Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (PC)
Originally published on Caltrops.com
In one final push to beat Hotline Miami 2, I decided to skip sleeping last night and blast my way through the game’s last five scenes. By 2 a.m., the tendons in the back of my hands burned so bad I had to start taking short breaks. At 3 a.m. I unlocked my first achievement, KARMA, by dying 1,000 times. Somewhere around 4 a.m., I fell asleep in my chair.
As the game’s synth-heavy soundtrack continued to pulse through my speakers, I dreamed that I was still playing the game. I was stuck in a never ending hallway filled with doors. The only way to see inside each room was to kick open every door and deal with whatever was hiding behind it. Some of the rooms were empty. Others contained hoards of enemies. The hallway was painted with blood. Much of it was mine.
Around 6 a.m., my wife entered my office to see if everything was okay since I hadn’t come to bed. The sound of the door opening woke me and almost caused me to fall out of my chair. She’s very lucky I didn’t have a nail gun or chainsaw within arm’s reach.
If you thought the plot of the first Hotline Miami game was twisted and confusing, don’t bother trying to unravel the sequel’s. Unlike the original game which had two playable POV characters, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number has thirteen, with a story that takes place both before and after the original. In flashbacks we see at least one character die that appears later in the game, which means either the earlier story line was a hallucination, or the latter one was. Or maybe both of them are. I’ve read Wikipedia’s plot summary of the game a dozen times and understand twice as much as I did before, which still isn’t much. Fortunately, Hotline Miami 2 can be played and enjoyed without understanding a lick of the plot, which is good news for dullards such as myself.
Summaries of the game sound like the fevered nightmares of someone suffering from malaria. At one point in the game I was a prison inmate, disguised as a cop, killing other cops, and eventually other inmates. I think. In another level I played as two swans — one armed with a chainsaw, the other, a revolver. A few minutes later I was a girl wearing a zebra mask with deadly fists. Each level is designed with a touch of genius and a sprinkling of masochism. Get caught in an enemy’s line of sight and they’ll either charge you at full speed or fill your face full of buckshot. Walk around the wrong corner or past a window and a dozen enemies may come at you. If you happened to bring a knife with you to that gun fight, you might as well use it to start digging your own grave.
After beating the original Hotline Miami I swore I’d never play it again, and I loathe myself for playing the sequel. With unlimited lives you can play each level an infinite number of times until you figure out the pattern, but many times I just wished it would end. Some levels took me hours to beat. Once I was dropped weaponless into a room with two enemies, the only solution being to knock one out, steal his knife, stab the second, and slash the first one’s throat before he bashes your brains in from behind. On another level I appeared in a room (again without a weapon) with an angry cop and an aggressive dog. Killing dogs is a big part of Miami Hotline 2. Dogs killing you is an even bigger part.
With so many playable characters come different rules and limitations. Some characters can use any weapon they find in the game, some are locked into using the ones they start with, and a few cannot use any weapons at all. On a few levels you can pick which character you wish to control, but more often than not, one is assigned to you based on the narrative. On at least one occasion, I spent several hours attempting to beat a level only to run into a glitch that made completing it with that character impossible. My only two options were to restart the level with a different character and lose a few hours worth of progress, or curl up on my futon and cry myself to sleep. In the end, I did both.
Along with hundreds of dogs, I’ve slaughtered soldiers, mafia men, cops, inmates, and thousands of other people over the past month. Beating the game unlocks hard mode, something you’ll need if you want to earn the Genocide Achievement (50,000 kills). After a month though, my nerves are shot. After beating pixelated men to death with a lead pipe for hours, I… I just wanna go home.
The game’s final level is a drug induced nightmare where the walls bend and sway and motion blur distorts reality. Compared to the rest of the game, Hotline Miami 2’s final stage is relatively easy, and your reward for enduring some of the most sadistic game play of all time is literally nuclear annihilation. As for you… well, let’s just say anybody not wearing two million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day.
I need somebody to hold me.
