WARNING: If you’re interested in exploring Hotline Miami’s themes for yourself and haven’t played the game yet, please play it before reading this. This article doesn’t just contain spoilers; I’m also talking about video games here. Video games are meant to be played, not read about. My experience may be different from yours, and that’s totally okay.

Full disclaimer: I’ve been friends with the developers of Hotline Miami since I started Vlambeer, I’m credited in the credits twice, and one of the “animal masks” in the game is named after me. I’m half Egyptian, so I’m a camel.

Dennaton’s debut, Hotline Miami, is, on the surface, as claimed in a controversial blog post, “an unsettling game about killing people.” The author suspects that the article is about the game’s critical reception, which, in his opinion, is about the “incredible blood stains it leaves in the environment.” The author bases his opinion on reviews and videos of the game, and therefore misses its subtleties – the themes, subtext, and raw genius that build Hotline Miami. The story uses its visual style, soundtrack, and interactions to convey its deeper meaning.

So that could be a blog post about the importance of playing video games before judging them. I could also write this article about why we shouldn’t simply criticize something we don’t try to understand. Instead, I want to discuss my playthrough of Hotline Miami with you guys, because I think it’s important.

After the tutorial, the player first learns about the game through a conversation with three masked figures in a pitch black room. Decay is obvious, littered with trash, and filled with bugs. The masked figures (a chicken, a horse, and an owl) seem to know more about the protagonist, reflecting and alluding to the horrific events that have taken place so far. As the scene fades, I find myself in an apartment — my apartment — and find a note and a chicken mask. I go downstairs, get in my car, and set off on my first mission.

Gameplay is simple. Each level begins with receiving a cryptic phone call containing an address. The player goes to their car, drives to the address, and hides their face with an animal mask of their own choosing. A pulsating electronic soundtrack punctuates the psychedelic colors as the player charges through the door and attempts to kill every soul on that floor of the building. Bright flashes, exciting music, excessive gore, big scores and combo mechanics to help you beat them faster, more efficiently and without mistakes.

Hotline Miami is a survival exercise on this level. Every mistake I make is my last. One wrong move and I often hit the restart button before the main character’s body hits the ground. A successful run is one that’s perfectly choreographed, perfectly executed, and adaptable enough to deal with unexpected problems. I ran in and grabbed the baseball bat the first unexpected guard was holding. I cracked his skull, slammed the door into another guard, and hurled the bat at my fellow guard. They both fall to the ground, so I kick the first guy’s head into the wall, grab the second’s shotgun and blast the top half of his torso, slamming him down to the marrow.

Once I finally reach it, I’m allowed to use the elevator or stairs to travel to other floors to continue my rampage. As my final victim’s head is smashed to pieces, the rampaging music stops, leaving an eerie soundscape as I make my way back to my car, past many fallen foes – the carnage I’ve left in my wake. A disturbing sight, but I’ve finished my job.

Players are judged on a number of things: style, flexibility, and speed. And then I find myself in a supermarket or a bar, getting free stuff, be it pizza or a VHS, from the shady characters who seem to work everywhere the protagonist visits.

The cycle repeats, and the violence is always gratuitous. People get hit over the head with baseball bats, dogs get shot with shotguns, throats get slashed, faces get disfigured with pots of boiling water. It’s hard not to feel a little uncomfortable in places, as the human brain fills in all the detail with its crude but ruthlessly efficient pixels. The game demands that you never question yourself, because hesitation means death.

In fact, the first time I noticed the tension between Hotline Miami’s thematic discomfort and gameplay was while watching a group of students play an early version shown at Gamescom. The students ran through the first five levels, laughing, joking and pointing at various executions. I pressed the spacebar and our jacketed hero knelt over a fallen gangster and slit the defenseless man’s throat. Pixelated blood gushed out as the man gave up his fight against death.

I had seen that animation many times and remembered the distinct anxiety I felt the first time I saw it, but its effect on these students was remarkable. They were not theorists or designers, but they recognized the same tension I felt. In an instant, the mood changed from joyous faces to anxious faces. For a moment, the violence wasn’t play, it was real. The conversation went from discussing the coolest execution animations to whether games were too violent and therefore not fun. I was amazed.

As the game progresses, the protagonist’s house, the starting point of each level, changes to reflect the changes in his life. Dishes are left behind, the trash is or isn’t taken out, and the second bed in the bedroom is empty, suggesting that the relationship did not last. At the beginning, the protagonist rescues a cocaine-addicted woman from her dealer. He takes her to his house, where she goes from sleeping on the couch to getting comfortable and eventually sleeping in the second bed.

The story unfolds through similar details. The shady characters who give me free goods at the end of each level seem to vacillate between being my best friend and barely knowing my personality. The mysterious email talks about an initiative called “50 Blessings”. The phone calls tell me to kill more and more people. Occasionally I find the bodies of other masked figures in the buildings I destroy. As I walk through the house preparing for the next mission, newspaper clippings the protagonist finds between missions may reveal the identity of the target from the previous mission.

Things get really weird when I’m ordered to kill a biker who has tracked down the source of a mysterious call to the phone company. Again I find myself in an insect-infested apartment, met by three masked figures. Their presence is suspicious, but their words are foreboding. They warn me that I will soon be completely alone.

The protagonist begins to see dead bodies in the house, which his girlfriend fails to notice. These untouchable corpses, mutilated and disfigured, scream at the player to move on. A shady caretaker is sweeping the floors of my house. At one point, while fleeing in a panic from over-equipped police officers, my rampage is suddenly interrupted by a SWAT attack.

The shopkeeper warns me that what I’m seeing isn’t entirely real. With a flash of static, the biker’s decapitated body disappears from the supermarket where it had somehow appeared. The same static sometimes hides the protagonist’s extremely violent actions. Then the shopkeeper himself appears dead in every shop. An aggressive bald man takes his place, ignoring the corpse next to him. He wouldn’t offer me free food or anything and threatened to make me leave.

My protagonist’s mental state is such that I question whether his perspective is even trustworthy. I no longer know what’s true. I don’t know if the people I kill are bad people. I don’t know how justified my violence is. Am I just a homicidal maniac?

The next call leaves me with no choice but to continue killing. A few days later, the player doesn’t go to the store or the bar after suffering another bloody attack. Instead, I found myself standing in the front door. With a somber feeling of acceptance, I went to my apartment to find the girl I’d previously saved from drugs, the one who’d spent most of the match indoors, dead, shot multiple times in the chest. Rat Mask sits in the living room. Without explanation, she shot me.

I woke up in my own home in the dark, as if three masked figures were waiting for me – this time in my home, not theirs. Instead, I find only one of them – the one wearing the mask I had unconsciously associated with “ego” – myself, the chicken mask only. My body lies on the floor in a pool of blood, I stand in the room, and the representation of my ego sits on the couch. The masked figure assures me that this is the last time we will meet, but that my actions no longer matter. The whole picture is never seen. I feel dejected when he commands me to go to my warm bed.

I walk down the hallway, changing into hospital clothes. I’m lying in a hospital bed at home. I drop to my knees, rip my head off, and fall to the ground. The last thing I see is my own body, decapitated, bloody and battered, lying next to me in the hospital bed.

I don’t know what parts of me are sane and what parts are not. When I think of films with similar themes and themes, Jacob’s Ladder comes to mind, as well as films about PTSD and films about madness.

The screen lights up again, the music slows and becomes calm, and the colors remain calm and unchanged. A few weeks later, I wake up in the same hospital bed. As I lie in bed, I hear a conversation between a doctor and a security guard. My friend is confirmed dead, and the culprit is in the police station. My goal is clear to me. I carefully get out of bed, but the trauma throws everything off, and if I move too quickly or too much at once, I’m down on my knees for a moment. Carefully avoiding attention, trying to walk through the pain, I sneak out of the hospital. Betrayed by my own people, I return to my hometown seeking revenge. My car is wrecked, the spot where my girlfriend died is outlined in crayon and my house is a mess.

No more calls. This must stop.

With amazing clarity, and without a single hallucination, I burst into the station, tracked down the man who shot me and my girlfriend, and eliminated him after learning what my next target was. I quickly exited the precinct and entered a strange-looking lobby with a telephone and a long hallway with closing doors on both sides. I reverted to my original form – kill the security guard, go upstairs, and kill everyone standing near the parked monster truck. I threatened the hapless bastard to tell me the location of the man behind all this chaos. Of course I will end his life too.

Just as I’m finally about to leave the last traces of the organization behind the mysterious phone calls, I’m met by a regretful old man in a wheelchair who talks like a chicken in a nightmare. He knows what’s going to happen, and so do I. To my surprise, without my intervention, without me pressing a button, without giving me a choice, the protagonist shoots the old man in the head before he can say much. He steps out onto the balcony for a cigarette.

The credits roll. I am confused. Who is the old man and who are the three masked men? Why did the chicken warn me that my actions would be of no use if I did that? What was the noise, what was the body? What was the purpose of the call, who was I working for? There’s no explanation, and the protagonist doesn’t seem to particularly care.

The credits end with a surprising twist: instead of returning to the main menu, the game shows me the date of my last mission. Suddenly, the date rewinds to before I got shot, before my girlfriend was killed, before the hallucinations started.

It took me a moment to work out what kind of character I was controlling, but I quickly realized it was the biker I killed at the phone company. To his surprise, the protagonist also receives a similar call. However, the Biker is not too keen on following orders and instead follows a trail of clues to the mastermind behind the call. Biker’s gameplay is similar, but unlike the set of meat cleavers, as he only has one weapon to use. These levels are surprisingly easy.

I get a sinking feeling that I know how this will end, but my fears turn to certainty when the last step on the trail finally leads to the phone company. There, just as the Biker realizes who the call is coming from, he is attacked by the protagonist. The same combat as last time plays out, only this time I control a biker, and I know the protagonist will reach for the golf club in the corner and swing his knife at the point between himself and the weapon he will use to kill me.

He falls to the ground quickly. The biker remarks that the man in the chicken mask should have retreated before I finished him off. The decapitated body on the floor was a strangely familiar sight until I remembered I’d seen it before, when the protagonist ripped his own head off just before waking up in the hospital. I stared in speechless confusion as I led the biker off the building onto his bike.

The fact that the two stories cannot coexist bothers me as I follow the trail. Now more than ever, I’m confused about what’s true and what’s a lie. When I arrive at the building where the bikers find a solution, I find myself in a familiar lobby – the one the protagonist visited after the precinct raid. It’s the same long hallway and the doors are locked, only this time a suspicious caretaker runs through one of the doors and I chase him into the sewers. No going for the monster truck guys.

I’m suddenly terrified – if the people I’m killing as the protagonist aren’t the people behind the phones, who could they be? Which clue did I follow? Who was the old man I shot? Does it even matter who they were? Did all these things actually happen? It all makes less and less sense.

I meet a pair of caretakers in the sewers, surrounded by dozens of phones, animal masks, and blueprints. They look vaguely familiar, and introduce themselves as an independent duo making a call because they’re bored and assume you are too. When the biker asks if they think this is a game, they reply with a question: “Don’t you think so?”

Something clicks in my head: these caretakers are developers, and they’re talking to me, not the biker. The phone calls are a metaphor that tells you what to do during the game. There is no grand plot, no secret goals, no morals. Hotline Miami reveals the true nature of violence in games.

As I start considering different perspectives, my mind races to keep up with it all – I see how neutral Hotline Miami is in its use of violence. It neither glorifies nor demonizes violence. It shows how ugly violence is, and doesn’t give it any value. That’s reality. One of the most striking moments in Hotline Miami is when a masked chicken delivers the most confrontational dialogue I’ve ever heard in a game: “Do you enjoy hurting other people?”

This is the only time Hotline Miami skips over subtlety What is it really getting at: how open are we to violence? Why are we so hung up on justifying violence in video games? Today’s Call of Duty reminds us how justifiable the use of violence can be by showing us giant nuclear missiles launching from a distant silo or an antagonist massacring an airfield full of people. Without judgement, you’re forced to think about your actions and draw your own conclusions.

The janitor is telling you to kill them.

I know that will win the match. I don’t care. I will kill the Janitors to make amends for everyone I killed for them and for the other masked people who died trying to carry out their missions.

As the credits roll for the second time, I have a lot to think about. On the one hand, I’m concerned about the discrepancies between the main story and the biker story. Did anything actually happen in the main plot after the phone company? Isn’t that when the hallucinations started? Did your girlfriend really die? Were they all in a coma before the hospital mission? How could they end up living in the same building if one of the stories isn’t true?

On another level, I’m thinking about killing the manager. I’m vaguely aware that it was the developer’s fault that I did something terrible to kill my boredom. I’m not sure if that’s justified. I’m not sure I mind either. Still thinking about it.

And finally, I think about how Hotline Miami is many things in many ways, but all done in ways that can only happen in a video game. Tiny snippets of optional information piece together an uncertain narrative. Challenging the violence by questioning the player’s autonomy only works if the player has control over the violence and the violence is unpleasant enough to make you mildly uncomfortable. The key dichotomy of Hotline Miami is how the game purposefully drives the player forward through music, graphics, and score, yet pushes the player back again through narrative uncertainty and the sheer horror of on-screen violence.

A trick that Hotline Miami uses to perfection is to give you no time to think during violent gameplay, providing enough need for thought through pauses and narrative uncertainty. This wasn’t achieved by telling me “feel this way” or through narration or dialogue; it was a unique combination of interactivity, graphics, audio, dialogue, and atmosphere that only a game can provide.

Hotline Miami took a bold step into uncharted territory where ego, player, avatar, autonomy, trust, action, responsibility, justice, morality, game, and game are all relevant, but never fully clearly defined, never take shape, and often overlap, excluding each other or challenging each other in impossible ways.

Hotline Miami isn’t a game about violence, it’s a game about getting back in your car and roaming among the corpses of the people you’ve killed because someone told you to.

It’s up to you to play the game or pick up the phone. Do you like hurting others?