Hotline Miami

[Architecture]

I avoid the double-barreled shotguns anyway, if I can. I really like the silenced pistols, especially once I discovered one bullet is enough to bring down the fat dudes.

[Gormongous]

Gave up on this one graph in.

 

I think it's ludicrous to call the game bad because you're not enjoying it. You can dislike it, sure--but I actively love this game. I find it challenging, and I feel rewarded when I successfully navigate between levels, even if it takes me 100 retries to reach the final screen.

 

Criticism's all well and good, but I think your approach here is misguided. HM2's design is certainly intentional, but I wouldn't ever call it intentionally bad.

 

None of your comments really address the writing or story, though, which is where I think Deadpan's taking a lot of his beef. I'm not as extreme in my views, but gameplay criticisms aside, I do see the writing in this game as an abject failure to be about or to accomplish anything, or even to provide proper framework through which to enjoy the violence, if this bigger-and-better sequel to a nihilistic video game about wallowing in violence also claims that same mantle. There are too many characters and too many scenes to be thematically coherent, the timeline skips around so much that it's a lot harder to care how those scenes and characters relate to each other, several plot threads are left entirely dangling, the ending is abrupt and unearned, and the powerful motifs from the first game (especially the masks) have been diluted down to a Greek chorus of mockery.

 

There is literally no part of the game's writing that distinguishes it as better than a hypothetical "Lost Levels" DLC with absolutely no story to explain it for me, which makes me wonder why the developers bothered. Either i) they deliberately chose to write a long-winded and obscure plot, wherein multiple minutes are spent listening more than once to minor characters muse on what they'll do when they quit the military, and happened to totally miss what worked about the first game's barely-there plot, which was full of nonsense but never wasted a second of your time that wasn't needed to set the mood, or ii) they did it all by accident, in the process of just making the game. Neither of these particularly absolves them from writing a terrible video game that is substantially less fun for me to play, so I'm okay with taking them to task. If you like the writing, like thecatamites did earlier in this thread and made good defense of it, you're welcome to say your piece, but I don't think I'm just saying that I didn't like the game. I think there's substantially less craft at work here, or at least the same amount of craft spread thinner over a much larger game.

[Problem Machine]

As I said, I think that there is a throughline to the story, which is showing how the chain of violence that starts in the military levels and set the foundation for Hotline Miami 1 eventually keeps echoing itself through different characters and eventually killing pretty much everybody. It's a different approach from that of the first game, which specifically puts you in the head of one -- well, two -- murderous maniacs, and how while they get roped into 50 Blessing's whole thing against their will they, and you as the player, enjoy the ride. Rather than focusing on that individually expressive experience of two characters, it pulls back and puts that in the greater context, showing both where Jacket came from and what the repercussions of his actions were. I thought that was pretty interesting!

 

Oh, I'm not sure if you noticed, but those scenes where they were talking about what they were going to do after the war? Each of those was the setting of one of the down-time segments from Hotline Miami. I don't think this was written nearly as carelessly as you seem to think.

[Architecture]

I actually do enjoy the writing, for what it's worth. I haven't finished the game so I can't definitely say it's a well-written game from end to end, but I find its use of non-linear narrative devices interesting and I think that it does a decent job of executing some self-aware commentary. In a lot of ways, I think the writing is about letting the game's mechanics and level design do the talking for it, even if the cutscenes border on verbosity. The opening scene is certainly an off-color attempt at examining sexism and sexualization in games, and I don't think it entirely succeeds in what it's trying to convey. But at the same time, I understand the (admittedly juvenile) place it's coming from.

 

But what I'm speaking to is the portion of the article wherein Deadpan writes:

 

"it wants to be a bad game, at least as far as its desire to be deliberately frustrating instead of entertaining is concerned."

 

I don't agree with this at all. I find the game to be monumentally entertaining, and I actually welcome the frustration the gameplay serves up. Being bested by a level only to step away for an evening and then load it up the next, successfully applying the strategies and mechanics I've accrued is rewarding in and of itself. The puzzle elements of the combat are the hook for me personally.

 

Again, I don't begrudge anyone who dislikes it, but calling the game objectively bad because it doesn't suit your tastes or subverts your expectations is lazy criticism.

[Gormongous]

Oh, I'm not sure if you noticed, but those scenes where they were talking about what they were going to do after the war? Each of those was the setting of one of the down-time segments from Hotline Miami. I don't think this was written nearly as carelessly as you seem to think.

I don't think callbacks to events or characters of the previous game count as "careful" writing unless they bring a new perspective to those events or characters. If that's all that takes, every Call of Duty game has "careful" writing, which actually may be true but does not stop it from being rote, derivative, or just plain boring.

To be blunt, I think that the story of the sequel is the least interesting path that someone writing Hotline Miami: Aftermath could have taken. Really, you're telling me that the consequences of Jacket's violent acts, themselves prefigured by other violent acts, have echoed out, causing more violent acts as others don their own figurative masks, until the escalation causes the ultimate violent act? Even if the presence of Helmet and others in the first game weren't already a fine treatment of that theme, is it really profound and exciting enough to draft the engine's slow pacing and the writers' flabby dialogue into dragging such an obvious thing out for fifteen or so hours? I don't think so, but obviously I'm in the minority here.

I just feel like, in a game like this, the story should stay out of my way, but in Hotline Miami 2, it most definitely didn't. It kept getting in my face, as if I enjoyed the brief weirdness of picking up a pizza from a guy spouting a handful of nonsense in the first game as anything more than fifteen seconds of incongruously humorous downtime between levels. I don't want to hear his fuckin' life story.

[Problem Machine]

Well it becomes relevant when you recall that all of those were dying/coma hallucinations of Jacket, and that he's cast his old wartime buddy in each of these roles because of the conversations. Maybe you don't find that interesting - I do. Maybe there's not a big grand meaning of life behind it, but I think it's really cool taking this character who is defined by violence and seeing how that happened, and alternate ways it could have happened -- either the peaceful retirement of the convenience store owner, the patriotic fervor of snake mask, or the bloody death of the last squad member. Alternatives are also a recurring theme, with several of the plot threads reaching contradictory endings (biker and Jacket, Richter and Jacket and Mob Boss, Mob Boss and the fans).

 

So, okay, whatever. You don't give a shit about the characters. I do. I like how each character expresses their personality through their particular form of violence, even in slight ways, as with Evan's reluctance to kill and Tony's unstoppable rage, and makes me feel a brief moment of synchronicity with them. These things matter, and change the qualitative experience of playing the game in slight but substantial ways. There may be plenty of room for improvement, I'm sure there could be snappier dialogue and that the ideas could be conveyed more quickly and effectively, but that's true of anything to various degrees -- I can get on board with that. However, claiming it's all filler, that it's all completely devoid of ideas, that it's all nonsense, or somehow self-contradictory? I completely disagree.

[Gormongous]

Well it becomes relevant when you recall that all of those were dying/coma hallucinations of Jacket, and that he's cast his old wartime buddy in each of these roles because of the conversations. Maybe you don't find that interesting - I do. Maybe there's not a big grand meaning of life behind it, but I think it's really cool taking this character who is defined by violence and seeing how that happened, and alternate ways it could have happened -- either the peaceful retirement of the convenience store owner, the patriotic fervor of snake mask, or the bloody death of the last squad member. Alternatives are also a recurring theme, with several of the plot threads reaching contradictory endings (biker and Jacket, Richter and Jacket and Mob Boss, Mob Boss and the fans).

 

So, okay, whatever. You don't give a shit about the characters. I do. I like how each character expresses their personality through their particular form of violence, even in slight ways, as with Evan's reluctance to kill and Tony's unstoppable rage, and makes me feel a brief moment of synchronicity with them. These things matter, and change the qualitative experience of playing the game in slight but substantial ways. There may be plenty of room for improvement, I'm sure there could be snappier dialogue and that the ideas could be conveyed more quickly and effectively, but that's true of anything to various degrees -- I can get on board with that. However, claiming it's all filler, that it's all completely devoid of ideas, that it's all nonsense, or somehow self-contradictory? I completely disagree.

 

We're going to have to agree to disagree, then. While I like a lot of the themes you mention, especially the idea of alternatives, I think that those are best conveyed through environmental data and gameplay outcomes. Expanding the brief and impressionistic non-combat interludes of the first game into multi-minute scenes of characters and events reveals to me how uniquely bad the Hotline Miami engine is at facilitating that means and mode of storytelling. It feels like trying to do Shakespeare while riding somewhere on the subway. I've never said that Hotline Miami 2 is completely devoid of ideas, and if I have I misspoke, but the game is impressively bad at conveying what ideas it does seem to have, when it's not conveying them through its depiction of violence (or, in the case of Evan, the lack thereof. Evan's quick emptying of guns that he picks up builds his character better for me than any of his interminable conversations. It still feels silly for him to be beating up an entire nightclub of guys, but at least the game lets you run past most of them. You're penalized horribly in terms of score, though, because the game wants you to know what really counts, characterization be damned).

 

The fact that the writing is of poor quality, in addition to being mostly redundant, just serves to sap my patience with it all the more. Half the lines could be cut from almost any verbal exchange without a loss to meaning and character, which was a funny quirk of the first game's writing that becomes a serious annoyance in a game that's twice the length with many times the dialogue. Did you know about the newspapers inserted into several of the levels that detail the geopolitical situation leading up to Hotline Miami 2's ending? The Dennaton guys like to over-explain themselves in really odd ways that make me feel like the first game's "secret" ending was more serious than not at all.

 

Also, and this is just a side note, but I don't think that anyone's a dying hallucination by Jacket? I thought we see him in jail at the end of the second game. At least, the game's wiki confirms that impression for me.

[Problem Machine]

Again, that's probably one of several outcomes, along with dying at the end of the war and getting killed by Biker. I don't think there's a single 'canon' chain of events. Whether it was dying or not, though, all of the levels pre-Trauma in HLM1 are unreliable narrator flashbacks, which becomes increasingly clear as they progress.

edit: Also, frankly, I am so much less annoyed by ANY story told through text than by any but the very best told by lengthy full-voiced cutscenes that I honestly don't get being bothered by the talkiness. It's like a minute of reading. Whatever.

[Gormongous]

Also, frankly, I am so much less annoyed by ANY story told through text than by any but the very best told by lengthy full-voiced cutscenes that I honestly don't get being bothered by the talkiness. It's like a minute of reading. Whatever.

 

Hey, I played all the Infinity Engine games and made it through forty hours of Wasteland 2. I'm not bothered by reading, at least in a game where reading does not totally destroy the pacing that's established by the gameplay. In Hotline Miami, running through an entire level in one go takes that same minute. I could die and restart a dozen times in that minute. It's a method of storytelling that's horribly unsuited to the game's core systems, on the level of Skyrim's books except mandatory, unless the intention is to enforce downtime between levels. In the first game, that seemed clearly like the intent -- minutes of frenetic damage followed by seconds of psychedelic noodling -- but in the second, there's so much more talking and so much of it is actually about the events of the prior or upcoming level, which requires not just consuming but digesting, that it's not so much downtime anymore as a separate task entirely that I found vastly less interesting to execute.

 

I also am not in a position to argue this very well, but I feel like a lot of the fluid interpretations in Hotline Miami come entirely from the first game. Except for the mob boss' scenes, which have a very simple diagetic reason for the contradictions and ambiguity, the writing and gameplay of the second game do not seem to support the same fluidity, not without extensive reference to the first game, which is a separate text that should stand on its own.

[Twig]

In Hotline Miami, running through an entire level in one go takes that same minute.

Wow, you are way better at this game than I am. It took me upwards of 10 minutes on average per level on my first run through. (On hard it's probably taking me 15-20 so far.)

[Problem Machine]

I don't think the second game really does stand on its own, which I guess is a fair criticism. It's a bunch of mini-scenarios tied into the first game in various ways. TBH I still think that it might have been better served being something like the Half Life 2 episodes, selling each act as a little $2 expansion to HLM1 which builds on the story a bit more and provides some new challenging levels. I don't think it's a bad sequel, but I think it could have been the most amazing DLC ever.

[Gormongous]

Wow, you are way better at this game than I am. It took me upwards of 10 minutes on average per level on my first run through. (On hard it's probably taking me 15-20 so far.)

 

Oh, my bad! I misspoke, Arararagi. I meant that, on the run that beats a level, it takes one minute. A theoretical perfect run takes about one minute. I think I've only ever one-shotted a single Hotline Miami level and it was the worst feeling ever. I hate that kind of success where I know I can't reproduce it.

 

I don't think the second game really does stand on its own, which I guess is a fair criticism. It's a bunch of mini-scenarios tied into the first game in various ways. TBH I still think that it might have been better served being something like the Half Life 2 episodes, selling each act as a little $2 expansion to HLM1 which builds on the story a bit more and provides some new challenging levels. I don't think it's a bad sequel, but I think it could have been the most amazing DLC ever.

 

Okay, that makes me glad, because I agree completely with you there. My frustrations with Hotline Miami 2 stem from it not feeling like a single coherent product, which keeps me from really digging into it how I want. Almost anything I like about some part of it is absent from some other part, so it would be much better for it to be three to five DLC that each explore a different splinter-reality of the first Hotline Miami.

 

Does anyone know why they ended up making a sequel, especially since I heard that it was initially supposed to be DLC? I personally only heard that they were working on new Hotline Miami content once, and then suddenly Korax is talking about his preorder.

[Twig]

Haha fair enough. Although I think it's safe to say that most people spend way more than one minute per level, so isn't it also sorta unfair to hold the gameplay-to-cutscene ratio against the game, in that regard?

 

Shrug I don't really know. I liked the game but I didn't get anything deep or meaningful out of it (or the first game).

[Gormongous]

Haha fair enough. Although I think it's safe to say that most people spend way more than one minute per level, so isn't it also sorta unfair to hold the gameplay-to-cutscene ratio against the game, in that regard?

 

Yeah, but that's why I said it's also a dozen restarts. Both in theoretical and actual gameplay, a minute-long cutscene is a substantial footprint onto the pacing, at least for me. I'm not really interesting in pushing that argument farther.

[Twig]

But you don't have to watch the cutscene every time, right? Just the once. And then after that if you close the game you can hold RMB to skip any cutscenes you don't want to watch again. I guess I just don't really understand.

 

Oh well.

[Gormongous]

But you don't have to watch the cutscene every time, right? Just the once. And then after that if you close the game you can hold RMB to skip any cutscenes you don't want to watch again. I guess I just don't really understand.

 

Oh well.

 

I mean, "you can skip it" is not a particularly useful or interesting rebuttal to criticism of a game's writing and pacing. The Hobbit movies are a fast and fun time if you're leaning on the "skip scene" button every time you get bored, but that doesn't make them good.

[Twig]

I'm not really addressing the quality of the writing, only the very specific issue of whether or not the cutscenes are too long compared to the gameplay sections.  It only forces the cutscene on you once per initiating the level. In the grand scheme of things, they were a mere fraction of my initial playthrough. That's what I'm trying to say! I think?

 

To be even more confusing, I don't think I'm trying to say anything at all. Just trying to understand why that's even an issue in the first place. It may be something that I am physically incapable of understanding.

[Problem Machine]

Does anyone know why they ended up making a sequel, especially since I heard that it was initially supposed to be DLC?

It sounded like after they did that first DLC level which was basically just a bonus level with no story they started developing something like a side story with the pig butcher. I can see how that idea, of a copycat killer inspired by jacket, started to expand out into a bunch of different related ideas of people who were caused for one reason or another to go on their own rampages, and after a certain point that concept became bigger and more sprawling than the entirety of Hotline Miami so they decided to make it a sequel. I certainly can see why it would be too much to ask a dev to release that much content as free DLC (which was their original starting point), but I think that they should have considered the idea of a paid expansion a bit more carefully. Oh well!

[Gormongous]

I'm not really addressing the quality of the writing, only the very specific issue of whether or not the cutscenes are too long compared to the gameplay sections.  It only forces the cutscene on you once per initiating the level. In the grand scheme of things, they were a mere fraction of my initial playthrough. That's what I'm trying to say! I think?

 

To be even more confusing, I don't think I'm trying to say anything at all. Just trying to understand why that's even an issue in the first place. It may be something that I am physically incapable of understanding.

 

I don't mean to make it a direct comparison where the ratio of story to gameplay is what matters. My intent was simply to point out that time has a different and higher premium in Hotline Miami that, when combined with other things, makes overly long or poorly written dialogue more of a fault than with other games. If it's not clear to you with that, just assume my point is stupid anyway and we can leave it at that.

 

It sounded like after they did that first DLC level which was basically just a bonus level with no story they started developing something like a side story with the pig butcher. I can see how that idea, of a copycat killer inspired by jacket, started to expand out into a bunch of different related ideas of people who were caused for one reason or another to go on their own rampages, and after a certain point that concept became bigger and more sprawling than the entirety of Hotline Miami so they decided to make it a sequel. I certainly can see why it would be too much to ask a dev to release that much content as free DLC (which was their original starting point), but I think that they should have considered the idea of a paid expansion a bit more carefully. Oh well!

 

Hmm, I didn't realize that the transition from free to paid was also the transition from DLC to full game. You're right, oh well! Hopefully the fact that I've seen your last comment echoed in several prominent and well-written reviews means that it's something from which they'll learn.

[Architecture]

I mean, "you can skip it" is not a particularly useful or interesting rebuttal to criticism of a game's writing and pacing. The Hobbit movies are a fast and fun time if you're leaning on the "skip scene" button every time you get bored, but that doesn't make them good.

 

I think this is a poor analogy--movies are a linear, non-interactive experience. I also think you're trying to have it both ways, as you can simply bypass all the story and just play the game, so when you say things like

I just feel like, in a game like this, the story should stay out of my way, but in Hotline Miami 2, it most definitely didn't. It kept getting in my face, as if I enjoyed the brief weirdness of picking up a pizza from a guy spouting a handful of nonsense in the first game as anything more than fifteen seconds of incongruously humorous downtime between levels. I don't want to hear his fuckin' life story.

I have to argue that it's an absolutely valid response to say, "holding the B button magically does away with the game's narrative."

[Twig]

I'm actually gonna flip on this and agree with Gorm even if he is crazy (U;). Not all of the cutscenes are skippable, as some of what are effectively cutscenes are interactive, for example the pizza-picking-upping he mentioned. There's quite a bit of that in this game (or at least enough to be annoyed if you don't like the story, or even just don't like doing dumb stuff the cutscene could arguably do for you).

[Problem Machine]

Hmm, I didn't realize that the transition from free to paid was also the transition from DLC to full game. You're right, oh well! Hopefully the fact that I've seen your last comment echoed in several prominent and well-written reviews means that it's something from which they'll learn.

Yeah, though I hope they do something that isn't Hotline Miami next. I've been a fan of Cactus's work since long before HLM, and would love to see him do something more like the really dreamlike stuff he used to at the scope of Hotline Miami.

[Architecture]

The first game had similar "playable cutscene" sections, so I guess I don't understand why people are complaining about it here if they weren't before. I personally welcome the respite of not murdering everything on screen, considering some of these level runs have taken me an hour to beat.

[Twig]

Because they don't like the story in this one but liked it in the first one.

[Gormongous]

I'm actually gonna flip on this and agree with Gorm even if he is crazy (U;). Not all of the cutscenes are skippable, as some of what are effectively cutscenes are interactive, for example the pizza-picking-upping he mentioned. There's quite a bit of that in this game (or at least enough to be annoyed if you don't like the story, or even just don't like doing dumb stuff the cutscene could arguably do for you).

 

Yeah, that's a good articulation of it. Either I read all the mediocre dialogue, or I walk through the (sometimes quite long) interstitials (and some of the levels themselves, because of the switching characters and motivations and dates, which does a lot to erode the cooler elements among those) not knowing what's going on. It turns them from one kind of a waste into another, which isn't a particularly good "fix."

 

Because they don't like the story in this one but liked it in the first one.

 

Well, more that the story was so much less present in the first one, especially with shorter conversations, that the flab was intriguing rather than burdensome. But yes, basically. Thanks, Twig!