Above is a really neat interpretation of what Hotline Miami would look like as a 3D PSone game. It's a fan project by developer Puppet Combo, creator of indie horror games like Babysitter Bloodbath and Power Drill Massacre. The video lasts for just over a minute, but offers a good look at what the game might've looked like if it was released in, say, 1999, and you had to play it with a DualShock controller.

It really captures the shaky 3D effect that strangely ended up defining the look of PSone games, and it has nice touches like the static TV screen and VHS kill counter. The developer followed up with some neat screenshots of the environments seen in the video:

If you like this and you're interested in more of Puppet Combo's work, the developer has a Patreon for making Grindhouse-style horror games. The $5 tier promises at least one new game, experiment or prototype per month.

How do you follow up one of the most influential cult games of the past decade?

The original Hotline Miami practically established a genre unto itself, using the form of the top-down indie shooter for relentless, unapologetically ugly murder sprees—whether the victims deserved it or not. Restarts are instant, because death is only a single enemy bullet away. So, you die. A lot. You learn where enemies are placed, and what direction they’re facing. You discover the difference between someone holding a baseball bat and a semiautomatic pistol the hard way. And then, you use this knowledge to kill every last person standing in the most brutal, gratuitous manner possible. In the wake of the false heroism of Spec Ops: The Line, Hotline Miami captivated players with a simple question: do you enjoy hurting people? Within Hotline Miami’s tightly designed, neon-bathed confines, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’.

The fact that the original Hotline Miami introduced moral questions about the experience you’re enjoying (hurting people) isn't, in itself, revolutionary. What truly sold its particular brand of delightful darkness was an overwhelmingly satisfying presentation, expressed through its art style and killer soundtrack. Synth beats combine with a rapid live-die-learn-repeat loop to drive you forward, encouraging you to hammer the R key after every death, late into the night. 

A brisk three-hour run time for a single playthrough doesn’t leave you with enough time to question what the hell is going on until the game is already over. In hindsight, the '80s stylings and surreal, psychedelic encounters with masked beings obscure the underlying weaknesses of the game as a whole. Weaknesses like an unsatisfying conspiracy storyline drawing attention away from the central, personal conflicts of the game, an inconsistent combat model that results in unfair deaths and a frustratingly obtuse final boss.

Hotline Miami 2 addresses these weaknesses with the quiet craftsmanship of experience, and doesn’t receive credit for any of it.

Combat in Hotline Miami 2 is, if not entirely consistent, more tightly controlled. With proper preparation, I found myself dying from offscreen threats far less often despite the sequel's larger levels, and diverse play styles outside of my comfort zone became mandatory as the game went on. The storytelling is boldly idiosyncratic, tying the lives of soldiers sent on suicidal missions in a deniable warzone to a group of fame-hungry serial killers with a mind-bending convolution and unexpected empathy only a series like Hotline Miami could achieve. 

Delivered over six chapters and roughly ten hours, I had more than enough time to question where the hell the story was going and why the game didn't end after the bastard-hard third act, only to find myself stunned as the scattered threads came together in its final two chapters. Long after I felt that the game should have been over, I suddenly didn't want it to end—and what an ending it is.

The playable cast of Hotline Miami 2 stars over seven horribly broken people, each dramatically changing the way the game is played due to their unique abilities and personalities. Character is communicated through gameplay, and your choice (or lack thereof) as a player. Having a pacifist journalist pick up a gun only causes him to unload it, disabling its use and giving you a grand 1000-point bonus. Forcing him to act against his nature and execute an enemy will send him into an uncontrollable rage, tinting the screen a lurid, overwhelming red and leaving your character vulnerable for an extended period of time. You won’t get any points, either. Where Hotline Miami asks if you enjoy hurting people, Hotline Miami 2 knows that you do—and places you in situations where indulging this desire will lead you to ruin.

Instead of a silent cipher slaughtering his way through an unprepared city (as in the first game), the characters in Hotline Miami 2 have voices, and visible lives outside of the scope of the game. One takes care of his ill mother full-time in between doing jobs for the local crime boss—the son of a man the main character of the first game murdered. Another is a journalist whose family is falling apart as a result of his investigation into the murderous happenings in his city (including the massacres of the first game). His wife and son have left. The journalist, in turn, has left the abandoned toys in his son’s room untouched. Scattered on the floor, just as his son placed them.

This is the dilemma facing Hotline Miami 2. Its events are inextricably connected to the consequences of your actions in the original game—consequences you, as a player, never expected to face outside of a cutscene, let alone see have a tangible effect upon the wider world. By tying itself so closely to its fantastic if flawed foundation, all of the issues carried over from the original game became glaringly apparent to returning players, and instead attached themselves to the sequel. 

The odds were stacked against Hotline Miami 2, and a controversial sexual assault scene ('justified' as a fake-out occurring on the set of a movie based on the events of the first game) didn’t help. It only seemed to establish Hotline Miami 2 as trying too hard to be controversial in a world the original had already shocked. What was once unique had become familiar, and so, contemptuous. As perhaps the definition of an underappreciated sequel, Hotline Miami 2 advances the features of its predecessor in every appreciable way, and suffered in comparison because it didn’t come first. If there’s anything this sequel deserves to be recognized for, though, it's the ending.

Many have harped on the brutality and intentional ugliness of the Hotline Miami series. The cathartic-bordering-on-guilty action of the series is its trademark. However, of all moments, developer Dennaton Games chose to conclude its bloody saga with an image of startling beauty. I’m not going to be coy about what that moment is. Hotline Miami 2 ends with nuclear war, and every one of the petty concerns of the main cast—your concerns—being washed away in a flash of light. I know how that sounds. If this were any other game, I’d call it a cop out. A deus ex machina wrapping up a story that ultimately became too convoluted for its own good. However, in Hotline Miami 2, it somehow feels like the only piece that could fit.

Starting with the unsatisfying, apparently janitor-led conspiracy of the first game, you hear whispers of something larger happening. Something big. Your colonel is being promoted to a higher position, but something went wrong in his head, out there in the jungle. Something he's bringing back with him. Shadowy organizations are promoting nationalism across the United States, but to what end? Where's the threat? That's all these supposed harbingers of doom are, right? Whispers? Right until the very end. At the conclusion of one of the greatest power fantasies ever made, you’re left powerless.

It carries an air of biblical inevitability. Everyone caught up in the minutia of their little lives, until an event out of their control reveals those lives to be cosmically inconsequential. Helpless before a wave of burning, blinding beauty.

How do you follow up one of the most influential cult games of the past decade?

You wash it away.

Over 500 games are discounted on Steam this week, a sizable chunk of which are visual novels and cutesy anime games. But if gratuitous violence is more your thing, allow me to direct your attention to two of the sales' best games and steepest discounts: the Hotline Miami combo pack and They Bleed Pixels. 

Hotline Miami is a gory top-down action game about murdering gangsters in a chicken mask. As our own Graham Smith said in his review, it's "a tight, efficient game" that encourages brutal creativity and lives by trial-and-error. Through Monday, November 13, you can pick up the original Hotline Miami and the sequel, Wrong Number, for $6.79. Note that the individual games aren't discounted, so you have to buy the bundle. Luckily, the bundle is cheaper than either individual game. 

In a similarly grisly vein, 2D platformer They Bleed Pixels is available for $2—a hefty 80 percent off—through Monday. Phil called it "neat, but also absurdly difficult" back in 2015 when it received its big Crimson Update, which added a host of levels, speedrun leaderboards, and, crucially, improved blood effects. If you dig its chiptune music, you can also grab the soundtrack for $1, or kill two birds with one collector's edition9. for $2.59.

As previously reported, tech-noir tactics game All Walls Must Fall is also heavily discounted this week, as its Berlin Wall anniversary sale happened to line up with the weekly sale. Atmospheric survival game This War of Mine is another standout at 80 percent off. 

This feels like it should be a headline from last year worrier that I am, I've just checked the dates again but Hotline Miami 2's level editor has just left beta. Which is to say, it's now live, so you can make your own Hotline levels, then whack them onto the Steam Workshop for others to enjoy. Sure, you've been able to do that for quite a while now, but the developers have fixed a fair few bugs for this proper release.

You'll find the patch notes for the editor here. Developer Dennaton has "attempted to make sure your old levels still work as they did before," but notes that there "may be some issues importing your levels created with versions prior to today's update".

"Thank you so much for your patience and help over the extended development of the level editor," Dennaton states in the Steam news post. "Without your passion, help, and feedback this would not have been possible. Now please go make Hotline Miami 3!"

If you decide to, please try to secure some new music from M.O.O.N, Jasper Byrne, Forest Swords and Carpenter Brut for the occasion. Ta.

Do you like your ultraviolence to have that personal touch? Chris was enraged by Hotline Miami 2's propensity to shoot him from off-screen, but now the tools are here to fix that—or make it much worse.

In a blog post, Dennaton announced that the long-awaited level editor has finally made in into a beta state and can be downloaded now by opting into 'editor_beta' in your Steam Hotline Miami 2 beta preferences. Tutorials, helpfully, are already in place for your perusal. The downside to this beta build is that it doesn't include Steam workshop support, so sharing your creations is less than straightforward. Dennaton has recommended "any other way you can think of", but the Reddit level-sharing megathread might be a good place to start.

There wasn't originally any plan to include support for custom sprites, but modders have stepped up with rudimentary tools to plug the gap. The process is a little more involved than building the levels themselves, however, so you'll want to study the instructions yourself before wading in.

Most of us have finished Hotline Miami 2 (unless you're a law abiding Australian), so it's good news that the game's level editor is entering beta on December 10. It'll roll out on Steam exclusively, but it won't have Steam Workshop support from the beginning. In a blogpost announcing the rollout, a Dennaton spokesperson said Steam was preferable as it's an easier platform to debug for.

You won't need to pull any strings to get access to the beta: it's available to everyone without an invite, and all content is available from the start (though more features will roll out with time). On the otherhand, there's no guarantee levels made during the beta period will carry over to the final version, which is expected to roll out some time in January.

The studio did confirm that no custom music or sprite editors will feature in the editor. "If we let people get free music when they download levels we are viewed as a illegal file sharing tool," the spokesperson said. On the topic of sprite editors, apparently modders are already on the job. 

Fingers crossed the level editor can improve on what our reviewer Chris Thursten found to be a disappointing main game. "Restrictive design decisions sap the energy from a series that revels in it, and technical issues deal the killing blow," he wrote.

What happens when you combine Hotline Miami with Superhot? SUPERHOTline Miami, obviously. As the name implies, the browser game combines the reflex-driven topdown shooting of Hotline Miami with the movement hook of Superhot. That is, enemy bullets only move when the player does. 

I only played until the second level (I was starting to receive resentful glances from my co-workers) but it's pretty fun, despite the barebones presentation. It's the work of indie developer Florian Dufour, who knocked it out one evening when he was bored (he's currently working on a game called Fast Travel: A Speedrun Journey). 

You can play SUPERHOTline Miami in your browser here, and there's the option to download it, too. It follows the playable April Fools joke SUPERQOT, which adds the Superhot twist to Quake. 

Prior to the launch of Hotline Miami 2, the system requirements indicated that the game would run under Windows XP. That turned out to be incorrect, which was bad news for gamers who preordered it on the assumption that it would. But that's been fixed now in the form of an unofficial patch that brings the new game to the old OS.

Created by Steam user Silent, the patch requires a certain amount of computer smarts: You'll need to unzip the archive into your Hotline Miami 2 directory, then run the included batch file, which patches the startup file with a custom .DLL making it bootable under XP. Detailed instructions are provided, and honestly, if you're reading this site then the great likelihood is that you won't have any trouble with it.

The instructions recommend that the game be run in OpenGL mode rather than DirectX 9, which can only run in borderless windowed mode and is apparently very crash-prone. The patch will also have to be re-applied every time the game is updated.

Windows XP is pretty grossly outdated by now, but as the Steam Hardware and Software survey indicates, it's holding on to life surprisingly well: It represents only a tiny slice of the OS pie, but it's neck-and-neck with Windows 8 64-bit and has more users than Windows Vista 32 and 64-bit combined. It's too bad that Hotline Miami 2 didn't fare particularly well in our review, but even so props to Silent for making this happen for those that needed it.

The original Hotline Miami was brutish, nasty, short. Its basic vocabulary was elegant enough to support a score-attack videogame but loose enough, creative enough to make you feel like that wasn't entirely the point. It was a marriage of Robotron and Lynch, Pollock with a machete going through the comedown of a century. It was about turning ugly uglyness into beautiful uglyness. If you lacked the hyperacute reflexes necessary to score an A grade in every level, you could still chase that feeling. Despite the bad-trip aesthetic and the bloody cruelty of it all, it actually represented a kind of harmony: pop art enhancing a game, a game enhancing pop art. It's a classic for that reason.

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is not a classic. Nor is it—and as somebody who loved the original, this is a tough admission—a particularly good game. This is despite it being, in many ways, more or less the same game. You slam through doors and send Russian mobsters sprawling to the floor. You kick their heads in, grab their knives, shank the next guy, throw his pipe through a window, shotgun a dog, turn the wrong corner, die in a hail of gunfire, hammer 'R', do it again, hammer 'R', do it again.

Hotline Miami 2's problems span the entire game, from its overall structure to its plot, the decisions that have been made regarding player characters, ability-modifying masks, and level design. It certainly amounts to more Hotline Miami—it is substantially longer than its predecessor, taking me eleven hours to reach the end—but it's worse Hotline Miami. If the original game was the movie Drive—a seductive pop cultural moment, shallow but resonant, a crystallised mood—then this sequel is Nicolas Winding Refn's poorly-received follow-up, Only God Forgives. More complex but less powerful.

Where the original focused on the experience of a single killer and treated the introduction of a second protagonist as a key plot beat, Hotline Miami switches between characters and eras with every level. The plot follows threads in 1985, 1989 and 1991, encompassing dream sequences, flashbacks, killing sprees that turn out to be movie scenes that turn out to be dream sequences that turn out to be flashbacks, and so on. Chapters are separated by non-combat vignettes, and it features far more talking than its predecessor did.

The game offers substantially more plot detail, too, but this is tied to characters who don't have character and events that don't have meaning. Dialogue is stilted and relationships boil down to gestures. The constant shifts in time and perspective suggest an attempt to recapture the first game's sense of strange, but it's too convoluted to amount to a similarly seductive solipsism. Hotline Miami 2 simply doesn't have anything to add. It's an ambitious, Lynchian superstructure surrounding a not-particularly-interesting crime fable.

When it tries to be more than that, it stumbles. The first decision you're faced with is the choice to enable or disable scenes of sexual violence: then, in the prologue, there's a suggested rape by your character that turns out to be a scene from a video nasty (or does it, and so on). Sexual violence does not occur again after that point, and its inclusion adds nothing, says nothing, and plays no role in the overall plot. It's artless and alienating, and giving the player the choice to switch it off suggests a lack of confidence in the entire idea. If it's unnecessary enough that it can be removed without consequence, why include it?

The first casualty of this problematic structure is atmosphere, but the second and more serious is combat. Characters are differentiated with hard playstyle restrictions. Where masks previously added subtle perks that encouraged experimentation, here they dictate much about how you approach a level. One character carries a gun that can be switched for a knife at any time. He can't pick up dropped weapons at all, and if he runs out of ammo he needs to restock at scarce ammo crates. This turns Hotline Miami 2 into an entirely different game—and a worse one. Imagine the frustration of facing down an enemy that can only be wounded with bullets while playing as a character who is out of ammo but isn't, for some reason, allowed to use the guns that are right there. That's Hotline Miami 2.

One group of characters does use masks, but each mask represents a different character and, similarly, they each have a substantial effect on how you play. Another character earns mask-esque upgrades but, disappointingly, several of these overlap with other characters in the game. One character fights non-lethally (mostly) and will discard bladed weapons or firearms that you try to pick up. The best characters, in this scenario, are the ones that use no gimmicks at all—because it's only then that you get to play with all of the game's systems, and it's those systems that make Hotline Miami what it is. This is not simply a shooter or a stealth game or a brawler: it is at its best when it is a freeform combination of the three, and when that freedom is placed in the hands of the player.

When you do have that freedom, you run up against level design issues. There are sequences that capture the original's grueling, rewarding sense of escalating power and violence, but far more that entirely frustrate. The use of guns is frequently mandated by the placement of melee-proof enemies, long sight-lines and distant snipers. This is the case even when you're not being forced to use particular weapons. You spend far more time edging around corners taking pot-shots at out-of-sight enemies than you should do in a Hotline Miami game.

This more restrictive design means that twisting Hotline Miami's basic systems is the most reliable way to progress, and this, in turn, draws the eye towards longstanding unresolved bugs, inconsistent AI, and flat-out instability. I have encountered, reliably, mission-critical items falling outside of the play area; invisible walls forming behind certain open doors; dogs spinning on the spot, forever; guns firing through people. Enemy behaviour is all over the place. You can fire a gun in one room and alert enemies half a level away but not the guy next door. Dogs can't be hurt while turning corners. Gunmen won't see you through an open door if the door is open just so. One tough five-stage midgame mission crashed three times on the final section, forcing me to play the entire thing over from scratch every time. I have never been more relieved to see the words 'Level Clear'.

There is still, however, power in those words, and I pressed on through the campaign partly because I had to and partly because I was so angry and disappointed with the game that I wanted to see it through to the bloody end. The feeling of utter frustration brought about by the new character mechanics and level layouts is, in some ways, a kind of double-edged victory for Hotline Miami overall. I certainly felt like an actual masochist.

There is also a sequence, right at the end, that is so inventive and powerfully presented that it suggests what really building upon the original's basic ideas might look like. It's not particularly interesting mechanically, but you've never seen anything like it. It lasts about three minutes.

There is another, powerful thing the game gets right, and that's the soundtrack. The soundtrack includes almost fifty lossless tracks by artists like Jasper Byrne, Carpenter Brut, M.O.O.N, Perturbator. The experience is enormously enhanced by their work. That crash-prone five-stage mission is accompanied by Carpenter Brut's Roller Mobster, and despite listening to it on the way to work for the last couple of months and having now listened to it over and over during two unnecessary additional attempts at that mission, it's still fucking rad.

It's also a better looking game—a familiar style rendered with a little more detail in the pixel art, more and more nuanced animations, and nice little touches like heads rolling away from decapitated corpses and pixelated blood softening as it touches water. If it wasn't for the narrative and the structure, the art and music would make Hotline Miami 2, overall, a stylistic improvement.

The big picture, though, is one of entirely-dispelled mystique. Did anybody need to know more about the circumstances leading up to the events of the original game? Did Hotline Miami ever need lore? Did you ever wish that you had less freedom to determine your course through a level? I didn't, and I don't. This is not the follow-up that Hotline Miami deserves. Then again, perhaps it didn't need a sequel at all.

Note: Hotline Miami 2 includes tools for users to create their own levels. I've spent some time with them but they're currently marked as being in alpha, and it's far too early to judge how well the community will make use of them. As such, they have not been factored in to the judgement offered here.