I played Super Hot this weekend, and didn’t particularly like it. That’s fine, it’s not necessarily for me, no big deal. I also saw people compare it to Hotline Miami, and that, too, is fine, after all, people draw comparisons from their own perspectives.
It isn’t something that works for me, though. To me it’s like pointing at an elephant and a car, and saying they’re basically the same because they’re big, and touch the ground in four places. They feel totally different to me, for a couple of reasons.
First, Hotline Miami is a game about living in a moment, actually. Super Hot is a game about pretending a moment lasts for a long time, so you can treat that individual moment like a puzzle. While Hotline Miami makes you retry a moment a dozen times, the pause-and-restart nature of Super Hot makes it a game that doesn’t have nearly the same swiftness and flow. Super Hot reloads set you back a minute, and the execution doesn’t reward daring like it rewards precision. Reloads take 4-9 seconds on my hardware, and the whole game feels like sliding through molasses.
Second, Super Hot feels from the opening paragraph like it’s going to lead to a twist of perhaps videogames masking violence is used to control us, which Hotline Miami actively avoided. In Hotline Miami they had the message of it was fun, so who cares – while Super Hot feels like it’s leading up to Saying Something about obedience and control. Bioshock but in an hour.
Finally… to me, at least, Super Hot doesn’t really feel like violence. It does feel like an attempt to deconstruct violence, to invent the idea of violence to those who have heard of it. It describes combat in a series of bouncing moments, of this-then-that-then-that, while Hotline Miami has a much more ridiculous, but real feeling build of frustration and struggle and improvising wildly.
None of this is, I must underscore, to say Super Hot is a bad game.
I just didn’t enjoy it.