Dennaton Games · Devolver Digital
We're excited to partner up with the amazing folks behind Kusan: City of Wolves on a Steam bundle. You can now pick up both games for an additional 10% off at the bundle here! View game page
We're excited to partner up with the amazing folks behind Kusan: City of Wolves on a Steam bundle.
You can now pick up both games for an additional 10% off at the bundle here!
Hotline Miami is one of the most brutal and best-sounding indie games ever made. The techno and vaporwave aesthetic melds with quick top-down violence to create something people still play to this day, and you can grab it for $2 on Steam. If you're one of the people with a Steam
Hotline Miami is one of the most brutal and best-sounding indie games ever made. The techno and vaporwave aesthetic melds with quick top-down violence to create something people still play to this day, and you can grab it for $2 on Steam. If you're one of the people with a Steam Deck, Hotline Miami - and the sequel - are games you don't want to miss.
RELATED LINKS:
Hotline Miami dev's next game may horrify or delight you, depending
Humble Indie Bundle 21 has more cheap PC games for Humble's ten-year anniversary
The Hotline Miami 3 teaser was "a prank that went way further than I thought it would"
Indie publisher Devolver Digital will host an E3 livestream at 9.30pm UK time on Saturday, 12th June. It's part of Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest. There's no word on what to expect from the show, although I suspect it will follow the same unhinged theme of previous Devolver Di
Indie publisher Devolver Digital will host an E3 livestream at 9.30pm UK time on Saturday, 12th June.
It's part of Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest.
There's no word on what to expect from the show, although I suspect it will follow the same unhinged theme of previous Devolver Digital E3 shows.
In 2020, Hotline Miami and its sequel were ported to Xbox One and Google Stadia. As clocks rolled over to 2021, one of the developers behind the indie games spoke a little about his new project, and it sounds exactly like you'd expect. In a vague tweet, Jonatan Söderström says th
In 2020, Hotline Miami and its sequel were ported to Xbox One and Google Stadia. As clocks rolled over to 2021, one of the developers behind the indie games spoke a little about his new project, and it sounds exactly like you'd expect.
In a vague tweet, Jonatan Söderström says the upcoming game is something a little more personal, and that reactions will likely be extreme, and mixed. "I wish I could write about what we're working on," He says. "It is a passion project so I'm not sure who will enjoy it. But I'm sure some people will be horrified and others delighted!"
Since it's 2021, that means it's nine years since Hotline Miami first launched. The surreal, ultra-violent action-adventure game was a massive hit on PC and console, helping put Devolver Digital on the map as a publisher. Söderström and developer Dennaton Games made a follow-up, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, released in 2015. The team added a level editor in 2016, and the enduring popularity led to a port of the Hotline Miami Collection to Nintendo Switch in 2019, and the aforementioned systems last year.
RELATED LINKS:
Humble Indie Bundle 21 has more cheap PC games for Humble's ten-year anniversary
The Hotline Miami 3 teaser was "a prank that went way further than I thought it would"
This horror dev reimagined Hotline Miami as a PS1-era classic
Oh man, Hotline Miami. I can still feel it. What a cutting, embarrassingly necessary parable of violence. What a way to stand on the shoulders of Shadow of the Colossus, by taking that moral throughline and wrapping it, head to toe, in the trappings of its time. What's weird, tho
Oh man, Hotline Miami. I can still feel it. What a cutting, embarrassingly necessary parable of violence. What a way to stand on the shoulders of Shadow of the Colossus, by taking that moral throughline and wrapping it, head to toe, in the trappings of its time.
What's weird, though, is I think parables are a bit rubbish. More often than not a parable will do somewhere between most and all of the work for you. You'll finish up - watching, reading, playing, whatever - and you'll know exactly what it is that you just consumed, what the point of it was, and what you need to do next, which is usually nothing.
Hotline Miami, a lot of the time, is at real threat of falling into that trap. You are summoned, via anonymous phone call, into a series of ultra-violent raids on various bad guy hideouts, and you obviously oblige. It's 2012 so naturally, Drive still fresh in the mind, this is set in the late '80s. It's a cult hit because it's indie and violent and has music, and the cult following has nicknamed your character "Jacket", because he has a cool jacket. Everything is neon, but a sort of grim neon, with a dirty, grainy flicker over the top that could be a sort of VHS effect or could be a glaring sign, as it gradually flickers with more vigor and grunge, that what you're seeing here isn't entirely real.
OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago , but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party. Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as p
OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party.
Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive.
In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you!
It's four in the morning on 18th February 2017, and a 19-year-old modder and writer named Spencer Yan is sitting in his college dorm at his computer, with a server full of Discord users eager for him to drop the latest update for Midnight Animal, a total conversion mod and origin
It's four in the morning on 18th February 2017, and a 19-year-old modder and writer named Spencer Yan is sitting in his college dorm at his computer, with a server full of Discord users eager for him to drop the latest update for Midnight Animal, a total conversion mod and original story built upon the bloodstained, bullet-riddled blueprints of Hotline Miami.
At this point, Yan has worked on Midnight Animal for over a year. The project has grown from a Mod DB page and some well received YouTube trailers to being greenlit on Steam. He has permission from developers Dennaton Games to use the source code, and an entire community of engaged and supportive Hotline Miami fans behind him.
What the community isn't yet aware of is the drastic creative reimagining the project has undergone in the time since they last saw an update. A transformation from what its creator describes as a "comically dark, pseudo-cyberpunk revenge story" to something far more personal, philosophical and poignant.
Update: The Twitter account and teaser are not official. Hotline Miami developer Dennaton confirmed that no sequel was in development, unfortunately. It's still a neat teaser and the full trailer should be worth keeping an eye out for. Original story: A new Twitter account refere
Update: The Twitter account and teaser are not official. Hotline Miami developer Dennaton confirmed that no sequel was in development, unfortunately. It's still a neat teaser and the full trailer should be worth keeping an eye out for.
Original story: A new Twitter account referencing Hotline Miami's original protagonist popped up over the weekend, posting a single video. It's a short, slick and appropriately gory teaser of a fight frozen in time that perfectly matches the series' tone and aesthetic, even though it appears to be live action. It ends with the promise of a trailer coming soon.
Though it's clearly connected to Hotline Miami, it could be a fan film or some other kind of unofficial project. The Twitter account is new, unverified and, while it follows some people involved with the game, it has hardly any followers. It does link back to the Hotline Miami website, however.
It looks good enough to be an official teaser, but a lot of fan projects are extremely high quality, so that alone doesn't mean Hotline Miami 3 is coming. That it's not presenting itself as a fan creation does at least suggest it's trying to appear official. Regardless, the full trailer should be a grisly treat.
Cheers, GamesRadar.
Katana ZERO is a stylish neo-noir, action-platformer featuring breakneck action and instant-death combat. Slash, dash, and manipulate time to unravel your past in a beautifully brutal acrobatic display.
Katana ZERO is a stylish neo-noir, action-platformer featuring breakneck action and instant-death combat. Slash, dash, and manipulate time to unravel your past in a beautifully brutal acrobatic display.
https://youtu.be/-MvvmPKGEHA
https://store.steampowered.com/app/460950/Katana_ZERO
APE OUT is a wildly intense and colorfully stylized smash ‘em up about primal escape, rhythmic violence, and frenetic jazz. Build up nearly unstoppable momentum and use your captors as both weapons and shields to crush everyone on your procedurally generated path to freedom.
APE OUT is a wildly intense and colorfully stylized smash ‘em up about primal escape, rhythmic violence, and frenetic jazz. Build up nearly unstoppable momentum and use your captors as both weapons and shields to crush everyone on your procedurally generated path to freedom.
https://youtu.be/inL630qzCnI
https://store.steampowered.com/app/447150/APE_OUT/
Today's Deal: Save 75% on the Hotline Miami series !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time
Today's Deal: Save 75% on the Hotline Miami series!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
*Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time
Update: In a tweet , Devolver Digital confirmed that this Steam sale is being held in conjunction with charitable speedrunning organization Games Done Quick. Devolver says they'll donate 10 percent of the sale's revenue to GDQ. GDQ recently kicked off Awesome Games Done Quick 201
Update: In a tweet, Devolver Digital confirmed that this Steam sale is being held in conjunction with charitable speedrunning organization Games Done Quick. Devolver says they'll donate 10 percent of the sale's revenue to GDQ.
GDQ recently kicked off Awesome Games Done Quick 2018, a week-long speedrun marathon dedicated to breaking videogames every way possible and raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Original story:
Publisher Devolver Digital is running a quick Steam sale to ring in the new year. A handful of good indies are on sale through Monday, January 15, including gratuitous violence simulator Hotline Miami and contemplative puzzler The Talos Principle. Here's the full list:
You'll also find some good discounts in GOG's New Year's Resolution sale, which started earlier today and runs through January 15. The first day's 'resolutions' (read: recommendations) are mostly meaty RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and there's a good indie presence thanks to other games like Torchlight and Legend of Grimrock.
The Humble Bundle fall sale is in full swing, and in addition to free copies of Brutal Legend , it's filled with big discounts on great indie games. The entire sale is a goldmine, but publisher Devolver Digital's library is especially rich. Note that some games are on sale throug
The Humble Bundle fall sale is in full swing, and in addition to free copies of Brutal Legend, it's filled with big discounts on great indie games. The entire sale is a goldmine, but publisher Devolver Digital's library is especially rich.
Note that some games are on sale through Tuesday, November 28, but others are only discounted until this Friday, November 24. Here are some highlights for the shorter sale which ends this Friday:
While these games are on sale through Tuesday, November 28:
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 pa
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.
Our friends Terri Vellmann and Doseone have released their incredible, full throttle first-person shooter High Hell today! It's been called Hotline Miami 3D so it might be up your alley - watch the trailer below and give it a shot. If you purchase before November 2 you get their
Our friends Terri Vellmann and Doseone have released their incredible, full throttle first-person shooter High Hell today! It's been called Hotline Miami 3D so it might be up your alley - watch the trailer below and give it a shot. If you purchase before November 2 you get their first game Heavy Bullets for free!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/673000/High_Hell/
https://youtu.be/mcTW8TyKtaM
Also, today is the anniversary of Hotline Miami which was released five years ago today - thanks so much for your love and support from the start! Check out this nice retrospective from Tech Raptor!
https://youtu.be/Hp8qkjljMas
Our friends Terri Vellmann and Doseone have released their incredible, full throttle first-person shooter High Hell today! It's been called Hotline Miami 3D so it might be up your alley - watch the trailer below and give it a shot. If you purchase before November 2 you get their
Our friends Terri Vellmann and Doseone have released their incredible, full throttle first-person shooter High Hell today! It's been called Hotline Miami 3D so it might be up your alley - watch the trailer below and give it a shot. If you purchase before November 2 you get their first game Heavy Bullets for free!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/673000/High_Hell/
https://youtu.be/mcTW8TyKtaM
Also, today is the anniversary of Hotline Miami which was released five years ago today - thanks so much for your love and support from the start! Check out this nice retrospective from Tech Raptor!
https://youtu.be/Hp8qkjljMas
In 2013 French electronic musician Kavinsky released a 13-track album of squelchy synths and triumphant lead lines called OutRun. It reveled in the forgotten sounds of 1980s movie scores, and the Ferrari Testarossa and palm trees on its cover referenced the 1986 arcade game the a
In 2013 French electronic musician Kavinsky released a 13-track album of squelchy synths and triumphant lead lines called OutRun. It reveled in the forgotten sounds of 1980s movie scores, and the Ferrari Testarossa and palm trees on its cover referenced the 1986 arcade game the album took its title from. It’s an impeccably composed image so stylized it doesn't really resemble the game it's named after.
That’s the synthwave ethos: taking elements of a period of '80s excess millennials find irresistibly evocative, and modernizing them so they're just barely recognizable. As Robert Parker (a Swedish producer responsible for albums like Drive Sweat Play) told Time Out, "Synthwave is nostalgia with selective memory loss... [Synthwave artists] don’t really try to imitate the sounds 100 per cent, but rather take out some of the essential parts and put it in a modern context."
Kavinsky's OutRun proved so popular in the synthwave scene that it spawned its own subgenre. Quite how the music relates back to Sega’s 31-year-old racer isn’t clear, and perhaps isn’t important. What’s important is that the music inspired by a racing game went on to inspire a new wave of indie racing games.
Games like Fraoula’s Neon Drive, Denver Productions’ OutDrive, and the ill-fated Power Drive 2000 (Kickstarted in 2015 but without a developer update since February of this year) all seem to agree on the tenets of the genre: angular concept cars screeching along retrofuturist highways through a miasma of purple and pink. Tron's neon lines often appear, as do Blade Runner's cityscapes. It's an unquestionably '80s vision, but the specifics of the decade often aren't in sharp enough focus to be recognizable—least of all the games they’re homaging.
Perhaps synthwave fans couldn’t find satisfaction in revisiting the actual games of the ‘80s, so instead they created a new and imaginary vision of what games like OutRun were. Neon Drive achieves a heightened sense of 'eightiesness' by making the music an essential part of the drive. Rather than pulsing away at the periphery of the experience, the beats in Neon Drive propel the whole world forward, creating a rhythm-action racer in which you’re not so much driving the car as dancing with it—perfect synergy between sound and visuals.
The same could be said of the game that started it all: Hotline Miami. To players of a certain age it’s the kind of gratuitous and dark entity you imagined when your parents talked about violent videogames many years ago. But even at the height of that moral panic the reality was so much tamer than Hotline Miami. Doom’s blood-specked sprites have nothing on Hotline Miami’s eye-gougings or spurting arteries, or its utterly amoral characters.
By setting itself so firmly in the 16-bit era with its visuals, Hotline Miami managed to attach itself to those original gaming boogeymen without playing anything like them. The score multipliers have at least half an eye on arcade gaming admittedly, and the top-down violence owes plenty to the original Grand Theft Auto. Yet Hotline Miami feels completely disconnected from gaming in the '80s or '90s on a mechanical level. Its quick restarts turn it into a hazy, endless dream, something that feels completely modern.
Hotline Miami's soundtrack, however, seems to gel with the pace and attitude of the game perfectly. Those 22 songs from the likes of Perturbator, Jasper Byrne, and Scattle have persistent beats matching your stubborn restarts while their glassy synth pads seem to implicitly reinforce the nihilism of the setting and dialogue. In many ways Hotline Miami is a horrible place to find yourself in, one you only stay in because you’re enjoying the violence so much. And as its creators have frequently pointed out, that was always the point.
Despite the obvious craftsmanship of both game and soundtrack, Hotline Miami was lucky to find the success that it did. Released in 2012, it found an audience who’d seen Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in theaters just a few months prior. With a hyper-stylized period setting, violence depicted with passivity, and a soundtrack full of Kavinsky, College, and Desire, Drive put synthwave in front of a mainstream cinema audience. Its poster, with a typeface inspired by 1983's Risky Business in hot pink contrasted against its dark blues, seems to have set out an indelible vision of that aesthetic.
If Hotline Miami represents the high point for synthwave-influenced games, the following year would see its low point. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon ticked all the boxes of the aesthetic: late '80s typography, that familiar colour palette, and an ironic repurposing of period elements (in this case the voice of Terminator and Aliens actor Michael Biehn). On paper it was primed to rewrite videogaming past like its synthwave-soundtracked brethren and offer the kind of heightened nostalgia hit you can’t get from genuinely old titles, never quite as stylish or ‘of their time’ as you remember.
The reality of Blood Dragon was a thoroughly modern open-world game with retrofuturist elements sellotaped onto it. If you were being unkind, you’d say it was Far Cry 3 with a palette swap squeezed out of Drive’s poster.
Instead of finding harmony between those elements, Blood Dragon pit them against each other. What made Far Cry 3 great was that it perfected a burgeoning frontier of open-world game design—it was an impossible task to ask a game so focused on the to new evoke something historical or nostalgic simply by changing its appearance and getting Hicks from Aliens in to record some gravelly quips.
Blood Dragon might be the first example of a game co-opting the synthwave ethos simply because it was in vogue, but it’s by no means the last. The danger with a genre of gaming and music as narrow and hard to define as this is that its output becomes reductive, simply hitting the recognizable trappings in order to give the 'come hither' finger to a hungry audience, without offering the chance to explore a remixed past that audience is really looking for.
Games under the ‘synthwave’ tag on Itch.io, for example, offer lots of stylish branding, but few seem to expand the retrofuturism concept further than that. 2D RPG Mistlurk is one exception to that rule: in Mistlurk you’re not just driving through the ubiquitous uncaring city, you’re actively trying to investigate and ultimately escape it. There’s an effort made to elaborate on the familiar tenets of the aesthetic, and give them deeper meaning. A meaning that’s underpinned, naturally, by gated snares and John Carpenter movie synths.
Five years after Hotline Miami and six years after Drive, synthwave and indie games still enjoy a symbiotic relationship, and are still responsible for the occasional gem. Last year’s Furi found a new kind of atmosphere and excitement by pairing the aesthetic with incredibly demanding boss battles in a less urban and more fantastical setting. A certain kind of listener will tell you that technically the soundtrack is 'darksynth', but the atmosphere’s very much a part of this broader movement. A steady evolution of it maybe, in which the rules are relaxed a bit.
Where that movement heads next is open to debate. It’s already had its breakthrough indie hit, and it’s already been absorbed into the mainstream. In music industry terms that means it's in trouble. To pick an example from a musical genre that's probably the antithesis of synthwave, we've had the moment where Limp Bizkit's chart success began the downfall of nu-metal. But right now at least, this little corner of gaming and music endures. As time drags us further away from the decade these games hark back to, game designers keep creating more ways to get back to it—or at least a hot pink version of it we can race through at top speed.
Top-down puncher Hotline Miami had brutality and baseball bats, but you know what it didn t have? Teleportation. That is how I imagine most videogames are created. Just one man in a tie who is approached by developers like an oracle and who says: “do X but with Y.” Mr Shifty is a
Top-down puncher Hotline Miami had brutality and baseball bats, but you know what it didn t have? Teleportation.
That is how I imagine most videogames are created. Just one man in a tie who is approached by developers like an oracle and who says: “do X but with Y.” Mr Shifty [official site] is about smashing through crowds of people while using a blink-like teleporting skill to dodge bullets and blows. It s out today and, like its masked mate from the 80s, it s all viewed from above. It looks hectic, but you can see that for yourself in the trailer below.
… [visit site to read more]
The ever-outlandish Devolver Digital has teamed up with The Humble Store this week to give us the aptly named Devolver Digital week —a sale period which sees up to 85 percent off a selection of the publisher's games. Big hitters such as Hotline Miami, its equally brutal and styli
The ever-outlandish Devolver Digital has teamed up with The Humble Store this week to give us the aptly named Devolver Digital week—a sale period which sees up to 85 percent off a selection of the publisher's games.
Big hitters such as Hotline Miami, its equally brutal and stylish sequel Wrong Number, and philosophy puzzler The Talos Principle are all worth a punt if you're yet to play them—going for £1.39, £2.99 and £7.49 (or your regional equivalent) respectively, with 75-80 percent discounts.
Not a Hero and Broforce are another two of my favourites listed, both of which are subject to 75 percent reductions at £2.49 and £2.99 in turn; while the gun-tastic bullet-hell shooter Enter the Gungeon is half price at £5.49.
The "point and click hugventure" Dropsy is another good shout at just £1.74, and, if you're extra tight for cash this week, I'd recommend gamified Tinder-like Reigns at £0.84, or the wonderful Downwell for £0.99.
The Humble Store's Devolver Digital Week will run this week—the full list of discounted Devolver games can be found over here, with five percent of each purchase going to charity as per Humble's standard. As always, let us know your favourite deals in the comments south of here.
Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.
Save 75% on the Hotline Miami series during this week's Midweek Madness*! *Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time
Save 75% on the Hotline Miami series during this week's Midweek Madness*!
*Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time