Hotline Miami has finished busting open skulls on PC, and now it’s turning to the PS3 and Vita.
For those unfamiliar from our previous rantings about it, Hotline Miami is a top-down action game where you play a hitman working for… somebody. The meat of the game is going through the various levels wearing an animal mask and brutally murdering men in tacky white suits with firearms, baseball bats, katanas, knives, and your bare hands.
Two things in particular make it great. The first is that it’s the most brutally challenging game to come down the pike in a long, long time. You die with one hit and have to start from the beginning of the screen, every time you die. It’s an old-school challenge that becomes surprisingly addictive as you work your way through.
Secondly, the game is probably one of the most atmospheric and disturbing games of 2012. Everything has a greasy atmosphere, a troubling sense of something being profoundly wrong. This is only reinforced as you play through the story, but it manifests itself in touches like the game’s soundtrack cutting to white noise when you clear the area. Most games with a dark tone only tell you your player character is nuts: Here, the game shows it, and it’ll stick with you.
So the fact that it’s coming to the PS3 and Vita this spring is pretty good news:
Dutch developer Abstraction Games has been appointed to deliver Hotline Miami’s trademark style and gameplay to both PS3 and PS Vita via PlayStation®Network under the guidance of Dennaton Games. Hotline Miami will also launch with Cross-Buy allowing gamers to play Hotline MIami on both PS3 and PS Vita with a single purchase. Boom.
This game becoming more mainstream is an important demonstration of the slowly collapsing wall between indie games and consoles.
Also, we can’t wait for people freaked out about video game violence to pick up on this one. Here, have a video: