SUPERHOT

Bullet time sucks, it has always sucked, it has sucked ever since Max Payne introduced it and very few games have managed to make it work. However let's not confuse slow-motion with bullet time, these are two very different things and there are many games that have made great use of slow-motion like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Most people don't realize how insanely fast bullets are in real life, the average speed of a bullet is double the speed of sound (around 750 meters per second). In order to see a bullet moving you would need to slow down time by an insane amount, far beyond anything you see in any game with a bullet-time mechanic. So what most games do is slow down the speed of bullets quite significantly so that they end up with guns that are unsatisfying to use, since they fire very slow bullets, and projectiles that are still so fast that cannot be reliably dodged at short range.

Superhot doesn't dodge this problem, in fact it's a perfect showcase of it since you have less control of bullet time than in other shooters, you are far more restricted: When you are standing still time moves very slowly and time only moves normally when you move, meaning you cannot do something as simple as jumping in slow-motion. And the slowdown also shows another problem with the bullet-time mechanic: it's boring.

Slow motion perception is a real thing you can feel in any good action game, during an emergency your brain can process a lot of information extremely quickly, you perceive time to be slower and your can react faster than normal. All this excitement dissipates as soon as you get a button to slow-down time, and it gets even worse when slow-motion is the default state, so Superhot gameplay is kinda boring and this is extremely noticeable during replays in which actions tend to look fairly unimpressive when played at a normal speed.

This kind of gameplay might still appeal to some people, although I suspect this applies mainly to people who aren't big fans of shooting games in the first place. Still I would admit I found Superhot to be a bit enjoyable.

But the game has other problems in a lot of different areas, for one thing most levels are extremely small and don't give you a lot of freedom of movement. Also enemies constantly spawn at multiple points in the map (usually behind you) with no warning so it's very easy to get yourself into a killing zone, the only way to prevent this is to have already played the level, so this leads into a lot of trial and error gameplay (most shooters have grown past this already).

The game also has this annoying tendency of constantly putting you in very vulnerable situations with no starting weapons, meaning you have to throw objects at enemies or use melee before you can grab a gun (I found this extremely annoying after a short while), to make things worse guns have very few bullets forcing you into having to steal weapons from enemies constantly (since more ammo would make the game very easy). So it's a very restrictive game which forces you into using it's gimmicks by having a lot of constraints.

There is also very little enemy variety, all the enemies have the same shape and are only differentiated by the weapons they carry, this also makes it harder to know what weapon an enemy is carrying which only adds unnecessary confusion (which easily leads into more trial and error). And the game would also be a lot more hard if the enemies were accurate, while playing the game I constantly found myself saved by an enemy missing shots in a hilarious fashion.

The non-gameplay elements are fairly weak too. The story is a generic and pretentious cyberpunk parable that interrupts you constantly with boring text dumps. The art is drab and minimalistic, the entire world is painted with a boring shade of white and all the enemies look the same. There is no music aside from the ending credits, which ironically has awesome music. And I don't like the interface either, maybe some people don't remember that MS-DOS sucks.

Superhot has one of my favorite game concepts ever. Just the thought of slow motion combat intrigues me. The story is really short but really thrilling and even without having spoken dialogue, the plot moves really well with text messages. The ending was the perfect way to give the player a moment of realization of how the whole game came to be. I personally really love the aesthetic of the game, the small amount of red on enemies looks great with the gray background. Since the main game only takes a few hours, it's great that there are also many, many more hours in challenges with different ways to play through the main levels again. All of them are quite fun and unique ways to put a twist on the game, but the final challenge, complete the whole game without dying nearly broke me. That challenge alone took me weeks but it was worth it and became my greatest achievement in gaming.

(written aug 9, 2016)

In 2013, a small group of friends put out a scrappy little game made for web browsers. Three years, a full team and a gallon of shoe polish later, the game has been remade as a downloadable title for console and PC.

SUPERHOT is a fast-paced FPS where time only moves when you move. This simple premise can be manipulated in so many ways, allowing for a short but sweet ~20 level campaign, ~20 level challenges, and an infinite shootout mode with ~5 challenges and arenas. Simple and clean graphics clash with the hardcore, dirty action SUPERHOT delivers in a hypnotizing way.

The first level starts in a L-shaped hallway. Turning the corner reveals an armed enemy on the other end of the hallway. Once you stop, you have (literally) all the time in the world to make your shot. Lead the bullet for a headshot, or shoot where you can already see your target. It adds the RTS feeling of strategy to a genre where immediately taking action is a core mechanic, but both aspects of both genres mesh smoothly and naturally.

The game introduces more weapons as it goes on. You start with a pistol, but then you start using shotguns, semi-automatic rifles, katanas, and even your own fists. Throwing a weapon will stun your enemies (except for the katana, which is an instant kill if thrown), and causes whatever weapon they’re holding to fly straight towards you, allowing you to grab it out of mid-air and use it against them. Despite that mechanic being used a lot, it’s so awesome to see and play that it never gets old.

When enemies shoot their weapons, the bullets are tailed by a thick, red line to easily see where they go. You can simply get out of the way, you can slowly watch it barely skim your head, and (my personal favorite) you can slice the incoming bullet in half with the katana.

Beating the level rewards you with a replay of your performance, but the whole video plays in real time, so all the moments you took to stand still and carefully aim appear as knee jerk reactions made at breakneck speeds. It’s more satisfying than any achievement or trophy could ever be, because it makes you feel cool. In quick paced action games that encourage you to be creative with your objective and switch weapons on the fly, being fluid, quick and perfect on every hit is the ultimate self-goal, so seeing your gameplay portrayed as a flawlessly executed takedown of every enemy achieves that goal tenfold.

The menu imitates old operating systems from the early 80’s, providing a stark contrast with the modern, sleek look of the actual game. Buildings, vehicles and background objects are pure white, with very light tones of blue in shadows and dark areas. This allows both the bright red enemies and pure black interactables to be easily distinguished, making the whole world look very clean and crisp.

Both the enemies and weapons have textures that look like perpetually moving tessellations. Triangles and polygons construct the bodies and weapons, so seeing these shapes crumble and explode makes the kills all the more satisfying. Gunshots cause the polygons of the body to explode in a million shattered red and orange shapes, while cutting with the katana slices enemies clean in half, revealing an inner light source. When game developers take simple, polygonal designs and add beautiful color, art direction, and a crapton of polish, they’re crafting a style that will withstand the test of time.

When you’re booted into the aforementioned operating system, a chat log starts. The stranger on the end of the chat tells you that there’s a new game being passed around on the internet called “superhot.exe”, and that you should totally play it. You download the file, and start playing.

Throughout each level, little tidbits of story appear in quick slideshows of text. They start out extremely vague, discussing something about a broken deal, but as the game goes on, things start to get stranger and stranger, more and more ominous; superhot.exe is more than a game.

Obviously I won’t spoil much but it’s a neat piece of meta-storytelling that can easily be completed in one sitting. You can tell that the developers put more focus on the sandbox aspect of this game, rather than making a linear action game with some bonus modes on the side.

Sound is a large factor in shaping the atmosphere and tone of SUPERHOT; just about as much as the visuals. While the visuals definitely pack a punch with exploding tessellations, the sounds are where the satisfaction of a hit comes from. You can hear crunching when striking an enemy with a bat; sounds of glass shattering when a bullet hits; metal slicing the air when you cut a bullet in two.

The lack of music helps because it gives all your attention to the fighting. Normally in an action film, there’s a heavy symphonic or electro soundtrack behind the epic scenes. SUPERHOT gives you no fanfare whatsoever, and it just makes the sounds of violence even louder. It’s all about the hardcore, brutal, violent matchups between you and your computer generated foes.

One of those games that works in theory way more than it's actually fun to play for me, but Superhot still has some great stuff going for it. The concept of this is awesome, there's something inherently badass about the idea of moving in slow motion and weaving between bullet spray, mowing down waves of bad guys as you move on, and the game takes advantage of this in a bunch of ways while also failing to overcome a couple of crucial barriers for me. For the positives I loved the visual design of this, it's all extremely simplistic but it's both extremely clean and manages to highlight anything of interest with the bold colour contrast featured throughout. The way enemies shatter like glass and bullets leave a bold, red trail further add to how seamlessly information is conveyed to the player and add a lot of weight and fluidity to things.

Everything about the game's presentation feels extremely clean and minimalistic, only the bare essentials are present, and any semblance of narrative is conveyed through brief flashes of text on the screen and occasionally slightly slower sections over a fictional messaging site. Along with this simplicity allowing each interaction to feel as if it has a lot more of a visceral punch to it, the game also does a genius thing of letting you see the sequence of events that just went down but happening at normal speeds the entire time, making it look as if the player has just pulled off a series of truly crazy manoeuvres like some kind of invincible, badass action hero, dancing around bullets while dispatching all enemies in a matter of seconds with alarming precision. These ending sequences almost make it worth the game alone and act as some truly awesome rewards that feel almost Super Meat Boy in nature, though this time it highlights your awesome accomplishment by making it seem way more technical and fast paced than it actually was, while Meat Boy highlighted it through representing how many deaths it took to overcome it, neither is better than the other really, just an interesting thing I noticed.

Unfortunately I wasn't entirely sold on the game as a whole either and found the gameplay to not quite hit right at all times. A lot of this came down to the core mechanic and the fact that I personally wasn't a big fan of it in a lot of cases, for however much I liked it in theory. The main reason for this is how limiting it feels and the fact that I was never able to entirely get into the flow of the game due to it's jarring stop-start nature. While Superhot should primarily be treated as a puzzle game, and I think that the idea of making fps mechanics have such an angle to them is really clever and innovative, there was this odd sense of frenetic skill testing underneath the more methodical and slow strategising that ends up feeling a bit at odds with one another. This becomes particularly problematic for me near the end when the game starts ramping up the encounters significantly with the vast array of enemy spawners all around the player taking a bit away from the methodical side of things in favour of forcing the player to turn around constantly to hopefully not get completely blindsided in a rather unsatisfying way. The core game also feels a bit lacking in terms of content, as while there are certainly other challenge modes and endless modes, they reuse a lot of content to the point where I just didn't see a point in going through it all. Overall this is a pretty cool game with some amazing qualities to it, but it's also not quite for me because of my own personal distaste for the way it flows. Definitely check it out if the concept seems cool to you, you'd probably get more out of it than me, and also, this game would probably be sick to speedrun.

Superhot
The main game is presented like a virtual reality simulation with red voxel humanoids as enemies, and white rooms and white objects. Outside the gameplay, you are chatting on a computer on a DOS-style interface. Your “friend” sends you an exe file of the game Superhot. These sections generally have a creepy atmosphere, and the story is very meta. There’s a lack of music, so you mainly hear the hissing and beeps of the computer.

The gameplay is a First Person Shooter in small areas. Time moves extremely slowly, but moves at normal speed when you move. It’s like playing in “bullet time” and (to some degree) allows you to think and plan out successive maneuvers.

All the weapons have very limited ammo and there’s no reloading (although there’s basically a cooldown until you can fire again), so you often shoot a few bullets, throw your weapon (this can stun enemies and make them drop theirs), pick up another weapon, repeat. When enemies drop weapons, you can catch them mid-air. You mainly use pistols, but there’s a shotgun, assault rifle, baseball bat and katana sword. Plus there’s many objects you can pick up as stunning weapons. If you are unarmed, you can punch and defeat enemies with a few blows.

Bullets take some time to travel, so you need to lead your targets in order to hit them. You often need to keep moving and ensure you side-step enemy’s bullets. Both you and your enemies can only take 1 bullet. Enemies shatter in a nice effect. When you die, you fall and the world sometimes goes distorted, then you can quickly retry the level. Bullets can collide in the air, and you can destroy weapons by shooting them.

Some levels are based in enclosed spaces like where you take out a few enemies in an elevator, then the doors open for the last few. Another sees you dropping from a train roof, taking out a few enemies, and turning around to quickly take out some more.

The fast-paced action reminds me of Hotline Miami, and when you fail, you can learn the enemy patterns to choose a better strategy. I actually found the majority of levels were easy and I completed them on the first try. There were some levels where I’d make a mistake and complete it on my second or third try. A few levels took me maybe 10 times. These levels were probably the most interesting ones with less scope for errors. There were definitely levels where I made mistakes but still completed them; basically I’m saying the game is mainly too easy. It's a problem when the game only lasts around 2.5 hours. When you complete the game, you unlock an Endless Mode, and some Challenges.

In later levels, you gain an ability to swap to an enemy's body. It’s an interesting idea, but maybe it makes the game easier.

When you complete a level, you see a replay, but it is obscured by the alternating words in large font “Super” and “Hot” with an annoying voice over that reads the words repeatedly. It gets tiresome after the first couple of levels; but watching a replay is a good idea.

You generally play a few levels before getting more chat dialogue or scenes. I felt a lot of these conversations dragged the pace of the game down, given that you could have whizzed through the previous levels in a few minutes, then have to read more text. I’ve seen similar stories in games like Pony Island so it didn’t really interest me.

It’s quite a unique gameplay style, but it’s an obvious idea really. I wish there were more levels; some longer, more challenging levels; and fewer interruptions with the story. What’s here is really fun and stylish; but it’s just too brief.

I enjoyed my, admittedly, short time with SUPERHOT. The main mechanic - time moves only when you move - is fun and makes for some very cool moments. The problem is that this is really the only thing the game has going for it. Every level has the same objective - kill all enemies - and in my opinion there is not enough variety between levels to keep the game engaging. Also, some of the later levels are very difficult and beating them becomes more of a painstaking process than a fun one.
Some people really disliked the story, it seems, I actually enjoyed it though. Yes, it's kind of dumb and predictable, but I liked the way it was presented. I beat the story in about 4 hours, if you're good at this game you will finish earlier. Afterwards you unlock challenge levels and stuff like that, but I'm good for now.