doctor discussing his fate. Jacket's injury was not lethal, but managed to put him into a coma. The police officer states that Jacket's girlfriend died and that they have the suspect in custody. Jacket escapes the hospital and arrives at his apartment to find it and his car ransacked. He changes back into his regular clothing and assaults the police station. He finds out that the bald man is the man with the rat mask who killed his girlfriend. He says that he got the same phone calls as Jacket and gives Jacket an address. After following more leads, he is eventually given the address of the head of the Russian mafia.

Jacket arrives at the address and rampages through the building. He kills everyone there, including the mobster boss. Jacket heads towards the balcony, drops an unexplained photograph into the darkness, and has a smoke as the credits roll.

Biker's Interpretation

Following the game's conclusion, the player is given the opportunity to play as the Biker, who is revealed to be receiving the same phone calls as Jacket. However, it appears that he knows more than Jacket did, and is attempting to end his affiliation with the group, leading him to track down the source at the phone company. While attempting to find out the source, Jacket arrives and attempts to stop him. However, this time the Biker, albeit reluctantly, defeats Jacket, seemingly killing him. The Biker then travels to the mob HQ where Jacket originally killed the mobster boss. Spotting a janitor retreat to the basement, the Biker heads downstairs to discover a room full of masks and phones. Two janitors have been setting up these killings.

Standard Ending

If Jacket doesn't collect a series of 'secrets' scattered around the various locations, the Biker confronts the janitors, only for them to claim that they are simply bored, with the voicemails and masks existing as a way to entertain themselves. The Biker then kills the pair, and leaves on his motorcycle before the credits roll again.

Secret Ending

With all the hidden 'secrets' collected throughout Jacket's chapters, the Biker is able to guess the password for the janitors' computer system, and discover their true intentions. When confronted, the pair detail that their plan was to destabilise the Ruso-American coalition by conducting the systematic murder of the Russian mob, under the guise of a patriot group, known as 50 Blessings. The pair claim that the Biker had knowingly signed up to be a part of this, a claim backed up by the appearance of the organization's flyers in Jacket's apartment. The janitors then reveal that there are chapters of the same organization all over the United States. The Biker then kills the pair, and leaves on his motorcycle before the credits roll for a second time.

Gameplay

File:Hotline Miami Trailer Image.jpeg

Jacket in conversation with the three masked figures

Hotline Miami has a top-down perspective with a focus on melee combat. While firearms are available, they are not recommended as the noise generated by these weapons attracts nearby enemies. Players can throw weapons and execute knocked over enemies. There is no health system to speak of, the player dies with only one hit. The player can instantly restart after death however there is no checkpoint system. There is a point system which grades how one plays and unlocks weaponry. The player can unlock masks which give passive bonuses such as faster walking speed and the ability to survive one bullet. There are three main enemy types with the exception of bosses. The three types are mobsters, dogs and thugs. Dogs and mobsters die in one hit while thugs take multiple shots.

Soundtrack

The Hotline Miami Official Soundtrack can be found on Dennaton Games' SoundCloud account.

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Horse Steppin'" (Sun Araw)	10:10
2.	"Hydrogen" (M.O.O.N.)	4:49
3.	"Paris" (M.O.O.N.)	4:31
4.	"Crystals" (M.O.O.N.)	4:49
5.	"Vengeance" (Perturbator)	2:53
6.	"Deep Cover" (Sun Araw)	8:05
7.	"Miami" (Jasper Byrne)	3:19
8.	"Hotline" (Jasper Byrne)	3:12
9.	"Knock Knock" (Scattle)	4:04
10.	"Musikk per automatikk" (Elliott Berlin)	3:05
11.	"Miami Disco" (Perturbator)	4:31
12.	"Release" (M.O.O.N.)	6:02
13.	"A New Morning" (Eirik Suhrke)	2:28
14.	"Flatline" (Scattle)	2:14
15.	"Silver Lights" (CoConuts)	6:36
16.	"Daisuke" (El Huervo feat. Shelby Cinca)	2:42
17.	"Turf" (El Huervo)	5:04
18.	"Crush" (El Huervo)	2:40
19.	"Electric Dreams" (Perturbator)	4:45
20.	"Inner Animal" (Scattle)	3:40
21.	"It's Safe Now" (Scattle)	2:43
Total length:		1:32:22

Reception

Hotline Miami received both Eurogamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Game of the Show award at their inaugural Rezzed expo.

Eurogamer scored the game 10/10, with reviewer Tom Bramwell saying that the game was a blend of elements, and if one of the game's elements were removed, the game would stop working, but you would be unable to understand why.

IGN gave the game a score of 8.8/10 emphasizing it's "striking blend of fast ultraviolence, a dense, challenging story and brilliant presentation." In its final verdict for the game, the reviewer Charles Onyett stated "Hotline Miami’s momentum of mystery builds right up to its finale, where snarling cynicism is offered as a justification for why all this machinery of neon fuzz and thumping bass, bright blood and fractured identity was started up in the first place. Yet the justification is also disarmingly simple, the same reason why quarters were dropped into arcade machines built during the late ‘80s era Dennaton Games so clearly reveres. Why bother with Hotline Miami? Because it exists. Because it’s fun. Because it deserves to be played."

It has a Metacritic score of 86.

Piracy

Jonatan Söderström has responded to complaints and questions on file-sharing website The Pirate Bay under the name cactus69, providing advice for users who are experiencing problems with pirated copies of the game. Söderström has made a post on Twitter admitting that whilst he does not want anyone to pirate the game, he can empathise with the fact that some people may not be able to afford it.

Sequel

In an interview with Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin at Eurogamer, the creators shed some light on possible new future game content. When prompted with the question of upcoming DLCs, the creators revealed "I think we're going to do quite a big project. It will probably be about as long as the full game, so probably we'll charge something for it. It will be like a sequel kind of, but building on the story. We don't want to reveal too much, but it will probably have more playable characters than the first game did. And a couple of different stories and angles. A lot of of people have been asking about a map editor to build their own stages, so we're looking at if it's possible to do that. I think it would be really cool to let people do their own stages."

In late November 2012, Söderström tweeted "Working while listening to the sweet tunes of a preliminary Hotline Miami 2 soundtrack that we've put together during the weekend." He later clarified that it was only really the music that he was dealing with at the time and that, "We only have some general plans for the next game". Further to hinting that the sequel may be some way off, Söderström insisted that he was still committed to working on patching and fixing the original game.

External links

• Hotline Miami official website