Developing an action scene for a movie requires a lot of storyboards: utilizing the environment of the scene, stunts, and constant movement. The best action scenes move at a rapid pace, building tension as they go but also feeling “real” in a way that makes nothing seem jarring to the viewer. Superhot fully understands what goes into making a great action scene, which is why every time I finished a level in the game, I re-watched all my actions, tracking the power I had in each given moment of the scenario. With Superhot, you are the director and the star of your own action movie, but its narrative takes things to a more interesting place that questions who really is in control of the scene.
The initial comparison one might have to Superhot is with Hotline Miami – a game that is both satisfying in its failures but also in its execution. Starting out as a Kickstarter demo (which is all still pretty much intact for the final release), the core conceit was that time would only move when the player moved. This creates a puzzle game feeling to the gameplay that makes each step feel calculated and important. If the game took place completely in real-time, it would just be a standard shooter. You can even play it in real-time if you decide that you never want to stop moving, but the game encourages you to slow down and think before acting. This is what makes Superhot genius in its gameplay loop.
Each scene is comprised of a couple props such as vases, bats, guns, etc. and a room or a couple rooms connected to make one area for the fight to take place in. These get more elaborate as time goes on, unless the game is introducing a new technique into the mix, which in itself makes things slightly more complicated. Enemies will either already be in the level, or they will spawn in waves. It is always the same placement of enemies or spawn points for the waves to come from, so each retry of a level only brings variety in how you move and tackle it. On the surface, that sounds repetitive and actually fairly easy, but Superhot makes a point of you trying something new once you’ve fully understood how to handle one situation.
Introducing a prop such as a katana into a level is begging for players to attempt to go through the level without their gun and instead using the sword to slice through enemies. Or maybe you want to play through and be as resourceful as possible, never using a weapon more than once. The challenge mode that unlocks after players beat the game’s main story offers many different ways to go through the 25 levels available that it is hard not to want to go through them again. Some of the levels actually require players to be resourceful because they offer little in terms of traditional weapons.
The most satisfying part of Superhot is when you finish a level. Everything has played out slowly and you’ve had a tough time trying to get past several enemy encounters – maybe you even had a gang of enemies all coming at you at once while you were left with few choices for retaliation – but now the level has been defeated. That isn’t the most satisfying part though, despite its inherent reward for beating a tough challenge. No, instead it is the replay that immediately plays back every action you did in real-time, as if the slow-motion never existed. This is where each scene begins to feel like a blueprint for an action scene. The props are there, the enemies are placed, they move in aggressive ways towards the protagonist, and then you kill them.
I uploaded a replay that I had to Killstagram – Superhot‘s website dedicated to hosting replay videos – and it was entitled “Oldboy Corridor”. You can watch that replay here. Why did I upload that clip, specifically? It was perfectly representative of the resourcefulness you can use in a situation (those props were put there to encourage variety), and it was just an awesome moment. The final part of that clip involves me throwing my katana at a guy to kill him, then picking up a vase and throwing it at another enemy, which then has his gun come towards me that I catch in mid-air, then shoot the guy with the gun behind him. Meanwhile, the guy who I hit with the vase moves to grab the gun on the floor, and I throw mine at him to stun him, leaving me time to grab the gun off the floor and shoot him. But I did all of that in slow-motion. The result is what you see in the clip. There’s no music, just a focus on the precision of combat.
Superhot‘s core concept is so immediately satisfying that it’s easy to lose sight of some of the game’s shortcomings. For example, while there are only 25 levels in Superhot, I found myself fairly done with the game after beating its story. This is something worth talking about because it is dealing heavily with technological advancements such as virtual reality and violence as a whole. The whole narrative is told mainly through chat messages happening through piOS (Superhot‘s fake operating system) and the text that appears on screen during gameplay. It becomes a weird meta-narrative right away as a copy of Superhot is provided to the player in-game and the mysterious person who has given you the game warns you to keep silent about what it is you’re playing. Clearly it’s a top-secret project that shouldn’t be in your hands.
That mystery is fairly interesting, but it really is the gameplay that matters most. Even in the late stages of the story, they introduce a new gameplay mechanic that I won’t spoil but it really didn’t end up jiving with me as much as the other mechanics did. There is even a stage early on where they get you to jump over a car, and I never found myself using jumping in an effective or frequent manner. Even in Endless mode, the game never really drove me to utilize the mechanics I had ignored. The late-game mechanic is helpful in the context of the levels they have set up, but it is fairly unnecessary outside of them.
The thing is, Superhot is insanely fun when you are playing it with the replays providing that dopamine rush required to make you want to try it again. The challenge modes are fun for a bit, but I honestly found very little drive to go through them completely. Even with the potential for amazing moments, the game so frequently doles them out that it isn’t enough for me to play for the promise of an awesome replay. Only when I’m in that moment did I ever care about how great the scene was playing out.
Superhot is inventive in its gameplay, stripping things back just enough to see the gears work but not enough that it loses the fun factor. When everything clicks and you’re running through a level taking on multiple enemies within a fraction of a second, the game transcends most shooters. Its simplistic aesthetic and minimalist score all work to show just how much the gameplay is all that matters. Dying becomes a double-edged sword because on one hand, you screwed up and died, but on the other, you get to take another stab at having an insanely stylish moment of combat. For me, there is nothing more satisfying than that silver lining in defeat.
A PC code for Superhot was provided by SUPERHOT Team for the purpose of this review.