Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami is a game about how your sense of empathy vanishes when you play violent video games.

The plot of Hotline Miami looks somewhat like this: Jacket picks up the phone and is ordered to deliver a briefcase to a dumpster. He dons a chicken mask he receives at the same time and leaves his apartment. While delivering the suitcase, he is attacked by Russian mobsters, which he brutally fights off. From then on, everything slowly falls apart. Jacket receives assignment after assignment on his phone, which he always completes with a bloodbath. As time goes on, Jacket starts trying to figure out who is on the other end of the line. But the plot isn't what I want to talk about in this essay.

Hotline Miami describes itself as a “high-octane action game overflowing with raw brutality, hard-boiled gunplay and skull crushing close combat.” This tagline almost makes it sound like a caricature of violent video games, which are so common nowadays. However, Hotline Miami isn’t just another violent video game. Hotline Miami is a game about the relation between video games and violence. The game is played from a top-down perspective (you see Jacket, the character you control, from above) and uses 80’s styled pixelized visuals, which makes you think the game cannot be as graphic as, for instance, to name a more recent title, Doom Eternal.
But it is! Hotline Miami is probably as violent as the first Doom games were considered upon their release. I mean hell, Hotline Miami is illegal in Australia. However, there is a deeper meaning underneath this thick layer of gruesomeness, blood, and sweat. There’s a message. And this message is a call to self-awareness.

At the beginning of Hotline Miami, we learn that Jacket is actually having a flashback whilst in a coma. He is confronted by a woman wearing a horse mask, a man wearing a chicken mask, and another man wearing an owl mask. The man in the chicken mask, or Richard, asks him "Do you like hurting other people?" This is the first thing the game does to make you reconsider. Do you actually get a kick out of firefights like the ones you are about to experience? It's likely you do, but don't want to admit it.

At the start of the second game of the franchise, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (which I’ll hopefully write about in the future) Jacket and his friends Beard, Daniels, and Barnes were a quartet of special operatives named the Ghost Wolves who fought in the (fictional) Hawaiian Conflict in 1985. One night, the colonel at the head of the Ghost Wolves runs out to their tent while wearing a panther’s torn face. Visibly drunk, he gives the following speech:

“Do you see this? ... Can you see my face? This is my true nature! You see, don't you? This is who I am! This is who we all are. We're animals! ... There's no denying it! A bunch of goddamn animals! They're sending us out to slaughter or be slaughtered... And here we sit until they tell us what to do, and how to do it! No will of our own, just mindless obedience! We don't even know why we're fighting now, do we? All we know is that deep down, somewhere in there, we enjoy it. Destruction and violence... it's just part of our nature.”

This, right here, is what Hotline Miami is about.
The mask that Jacket slips onto his head before starting a shootout is the imaginary mask you place upon your face when you boot up Hotline Miami. And this mask - your mask, has the sentence “It’s just a game” printed on it. And it's not just any mask- it's an animal mask.
The reason Hotline Miami isn’t played in a first person perspective is to put distance between you and Jacket. He's partially responsible for the scene, since his story is the lain plot drive, but this massacre is your fault. And you get to watch Jacket walk away from it on your command.
See, Hotline Miami is a video game in which you run into buildings, and open fire until the silence of the aftermath puts an end to your performance. You get a score. You get a grade. Music plays. Even though you just committed mass murder in Miami. But you're still having a good time.

You like hurting other people.