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Upcoming discussion schedule:

December 6th: Gunpoint
December 20th:: The Shivah
January 3rd: Her Story
January 17th: Zeno Clash
January 24th: Oxenfree

P.S.: On account of the coming end of year sales, the pricing restrictions are being temporarily softened, e.g. Oxenfree is $20, but has been on sale for just $5.
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Welcome to the second edition of the GOG Gaming Book Club / Gaming Symposium! I still haven't given up on this. Let's share our thoughts on Hotline Miami, like before, I'll wait a bit before posting my own opinion.


What was up with that story, huh? Which timeline is canon? Are both of them canon? Do you think the devs had a message they wanted to get across? How about that weird hospital level? The thing people focus a lot on is that "Do you like hurting other people?" question, one of the first things you hear in the game.

How about the gameplay? What did you think of its fast paced nature? Did it ever get frustrating? Did you favor one strategy over another? Any favorite masks? Did you prefer Jacket or Helmet?

The point is that there's no point. The devs themselves are in the game to explicitly say that. You keep going on, shooting, killing, mutilating, and getting thrilled looking for meaning to something that is meaningless.
If that works or not, I think it is up to the player themselves, there's the secret to be unlocked if you want to look for "moar" but I wasn't too found of it.

Gameplay wise, I think it is awesome. Pure arcade fun. Challenging, "easy to learn hard to master" type of deal, the masks essentially works as different challenges and/or difficult settings and I've found quite fun to play with.

And jacket all the way! :D

I wish I did. Instead, I hammered on the keys for a while, then gave up.

"If that works or not, I think it is up to the player themselves, there's the secret to be unlocked if you want to look for "moar" but I wasn't too found of it."

Even if you don't unlock the secret there's a storyline between and throughout some levels. You can't completely dismiss it a meaningless at least in the sense that the story is completely irrelevant.

I really enjoyed the game, but I can't say I paid all that much mind to the story. At least not to the crazy trippy bits of it. Although I did get all secret for that computer password.

The thing is, all the time the game questions you the player, your actions, "why are you using that mask?", "Do you like hurting people?" and so on, and as the game progresses and it all gets weird and you go into the final mission looking for answers and them... there's no answers. You go in into the game, kill a lot of pixel people and enjoy yourself, looking for any reason other than "this is a game".

If you look at the documentary, you see how the devs talk about "they didn't expect it to be a big deal", and the whole personal bits that are included in the game. There's the self indulgence of having the overall cohesive narrative/story, but the "meta" stuff is all quite explicit.

I agree that you can interpret the question sequences or the "meta" however you want, it's a shallow or deep as you make it to be, for me it was a welcome bit of seasonign to the overall game. I haven't read or watched any of the documentary, but i think the basic plot was there for a bit more than self-indulgence.

I'm not arguing about whether the game has any particular deep phylosophical points, just that there is a basic plot and that it's a good one in the context of the game.

Yeah, that's how I see the game as well. In fact, I agree with the idea that the game can be divided into a few different section.



1. The first batch of levels -> There's very little context given for all the massacres you're commiting, but the gameplay is fun and therefore the game is fun.

2. The hospital level -> Here things are switched: you do have clear context as to why you're there, who was responsible, and why you must escape, but you lose the fast paced gameplay. Colors aren't as vibrant, the music is much slower, you can't walk too much without stopping, line of sight triggers a losing state.

I think this was here to show that the game can work with the gameplay and without context, but not the other way around.

3. The revenge story -> For the next levels Jacket is in his own by the book revenge story. Now you have both the context and the gameplay. I think it might be to ask whether having both really made the game better, in comparison to the earlier levels.

4. Helmet's story -> He complains that he was promised fun but there's no point to anything he's doing, he wants answers, he wants to know what's going on. I think he is meant to be a stand-in for the players that need that story context to enjoy a game, to whom just the gameplay by itself and going for high-scores feels a little empty.

In the end he runs into the people behind it all: the Janitors, who are modeled after the developers. After confronted and asked who they're working for and what was the point of it all, they say fourth wall breaking stuff like "We're independent! We did it all ourselves!" and "You enjoyed yourself, didn't you?"

5. The secret ending -> After scouring all the levels for all those secret letters, with the size of a pixel, you're able to crack the password of the computer and better confront the Janitors. They then proceed to reveal their plan to you. However, that info dump ends with Helmet, the player stand-in, saying "You wasted enough of my time." right before he kills them.



I think above all it's a game about games, that in the debate between narrative and gameplay it throws its hat as far into the gameplay camp as it can, and in the end narrative pales in comparison to the raw gameplay when it comes to player engagement. I disagree, I think the way you contextualize play is massively important, but I do find it fascinating the way they got that message across.

That's not all the game is. There's definitely something about violence in there, and gung-ho nationalism ("Born in the USA" and all that), but I don't think those are nearly the main focus the way narrative vs. gameplay is. And then there's the sequel of course. I imagine they got all the metatext out of their system in the first game, so in the sequel all that was left to expand was the text. I never thought I'd see so much lore in a Hotline Miami game.

Of course that could recontextualize the first game. The "Russian mafia vs. US nationalists" plot felt so peripheral in the first game I never gave it too much care and attention, but the sequel leans so heavily on it, on replays it might be hard to not be looking for connections.

They don't feel like two parts of a single whole to me though. They strike me as a passion project that ended up much more popular than expected, and the sequel they never imagine they could've made. So I see the two as entirely different things, with different messages and purposes.

And the sequel hinted at both timelines? I thought it went with the Jacket line all the way.

I finished the game yesterday night, just in time for the symposium. :)

Gameplay-wise, it was a blast all the way through. I loved its unforgiving and fast paced nature, even though I usually took it quite slow and tactical. That's probably why I mainly got C and C- ratings, but I couldn't really see any other way, as going into rooms guns ablaze was a sure receipt for failure time and again. Instead I tended to go for a stealthy approach with mêlée weapons whenever possible; that's why I preferred Helmet over Jacket, and why I usually used the 'Lassie' (dogs don't attack) and the unicorn (silenced weapons) masks.

If I had to complain about something, I'd say the difficulty progression was not that well tuned throughout the levels. For me the highest difficulty spike was around chapters 4 or 5, where I spent almost half an hour per chapter. In contrast, the later chapters felt way easier in comparison. Maybe it's because I got better as I played, or perhaps because I played this game in three different sessions and the first day I was less focused for some reason. What do you guys think about that?

As per the story... 'trippy' is a real understatement. Everything is revealed (more or less) at the end, but it's true that many things are left for the player to interpret (or are revealed in HM2, as it seems). I really liked the ending though, even though I didn't understand why the hell did all these people do what they were told in the messages? I was always assuming that Jacket knew from beforehand who was communicating with him... Either that, or he was insane and everything was in his imagination (except the murders, of course).

After playing Helmet's extra chapters I ended up thinking that both storylines are 'cannon', or at least up to a point. I may be wrong, but doesn't Jacket start seeing dead and mutilated people talking to him just after the 'PhoneHom' level? Could it be that Helmet does kill him and everything that comes after that it's simply a hallucination of Jacket just beofre he dies? (Or maybe he doesn't die, and the hallucinations only comprise until he wakes up in the hospital? But nah, don't think so, 'cause then Jacket's ending wouldn't make sense, would it?)

I think you will like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-8QAFqAAJ8

You can encounter Helmet while playing the writer, but it's hard to say how canon that encounter is.

I never though about the story the way you listed it. It does make a lot of sense.

I still think HM 1's plot was at least in some way planned out, because it's just fantastic how the second game expands an adds to it I greatly prefer it both in story and music selection. The overreliance of guns damaged the gameplay a bit but it's still damn good.

Hey, that was a pretty cool video. Thanks for sharing!



I don't remember having quite as much problem with those levels, then again I've played the game several times now. Perhaps there is a bit of difficulty jump and new players would suffer the most from it.

Personally, my biggest problem in regards to difficulty are a couple of Jacket's final levels. They were too big and sometimes led to me getting killed by offscreen enemies.

Did you think they had a message behind that trippyness? Or were they just throwing stuff at the wall to see what stick? XD



I remembered him showing up but I thought it was in a timeline before the first game, I must have gotten confused. Especially if it was the writer, didn't he get involved only later to cover Jacket's crimes?

I preferred the first one, but that's part of what I said in them each delivering its own thing, so I see how someone might lean towards 2 instead.

I do think a lot of that expansion was a symptom of what was wrong with the game though.

They had that mentality of "It's a sequel! Everything has to be bigger! More of everything!". In the story that meant "The first game had two timelines? This one has 5! The first game had two characters? This one has 10!", that came out fine, but the same mentality applied to the level design is what killed that game for me.

The levels were so big! Almost every one would have at least one big area where enemies could see you and kill you from offscreen. And the levels were long too! In the first game I felt like I was never more than 30 seconds of not screwing up away from beating the level (muntdefems might disagree with me on this, from what he said).

In the sequel because the levels were so long, dying felt like a much bigger punishment, that coupled with the wide open spaces leading to offscreen deaths, completely changed the way the game was played. Suddenly, to avoid frustration, I had to play much more carefully. What was 30s of an uninterrupted bit of flawless play, became 3 to 5 minutes of peeking around corners and baiting the AI. It's the reason why I don't see myself going back to it.

Having further reflected upon this, I think it was the introduction of dogs and, more importantly, windows/glasses within levels that posed a bigger challenge to me. I was repeatedly killed by thugs behind windows that I failed to recognize as such.


Yeah, that too. This is where the giraffe mask probably comes in handy, but I never tried it. I'm not happy to learn that this becomes the norm in the sequel. :(


At first I was genuinely convinced everything showed on screen had a meaning that would be revealed later on. My guess was of course that Jacket was deranged and making most of the stuff himself, all with those encounters with the three masked figures and so on.

In fact, at the end I failed to recognize the janitors as alter egos for the devs, and it was the comments in this thread that made me make the connection. Upon learning this, yeah, I've got no choice but accepting there is no message or greater truth about this game's story. Well played, Dennaton, well played. :P


I actually disagree, but only to a certain point. While I certainly never completed a level in only 30 seconds, I was never too pissed off at being killed either, since I could get back to the point where I died within a few seconds (with the possible exception of some of Jacket's later levels, like the police station one). Again, I'm a little disappointed to learn this is no longer the case in Wrong Number...