The difficult second album problem applies not only to music. In the realm of videogames, plenty of revered games and creators have been undermined by an inability to provide a sequel that is anywhere near the quality of the original. But from the challenging content to the arresting visuals, from the achingly cool music to the ferocious difficulty, everything that made Hotline Miami great is served up once again here.
Don’t think the similarities undermine the experience, though. A range of initially subtle changes to the formula eventually reveal themselves as impactful and welcome alterations and additions. Most immediate is the greater diversity. Where the first game saw you ransack a number of buildings that featured uniformly similar shades of pink floors,whitewalls and brown doors, here you’re quickly moved between interior and exterior locations, gang hideouts and film sets, forests and night clubs. It’s a glorious diversification of a focused visual style and one that elegantly destroys the naysayers claiming ‘pixel art’ has killed itself through cliché and saturation.
The broader range of colour schemes and layouts is mirrored in the varying scale of levels, with the long-winded and exhausting transitioning into the short and sharp, and back again. Pleasingly, this prevents the campaign feeling like a chore. Just as fatigue over the impenetrability is beginning to set in you’re given a decidedly easier task to overcome, allowing you to regain your composure before being thrown back to the sharks.
Understandably buoyed by the plaudits it has received, Dennaton has branched out into more complex mission design to fill these expansive spaces. A new type of difficulty is thrown at you in the form of strict loadout limits, with certain missions asking you to select a weapon and forcing you to stick with it until completion. This flies in the face of one of Hotline Miami’s core building blocks: the ability to pick up and throw away any weapon you come across.
These weapon-limiting missions stick out in the mind as expertly balanced examples. The very fact that designer Jonatan Soderstrom knows which weapon you’re holding allows him to better craft a level that tests very specific skills, something that, in hindsight, the original lacked once you’d reached a certain degree of competence. Brutally, there are missions that refuse you the right to use firearms at all and yet take great pleasure in throwing what can seem like an endless stream of enemies your way. Remaining open to experimentation is key to progression given this consistent changing of the rules. The player doomed to failure is the one that stubbornly sticks to methods that have seen success in the past, with certain levels here going so far as to switch which character you’re in control of partway through… sometimes multiple times.
It’s eye-opening to see just how much a slight change in your available actions change the experience. This stands as testament to how well honed Hotline Miami ’s underlying principles really are, with every slight deviation resulting in a clear and obvious modification and effect. The emphasis on using different characters and being forced to master different abilities makes sense when viewed through the narrative. Set primarily after the events of Hotline Miami 1, the story encapsulates the personal lives of many more characters. Before the finale you’re given access to the eyes of a troubled actor, a soldier, a detective, a journalist and more.
Themes centre around political and social unrest, with emphasis on the effect that horror, gore and violence as depicted in the media has had, and might continue to have, on civilisation as a whole. The journalist embodies this idea with particular elegance, his seemingly neutral facade able to be corrupted by the player should you so desire. By presenting this content via the different viewpoints and experiences held by the cast, Dennaton has managed to both expand its narrative horizons and lay waste to the idea that its particular brand of controversial bloodshed is nothing more than gratuitous self-publicity. There will, of course, be those that venomously object to the content here (it’s already banned in Australia), but a deeper reading of the subject matter reveals a message that stands in protest to certain elements of our present reality. It’s a message written in the language of that which it stands in opposition against. What better way to get your point across?
Everything here, from the narrative to the gameplay, is completely devoid of hand-holding and patronisation. What can be learned and understood takes time to uncover and master, a tack that sets Hotline Miami 2 apart from modern mainstream game design and its obsessing over players never feeling ‘stuck’ or ‘frustrated’. It takes effort to receive your rewards here and, as a result, success is all the more satisfying. It is, therefore, worth playing through everything included multiple times to fully appreciate the goals that Dennaton has aimed for and the results it has achieved. This is not merely a sequel worth playing, it’s one worth consuming again and again until its every secret has been revealed.