This review contains spoilers
Why was Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive such an influential cultural force across all forms of art and entertainment last decade? The film was released in the early period of the decade in 2011, so there was plenty of time for its 1980s-reminiscent aesthetic to seep into the zeitgeist of the 2010s. However, what I’m wondering is why so many artists gravitated towards emulating Drive’s style. Admittedly, the elements that constitute its style are endearingly kitsch, and the way that the retro-chic artistic direction is layered over gritty, darkened overtones presents a unique contrast that surprisingly melds together superbly. Normally, highlighting the purplish pink neon hue of the 1980s is a signifier of the decade’s elated decadence, but Drive’s direction rather exposes the drug-addled dirt and sleaze underneath the surface. Its modus operandi wasn’t an homage to the next-to-last decade of the 20th century, but a scathing depiction of what was hidden in plain sight across the ten years. Drive resonated with the influx of vaporwave and hypnagogic pop artists whose music reckoned back to the antiquated production of 1980s synthpop, as well as films like Baby Driver and the long-awaited sequel Blade Runner 2049 that shared Drive’s signature aesthetic and brooding, yet high-octane action pacing. In the realm of video games, the closest another work of fiction ever came to truly capturing Drive’s aura to its full extent is Hotline Miami, an indie darling that effectively translated all of the components of Refn’s most notable film to an interactive medium. However, Hotline Miami achieves something beyond an interactive tribute.
To start, Hotline Miami is fucking putrid. Drive, of course, had its fair share of scenes that didn’t shy away from depicting graphic, stylized violence on the celluloid, but every waking moment of Hotline Miami is a torrent of blood splatter. The entirety of Hotline Miami is that elevator scene from Drive and plenty of fans of the film state they find that scene hard to stomach due to its unflinching brutality. I realize that Hotline Miami is not a literal video game adaptation of Drive but if anyone were to make the argument that the violence of any adapted work is heightened in the video game medium to gamify the content, Hotline Miami would be a testament to this claim. “Jacket,” the anonymous protagonist whose nickname stems from the same snazzy clothing item signifier that Ryan Gosling’s character from Drive possesses, paints the interior walls of Miami’s corporate buildings with the gushing, red bodily plasma of the Russian mafia. However, the game never romanticizes the carnage, depicting the frequent massacres that occur throughout the game with a dread-filled, dark tone that becomes apparent once the flies start buzzing around the fresh, stinking corpses in Jacket’s wake once he climbs back up to his vehicle. The vibrant 1980s backdrop and aesthetic choices are practically what save Hotline Miami from plunging into severely horrific territory because what is being presented is truly grim and vile. I’m astonished how Hotline Miami didn’t draw in a flood of lashback from the typical crowd of concerned parents and scapegoating politicians considering the breadth of its depravity. Really, it’s probably because the pixel art that renders the viscera looks so quaint that Hotline Miami’s graphic content doesn’t bat an eye in an era with gaming visuals that could be mistaken for cinematics. Still, IF Hotline Miami weren’t an indie title where the developers were working with the bare essentials of gaming presentation, the game would make Max Payne look like Kirby. Hell, it could maybe even surpass Manhunt’s level of nihilistic gore.
Even though I’ve already compared Hotline Miami to Drive ad Nauseam at this point, the general objective across each of the game’s levels is reminiscent of the climactic sequence of Taxi Driver. For each of Hotline Miami’s chapters, Jacket enters one of the southern tip of Florida’s various commercial buildings, whose location is given through a dossier transferred to him via a phone call. Like Travis Bickle in Sport’s New York brothel, his objective is to clear the building of everyone in it, and I don’t mean by executing a devious prank like pulling the fire alarm. Jacket must take no prisoners and murder everyone on sight. The player witnesses this mission from a top-down perspective, a view of the scene from an impersonal angle as if they are an accomplice to the carnage as opposed to acting as the prime perpetrator (or an homage to when the screen pans out at the end of Taxi Driver?) More than likely, the top-down mechanics are to complement the twin-stick shooter gameplay. The player will control Jacket’s movement with a close combination of keyboard keys while performing most of the actions by alternating the left and right buttons on the mousepad. For anyone playing the console ports of Hotline Miami, both analog sticks need to be used simultaneously for both Jacket’s movement and aiming controls. Jacket enters every building unarmed, but this surprisingly isn’t a horribly miscalculated judgment call on his part as the area is littered with guns and other blunt objects galore. Simply knock out a goon situated at the front of the building and steal his weapon and he’s good to go. Of course, Jacket will dispose of his first victim a little more thoroughly, so the game allows him to perform an “execution” move on the ground with whichever weapon he has or his bare hands to slip the unconscious foe into a state of eternal oblivion. Once Jacket makes a meticulous effort to search every corner, closet, and behind every potted plant to dispatch all of his targets, he retraces his steps back up to the Delorean-esque limousine back to his safe house.
The rinse-and-repeat kind of gameplay that Hotline Miami bestows should tire the player through the stacked number of levels the game provides. However, Hotline Miami’s strict, constant difficulty curve is what staves off the repetition from becoming grating. Hotline Miami’s main gimmick is that the player must mow down the army of Russian mobsters without sustaining even a smidge of damage. If Jacket so much as trips on a cockroach that is sure to scurry by in these scuzzy hallways, he’s completely done for. Not to mention, all of the enemies inside are acutely alert (probably due to copious cocaine consumption), and they’ll spring at the opportunity to beat Jacket down or shoot him on sight before he can register what just happened. Hotline Miami’s core idiosyncrasy is absolutely brilliant, as the swift penalty for one’s mistakes adds a plethora of rich layers to the gameplay. While the overarching goal is to expunge the area of any Russian mafia activity, succeeding is not a simple matter of readying, aiming, and firing at will. Hotline Miami is a quasi-stealth game in that the player must refrain from acting rashly and plan each step accordingly. The jig won’t be up if an enemy catches Jacket, but the player should ideally be treating the overwhelming odds at hand with patience and tact if they want to make a clean getaway. However, for as proficient as some players might be in the vein of traditional stealth games like Metal Gear Solid, Hotline Miami practically guarantees that they’ll never achieve victory on their first attempt. Hotline Miami is a game whose progression is marked by trial and error, memorizing every little increment of the field and the relative rotation of where the enemies are stationed or the trajectory of their pacing. Later levels also add vicious rottweiler dogs that pin down Jacket and tear his trachea right out of his throat as well as burly black bouncers who are immune to melee weapons to thwart any accumulative familiarity. However, the cardinal rules to abide by in Hotline Miami, such as that the abrasively loud gunshots will always attract attention and that not taking advantage of every abrupt door swing to subdue enemies, will always be in place to ensure a quicker victory. As the game progresses, Jacket will unlock a wide variety of crude animal masks with special attributes that could compensate for whichever blindspot keeps befalling them. A checkpoint will be placed once the player reaches another floor as well, so the game is more than accommodating to its regulations. Still, some may feel dejected constantly respawning at the entrance upon subsequent failures, but the eventual triumph over the league of bald, eastern European Don Johnson wannabes will invigorate the player with a sense of gratification. Plus, all of the failed attempts behind the success will fuel one impressively smooth go-around. Jacket will execute every last living, breathing being in the vicinity unscathed like Travis Bickle, but if Travis Bickle had the killing acuity of a ninja.
Hotline Miami’s substance is interwoven into the gameplay and presentation, but there is a subtly told story that is still being told between the levels. Since his girlfriend left him, Jacket’s life has plummeted into a downward spiral of personal atrophy. The negligent, destitute state of his apartment is emblematic of Jacket’s metaphorical inner soul and mental state. Jacket’s evident apathy for his life and the world around him has made him a prime candidate for a radical group referred to as the “Fifty Blessings,” whose mission to fracture America’s relationship with Russia by exterminating their mafia is a very Cold War-centric pursuit of nationalism. Only a reprobate with nothing to lose would sign themselves up for a dangerously self-destructive act, and Jacket undoubtedly fits the description. As he accustomed himself to the daily grind of mass murder, Jacket’s mental state deteriorates even further. Three men often visit him in a hazy, darkened stupor of crawling insects that are wearing the animal masks he uses on the job, his “three witches” who judge him on his actions instead of offering premonitions. Jacket’s mental fortitude seems like it could bounce back after igniting a new relationship with a new girl he saved from a sleazy executive producer during a mission and interacting with a friendly and seemingly omnipresent store clerk that charitably gives him a bevy of free shit for his troubles. Unfortunately, the clerk winds up dead and so does his prospective new love, and the killer of the latter minor character shoots Jacket. He survives and is taken to the hospital, which is where we discover that the events in the game leading up to Jacket’s recovery have been a comatose recollection of his life’s recent events. Once he escapes the hospital and infiltrates the Miami police station, he confronts the man who reduced him to a vegetable and decides to let him live (in the canonical timeline) to procure instead information on where to locate the Russian mafia’s district leader. He confronts the local don, plus his female and canine bodyguards to shield him during his boss encounter, and then kills himself because he’s a man of outstanding pride. Jacket has rid late 1980s Miami of the Russian scourge, and treats himself to a long toke off of a Marlboro red as he tosses a picture from his pocket off the balcony.
Sure, this is technically the current of events that occurs throughout Hotline Miami’s runtime. However, how the game presents its story is akin to a photo collage where the pictures are aligned in a row. The player still has to piece together the context and correlative bearings between scenes and even then, the glue holding these hazy frames together isn’t sticking and making the pictures slip. In fact, we aren’t even privy to who is behind the phone messages until “Biker,” a boss battle whose death was only a fabrication in Jacket’s fleeting consciousness, confronts the two men responsible in the game’s epilogue. This is why Hotline Miami’s greatest theme is dissociation, a prevalent topic among the morally questionable protagonists from the films that comprise the game’s major influences. While Jacket is yet another unhinged renegade bound to enact (several) killing sprees, how Hotline Miami takes advantage of the video game medium to present Jacket’s dissociation from reality is utterly genius. You see, video games can get away with having a fractured, surreal narrative because at least it’s supported by the gameplay elements to hold the foundation. In most character-driven films, the entire plot arc has to be linear and cogent to prevent it from collapsing. All the player has to understand from the gameplay is that Jacket is climbing up the proverbial ladder to reach the tip of the Russian mafia tower, and the ascent is going to become more hectic the higher they reach. The lack of context and frazzled construction of the plot makes the player as dissociated with reality as Jacket, a deeper, symbiotic connection with the character than simply engaging with them from afar as a viewer. Jacket’s motives for assigning himself the onus of assassinating the entire Russian mafia are unclear but then again, what is the player’s motives for directing him through all the blood he spills in the first place? Dissociation isn’t a one-way street for the protagonist for the cogent viewer to assess from a clearer perspective; they are as confused and mentally incongruous as Jacket is, equally dissociating from the damnable ethics of the heinous sprawl of bloodshed.
If Drive was the first stepping stone in establishing the “synthwave” aesthetic that was popular in the 2010s, Hotline Miami most likely launched it into primetime. It’s no wonder as to why it resonated with so many gamers considering the extent of how inspired the game feels. Hotline Miami’s influences are conspicuous, but it is anything but pastiche. Hotline Miami borrows the similar themes, characters, and grizzly tone found in films like Drive and Taxi Driver and re-blends them into the realm of gaming like a fine cocktail on ice. It understood that it could accomplish what those films feasibly couldn’t in another medium, with exceptionally engaging and unique mechanics that future indie developers will be emulating from now until the end of time. If Hotline Miami’s goal was to create an interactive Drive, the developers managed to supersede its initial source. If one doesn’t mind reaching down into the depths of depravity and enacting ambiguous acts of ultraviolence, Hotline Miami is a landmark for gameplay and narrative innovation for gaming.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com
To start, Hotline Miami is fucking putrid. Drive, of course, had its fair share of scenes that didn’t shy away from depicting graphic, stylized violence on the celluloid, but every waking moment of Hotline Miami is a torrent of blood splatter. The entirety of Hotline Miami is that elevator scene from Drive and plenty of fans of the film state they find that scene hard to stomach due to its unflinching brutality. I realize that Hotline Miami is not a literal video game adaptation of Drive but if anyone were to make the argument that the violence of any adapted work is heightened in the video game medium to gamify the content, Hotline Miami would be a testament to this claim. “Jacket,” the anonymous protagonist whose nickname stems from the same snazzy clothing item signifier that Ryan Gosling’s character from Drive possesses, paints the interior walls of Miami’s corporate buildings with the gushing, red bodily plasma of the Russian mafia. However, the game never romanticizes the carnage, depicting the frequent massacres that occur throughout the game with a dread-filled, dark tone that becomes apparent once the flies start buzzing around the fresh, stinking corpses in Jacket’s wake once he climbs back up to his vehicle. The vibrant 1980s backdrop and aesthetic choices are practically what save Hotline Miami from plunging into severely horrific territory because what is being presented is truly grim and vile. I’m astonished how Hotline Miami didn’t draw in a flood of lashback from the typical crowd of concerned parents and scapegoating politicians considering the breadth of its depravity. Really, it’s probably because the pixel art that renders the viscera looks so quaint that Hotline Miami’s graphic content doesn’t bat an eye in an era with gaming visuals that could be mistaken for cinematics. Still, IF Hotline Miami weren’t an indie title where the developers were working with the bare essentials of gaming presentation, the game would make Max Payne look like Kirby. Hell, it could maybe even surpass Manhunt’s level of nihilistic gore.
Even though I’ve already compared Hotline Miami to Drive ad Nauseam at this point, the general objective across each of the game’s levels is reminiscent of the climactic sequence of Taxi Driver. For each of Hotline Miami’s chapters, Jacket enters one of the southern tip of Florida’s various commercial buildings, whose location is given through a dossier transferred to him via a phone call. Like Travis Bickle in Sport’s New York brothel, his objective is to clear the building of everyone in it, and I don’t mean by executing a devious prank like pulling the fire alarm. Jacket must take no prisoners and murder everyone on sight. The player witnesses this mission from a top-down perspective, a view of the scene from an impersonal angle as if they are an accomplice to the carnage as opposed to acting as the prime perpetrator (or an homage to when the screen pans out at the end of Taxi Driver?) More than likely, the top-down mechanics are to complement the twin-stick shooter gameplay. The player will control Jacket’s movement with a close combination of keyboard keys while performing most of the actions by alternating the left and right buttons on the mousepad. For anyone playing the console ports of Hotline Miami, both analog sticks need to be used simultaneously for both Jacket’s movement and aiming controls. Jacket enters every building unarmed, but this surprisingly isn’t a horribly miscalculated judgment call on his part as the area is littered with guns and other blunt objects galore. Simply knock out a goon situated at the front of the building and steal his weapon and he’s good to go. Of course, Jacket will dispose of his first victim a little more thoroughly, so the game allows him to perform an “execution” move on the ground with whichever weapon he has or his bare hands to slip the unconscious foe into a state of eternal oblivion. Once Jacket makes a meticulous effort to search every corner, closet, and behind every potted plant to dispatch all of his targets, he retraces his steps back up to the Delorean-esque limousine back to his safe house.
The rinse-and-repeat kind of gameplay that Hotline Miami bestows should tire the player through the stacked number of levels the game provides. However, Hotline Miami’s strict, constant difficulty curve is what staves off the repetition from becoming grating. Hotline Miami’s main gimmick is that the player must mow down the army of Russian mobsters without sustaining even a smidge of damage. If Jacket so much as trips on a cockroach that is sure to scurry by in these scuzzy hallways, he’s completely done for. Not to mention, all of the enemies inside are acutely alert (probably due to copious cocaine consumption), and they’ll spring at the opportunity to beat Jacket down or shoot him on sight before he can register what just happened. Hotline Miami’s core idiosyncrasy is absolutely brilliant, as the swift penalty for one’s mistakes adds a plethora of rich layers to the gameplay. While the overarching goal is to expunge the area of any Russian mafia activity, succeeding is not a simple matter of readying, aiming, and firing at will. Hotline Miami is a quasi-stealth game in that the player must refrain from acting rashly and plan each step accordingly. The jig won’t be up if an enemy catches Jacket, but the player should ideally be treating the overwhelming odds at hand with patience and tact if they want to make a clean getaway. However, for as proficient as some players might be in the vein of traditional stealth games like Metal Gear Solid, Hotline Miami practically guarantees that they’ll never achieve victory on their first attempt. Hotline Miami is a game whose progression is marked by trial and error, memorizing every little increment of the field and the relative rotation of where the enemies are stationed or the trajectory of their pacing. Later levels also add vicious rottweiler dogs that pin down Jacket and tear his trachea right out of his throat as well as burly black bouncers who are immune to melee weapons to thwart any accumulative familiarity. However, the cardinal rules to abide by in Hotline Miami, such as that the abrasively loud gunshots will always attract attention and that not taking advantage of every abrupt door swing to subdue enemies, will always be in place to ensure a quicker victory. As the game progresses, Jacket will unlock a wide variety of crude animal masks with special attributes that could compensate for whichever blindspot keeps befalling them. A checkpoint will be placed once the player reaches another floor as well, so the game is more than accommodating to its regulations. Still, some may feel dejected constantly respawning at the entrance upon subsequent failures, but the eventual triumph over the league of bald, eastern European Don Johnson wannabes will invigorate the player with a sense of gratification. Plus, all of the failed attempts behind the success will fuel one impressively smooth go-around. Jacket will execute every last living, breathing being in the vicinity unscathed like Travis Bickle, but if Travis Bickle had the killing acuity of a ninja.
Hotline Miami’s substance is interwoven into the gameplay and presentation, but there is a subtly told story that is still being told between the levels. Since his girlfriend left him, Jacket’s life has plummeted into a downward spiral of personal atrophy. The negligent, destitute state of his apartment is emblematic of Jacket’s metaphorical inner soul and mental state. Jacket’s evident apathy for his life and the world around him has made him a prime candidate for a radical group referred to as the “Fifty Blessings,” whose mission to fracture America’s relationship with Russia by exterminating their mafia is a very Cold War-centric pursuit of nationalism. Only a reprobate with nothing to lose would sign themselves up for a dangerously self-destructive act, and Jacket undoubtedly fits the description. As he accustomed himself to the daily grind of mass murder, Jacket’s mental state deteriorates even further. Three men often visit him in a hazy, darkened stupor of crawling insects that are wearing the animal masks he uses on the job, his “three witches” who judge him on his actions instead of offering premonitions. Jacket’s mental fortitude seems like it could bounce back after igniting a new relationship with a new girl he saved from a sleazy executive producer during a mission and interacting with a friendly and seemingly omnipresent store clerk that charitably gives him a bevy of free shit for his troubles. Unfortunately, the clerk winds up dead and so does his prospective new love, and the killer of the latter minor character shoots Jacket. He survives and is taken to the hospital, which is where we discover that the events in the game leading up to Jacket’s recovery have been a comatose recollection of his life’s recent events. Once he escapes the hospital and infiltrates the Miami police station, he confronts the man who reduced him to a vegetable and decides to let him live (in the canonical timeline) to procure instead information on where to locate the Russian mafia’s district leader. He confronts the local don, plus his female and canine bodyguards to shield him during his boss encounter, and then kills himself because he’s a man of outstanding pride. Jacket has rid late 1980s Miami of the Russian scourge, and treats himself to a long toke off of a Marlboro red as he tosses a picture from his pocket off the balcony.
Sure, this is technically the current of events that occurs throughout Hotline Miami’s runtime. However, how the game presents its story is akin to a photo collage where the pictures are aligned in a row. The player still has to piece together the context and correlative bearings between scenes and even then, the glue holding these hazy frames together isn’t sticking and making the pictures slip. In fact, we aren’t even privy to who is behind the phone messages until “Biker,” a boss battle whose death was only a fabrication in Jacket’s fleeting consciousness, confronts the two men responsible in the game’s epilogue. This is why Hotline Miami’s greatest theme is dissociation, a prevalent topic among the morally questionable protagonists from the films that comprise the game’s major influences. While Jacket is yet another unhinged renegade bound to enact (several) killing sprees, how Hotline Miami takes advantage of the video game medium to present Jacket’s dissociation from reality is utterly genius. You see, video games can get away with having a fractured, surreal narrative because at least it’s supported by the gameplay elements to hold the foundation. In most character-driven films, the entire plot arc has to be linear and cogent to prevent it from collapsing. All the player has to understand from the gameplay is that Jacket is climbing up the proverbial ladder to reach the tip of the Russian mafia tower, and the ascent is going to become more hectic the higher they reach. The lack of context and frazzled construction of the plot makes the player as dissociated with reality as Jacket, a deeper, symbiotic connection with the character than simply engaging with them from afar as a viewer. Jacket’s motives for assigning himself the onus of assassinating the entire Russian mafia are unclear but then again, what is the player’s motives for directing him through all the blood he spills in the first place? Dissociation isn’t a one-way street for the protagonist for the cogent viewer to assess from a clearer perspective; they are as confused and mentally incongruous as Jacket is, equally dissociating from the damnable ethics of the heinous sprawl of bloodshed.
If Drive was the first stepping stone in establishing the “synthwave” aesthetic that was popular in the 2010s, Hotline Miami most likely launched it into primetime. It’s no wonder as to why it resonated with so many gamers considering the extent of how inspired the game feels. Hotline Miami’s influences are conspicuous, but it is anything but pastiche. Hotline Miami borrows the similar themes, characters, and grizzly tone found in films like Drive and Taxi Driver and re-blends them into the realm of gaming like a fine cocktail on ice. It understood that it could accomplish what those films feasibly couldn’t in another medium, with exceptionally engaging and unique mechanics that future indie developers will be emulating from now until the end of time. If Hotline Miami’s goal was to create an interactive Drive, the developers managed to supersede its initial source. If one doesn’t mind reaching down into the depths of depravity and enacting ambiguous acts of ultraviolence, Hotline Miami is a landmark for gameplay and narrative innovation for gaming.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com