I don’t get Hotline Miami 2.  
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Like I, I don’t! I don’t know what it’s doing. It is a confounding game to me. And this is not my usual take, I know. I'm not
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an “ending...explained!” channel, but  I usually say, “hey, here’s a game,   this is how it uses this technique to reveal that  theme, which makes us think about these other  
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things.” And other times, I will play a game,  think “I liked that!” and get on with my life.  
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Not all games require essays. Sometimes I  can just play something and move on.  
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That’s not the case with Hotline Miami  2. Hotline Miami 2 has so much going on,   so many bizarre choices and weird digressions,  that it seems absolutely made for someone like  
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me to just swim around in and find the central  ethos. I should submerge myself in Hotline Miami  
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2 for a month straight, surface, and with a  deep breath, say “It’s about...capitalism!  
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Or addiction! Or the military industrial  complex!” and all the comments go “yes,  
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thank you, very wise Mr. Geller, so smart, does  anyone else think his beard looks painted on.”  
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And I just- I dunno! I just don’t have it. I don’t  have the answer. Why do I care about Hotline Miami  
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2? Let’s start at the beginning, I guess. So Hotline Miami 1 was released in October 2012  
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for PC, and then a little later for various  other consoles. It was, to put it lightly,   a hit. 2012 wasn’t an era without indie games  by any means, but the really successful ones  
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were still generally outliers. So for Hotline  Miami, a game made basically by two people,  
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to release, get perfect scores from several  outlets and sell hundreds of thousands of   copies within a couple months? That was a  story. That was a notable level of prestige  
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for a game with this small of a development  team. And when you learn what the game is,  
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that success gets even more impressive. Hotline Miami doesn’t even get past the   title screen before launching an assault on the  senses. Strobing colors, near-unreadable font, an  
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endless procession of palm trees and the blaring  distorted notes of “Horse Steppin” by Sun Araw.  
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This is not what most game  start screens look like. And   it doesn’t get more gentle from here on out. There are, I think, three main components of  
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Hotline Miami gameplay. The first is dialogue,  which basically doubles as the game’s cutscenes.  
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Characters display their almost-always-grotesque  portrait on the right side of the screen,  
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while dialogue from them scrolls underneath. The  player’s main protagonist, a guy named Jacket,  
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basically never responds during any of this. There  are just characters that talk at you as you click  
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through their dialogue. The second component of  gameplay is kinda ambient exploration sections,  
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though “exploration” is maybe a bit too open.  Before missions, you can briefly wander your  
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apartment before going to the phone, getting a  voicemail, and setting off on a mission proper.   After your mission, you often stop in  a video store or bar or gas station,  
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talk to the attendant- a character named  Beard- and then go pick up a vhs/drink/snack.  
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Neither of those two are really the focus of the  game, of course. That would be the third section:  
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HORRIBLE, INCREDIBLE, UNMITIGATED VIOLENCE.  
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The brunt of your time playing Hotline Miami  will be spent in a series of rooms with a bunch   of goons, bashing the absolute life out  of each other. It is a remarkably simple,  
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and remarkably enthralling system. You  can punch people, knock them to the floor,   and then punch them again until they don’t  get up. They often have melee weapons,  
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which you can use to merc someone before they  even hit the ground. They sometimes have guns,  
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which are even better at murder, but have limited  ammo and also attract the attention of everyone   in proximity. One shot from almost anything at  any time will kill you, and the enemies are fast,  
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and more often than not they will hit you before  you hit them. Levels are a brutal mix of memory  
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and reactivity, moving between rooms and hallways  as quickly as you can, cycling through weapons,  
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and inflicting general atrocities on dudes.  You will restart many, many times, and it’s  
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through this mechanical repetition that the game  can play what I think of as its “Big Trick.”  
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During the level, lights flash, lives begin  and end within fractions of seconds, and the   soundtrack goes harder than should be legal. Every  single part is designed to drive you forward,  
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towards violence and repetition and stringing  together the biggest combo of mobsters you can.  
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Then, the second you’ve killed the last guy in  the level, everything stops, the music goes quiet,  
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high score awards stop popping up. You walk back  through the level to the exit, and as you do,  
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walk past the brutalized bodies of all the  folks you just had such a good time killing.  
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It’s very, and I use this term lovingly, early  2010s thought-provoking. “Is the violence that we  
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love to do in video games actually...bad?” Maybe  the most famous line of the game, one that’s made  
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it into countless fan arts and forum signatures,  is posed by an enigmatic uhh, man in a chicken  
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mask. “Do you like hurting other people?” And we  think back to the chemically perfect combination  
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of music, pacing, and challenge of those murder  sprees and think “yeah, I did really enjoy that,  
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oh noooooo what if I’m as unquestioning of  the drive to murder as Jacket?” This is also,  
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again I say this lovingly, the take you’ll find  on most critical analyses of Hotline Miami.  
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The actual “plot” of the game, I  think, purposely sidelines itself.   With a little critical thought, you can figure  out “oh yeah, these weird voicemails that Jacket  
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gets are actually directions on where to go  to murder people.” When the phone tells you   to go pick up a load of laundry and be discrete  about it, it’s not talking about laundry.  
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You can figure out that the people he’s killing  are largely russian mobsters, you can even put   together all the puzzle pieces scattered through  the levels to find out that all of this has  
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been orchestrated by a bizarre organization  called “50 Blessings” that’s determined to  
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stop a Russian-American alliance. But, and this  is going to be something I repeat, I don’t think  
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the game actually intends for you to figure all  this out. At least not on the first playthrough.  
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The experience of Hotline Miami isn’t one of  international intrigue and crime-web dynamics,  
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it’s playing a guy who kills joyfully  and unquestioningly over and over.  
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I think our main takeaway from Hotline Miami is  supposed to be introspection on why we enjoy these  
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things so much. The far more likely end to the  game, without all the puzzle pieces put together,  
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is the members of 50 Blessings laughing at you  for asking the purpose and saying, paraphrased,  
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“you thought there was a point  to this? This was a game you   goddamn psycho.” This is perfectly in line  with the game’s “trick” of the music stopping  
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and the monotony of everything except the  violence. Hotline Miami, read on a wiki,  
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might be the story of a mob war fought  by unwitting actors in an attempt to   affect foreign policy, but the very real played  experience of the game has little to do with that.  
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To be clear, I don’t think the “plot plot” is  done poorly, I think those hidden revelations  
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add texture and commentary to the game’s focus on  mindless violence. But, because of how it’s told,  
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and how it will be experienced, I think it’s a  very different question to ask “what’s the plot of  
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Hotline Miami” vs “what is this game about?” The cultural legacy of Hotline Miami, just like  
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the legacy of one of its chief inspirations, the  movie Drive, is one of imagery and mood. It’s hard  
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for me to not ascribe some of the resurgence  of synthwave and outrun as musical genres, or  
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the neon violence look that’s come to  define a certain genre of movie, or the   general form that 80s nostalgia has taken, to  Hotline Miami. It is, while not the only factor  
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in any of those movements, a massively influential  piece of work. I mean, I literally don’t even know  
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how to figure out how many times songs on the  soundtrack have been listened to but I think   it’s fair to say there are dozens of millions  of people who have listened to something like  
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“Hydrogen” by M.O.O.N. without ever knowing that  it’s famous because of an indie video game.  
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And Hotline Miami also has a major  hand in our current gaming landscape,   because as well as all the titles that  took direct inspiration from its gameplay,  
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Hotline Miami sold enough copies and turned  enough heads to basically create the game  
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publisher Devolver- or at least, boost it to the  level of prominence we’re familiar with today.  
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You can thank Hotline Miami for those performance  press conferences that now happen every year. The  
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point of all this is that Hotline Miami was a  big f*cking deal, and I can only imagine that  
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the developers went into the second with a blank  check but a massive list of expectations.  
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Number 1 of these expectations, as I’ve heard the  devs echo in interviews, is how can you even make  
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a sequel? When the first game concludes with such  a clear message, how do you follow that up?  
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Well. In the first scene of Hotline Miami 2,   released March of 2015, you play as a man in a pig  mask who easily fights his way through a house,  
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killing everyone- except a woman upstairs  who you appear to sexually assault.  
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But then, a switch is flipped, the scene is  revealed to be a film set, and you, the woman,  
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and all the people killed are actors. Okay. The scene was controversial enough that there  
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were stories about it before release, and the  game includes an option to skip it. I will say,  
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of the many incredibly graphic things in this  game, that scene is not one of them- it’s quick,  
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obscured, and is almost immediately subverted.  In fact, it’s so quick and so easily skipped  
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that it kind of begs the question: why  is this in here in the first place?  
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I’m not saying that games shouldn’t try to  approach these topics or it’s impossible   to depict them well, I’m saying I don’t know what  this is doing here. Why does this game start with  
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actors acting out a sexual assault that’s never  remarked on again? We learn later that the movie  
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being filmed here is a sort of grindhouse version  of the events of the first game, but nothing like  
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this was present in the first game. I have two guesses of the scene’s purpose:  
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One is it’s just designed to shock. Most players  of the first game will already be familiar with  
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its hyperviolence- shotgun blasts and curb stomps  just wouldn’t be as novel this time around,  
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so its upending audience expectations with  a new, even more taboo sort of violence.  
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I don’t want this to be the case. The first  game’s forced introspection on violence   worked because hitting and shooting people is  such a common language for games. This scene  
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is not that; if it’s purpose is only shock, it’s  cheap writing, exploitative. If its purpose is  
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only shock, the game has nothing to say  about sexual assault at all, other than   “ahh, didn’t expect that, did ya?”  
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My second guess is maybe it’s a commentary on how  culture distorts and sexualizes violence against  
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women. Even though nothing like this was present  in the events of Hotline Miami 1, which this movie  
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is theoretically based on, it’s added in this  scene because the writers or executives of this  
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fictional film thought it needed sex-ing up. Just  after the lights come up and you see the cameras,  
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the director tells you to act more tough and the  woman to act more “girly.” That is...something.  
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I still don’t think this read is quite  enough to justify the scene’s presence,   but that is a topic with a lot of thematic weight  that could be explored and expanded on and…  
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Here’s the thing. It’s not. At least I don’t  think it is. Hotline Miami 2 leaves this scene as  
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quickly as it was introduced, and seems to leave  any exploration of that topic behind as well. But  
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maybe it doesn’t? Maybe there is actually  a deep cohesion between this scene and the  
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events of the rest of the game. And this is what  I keep coming back to when thinking and writing  
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about this thing: am I just not smart enough to  get what it’s doing? Am I just missing things?  
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Because Hotline Miami 2 is a lot of things, but it  is absolutely not thoughtless and it’s not lazy.  
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There’s a lot going on here. An almost  overwhelming amount. Let’s break it down.  
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In the first game, we have two protagonists,  Jacket and another guy named Biker. They do  
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things in basically the same timeframe  as each other and in the same location,   and that’s the whole game. In the second, we have almost TEN protagonists,  
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more if you count that some are groups of people  and you can play as anyone in those groups.  
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Many of them are actually named, unlike the  first game, but many of them still aren’t,   and it can be seriously difficult to just  remember who is who. You’ve got characters  
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named things like “Manny Pardo” or “Martin  Brown” doing things alongside characters like  
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“the son” or “the henchman.” And if  this was the only added complexity,   that might be enough, but of course the game  isn’t chronological either. Hotline Miami 2 is,  
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this is directly from the wiki, a “sequel,  a sidequel, and a prequel,” I mean?  
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It’s fine, for games to do this sort of  thing, of course. Another indie classic,   30 Flights of Loving, introduces characters  and different timelines in rapid succession,  
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and that one doesn’t even have dialogue! If a  game wants its story to be a jigsaw puzzle that  
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the player needs to assemble, that’s fine! But  it’s here that I run into that distinction I  
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posed earlier. I can tell you what Hotline Miami  2’s plot is. I have solved that particular puzzle.  
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I still can’t tell you what it’s about. What’s the plot? It’s- jesus christ, okay. So  
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as the wiki says, there are three different  timelines, but each timeline is broken into   many different chunks. So one of the sequel chunks  follows that movie actor who you play as in that  
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first, controversial scene, who’s been a pretty  chill actor but is now using the movie as license  
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to indulge darker, more violent urges, He lives  out several sequences which straddle the line   between dreamlike and fantasy, including one where  he’s on a talkshow and speaks about how he loves  
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being given permission to do violence. He fights  through several levels which feel very real,   only to be revealed to be film sets, but in  the last one the woman he previously was in  
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the assault scene with shoots him, the culmination  of the movie. As it turns out, she accidentally   shot him for real- the gun had live ammo. But it also follows a group called “the fans”  
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that are literally fans of the events of the  first game, and want to emulate Jacket’s actions,   but they don’t have anyone calling or leaving  them messages. So they just mask up and go and  
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kill random groups of drug users and mobsters and  stuff, and they keep doing it even after some of   the members of the group express reservations,  and at the end of their storyline they go try and  
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take over a base owned by the russian  mob, and they’re all killed.   There’s the mob itself, which is a whole f*cking  can of worms. The first interaction we have with  
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them is when you’re playing a henchman, who  the mob boss keeps ordering to go fight the   Colombians, who have a rival and more dominant  gang. The henchman wants out and finds a huge  
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stache of money at one of his gang raids, and  he takes it to escape with his girlfriend, but   his girlfriend takes the money and runs without  him. He returns to the mafia and sinks into a  
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drug-fueled depression. The fans, before they’re  all killed, find him and kill him horribly.   There’s Evan Wright, who’s writing a book about  the events of Hotline Miami, and interviews  
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several of the other characters. He talks to Manny  Pardo, a cop who knows a lot about Jacket. Johnson   is also about as homicidal as cops come, and  uses his status to frequently kill dozens of  
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people at a time before flashing his badge to  get away with it. Towards the end of the game,   he starts panicking that people are going to align  him with the miami mutilator, a serial killer he’s  
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investigating, and refuses to go into work. There’s “the son,” a son of the russian mob boss   from the first game, who orders the  henchman around attempting to fight  
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the more powerful colombian gang. After the  Henchman’s death, he goes out and starts   slaughtering them himself. At his end, he  takes so many drugs that he fully wigs out,  
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kills a bunch of his own men, fights some probably  hallucinated monsters, and jumps off the roof.  
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In the “Sidequel,” a section that takes  place at the same time as Hotline Miami,   there’s a character named Richter who was  actually in the first game, and shot Jacket,  
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and here we find out that he has a sick mom  and also was getting death threats from the   50 Blessings group from the first game,  and there’s also a character named Jake  
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who’s a white nationalist who is ALSO  getting messages from 50 Blessings,   but figures out who they are and loves  it and wants to get more into it but is   captured and killed by either 50 blessings or  the russians he’s supposed to be killing.  
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Finally, the prequel is entirely played  from the perspective of The Soldier,   who is stationed in Hawaii of all places, fighting  soviet bases in increasingly suicidal missions.  
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The Soldier is stationed there with a platoon  of people, many of whom die. Their colonel also   kinda loses his mind and wears a leopard head on  his skull. Oh, and one of the platoon is Jacket  
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from the first game, and the soldier you’re  playing as is Beard from the first game.  
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Finally for real, in the game’s outro, we hear  a news report that members of 50 blessings have   taken over some international conference and  killed both the US and Russian presidents,  
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and the world has been pushed into nuclear war,   and then we watch literally every character  still living in the game get nuked.  
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See, I told you. I know the plot.  I’m not confused by the actual  
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beat-by-beat of events that happen here. And  in that truncated version of a plot summary,  
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there are some things that probably caught your  attention, and they catch mine too because they’re   really interesting. Actually, almost EVERY  individual beat is really interesting.  
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For example, you’ve got this guy named Jake who  basically recreates the events of the first game,  
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but instead of doing it through a dissociative  nihilism that reflects the players attitudes  
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toward violence, Jake is doing it because of a  seething ultranationalism. When he puts together  
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that the the mysterious phone calls he’s getting  are from an underground group that wants him to   kill Russians, he’s thrilled- being included  in the murder gives him purpose, makes him  
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feel included in something. He’s clearly wanted  this for years. The game calls attention to his  
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love of the Confederate flag not once but twice,  highlighting a link between the neo-confederacy  
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and violence that, ya know, AIN’T WRONG. But this theme feels like it starts and ends  
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with Jake, whose self-contained storyline  ends about halfway through the game. I could  
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say that this plotline parallels a general theme  of characters looking for an excuse for violence,  
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and this is partially true- the group of fans  obsessed with Jacket are looking for any reason   to go kill folks, and the actor in the movie talks  about using it to indulge his violent impulses.  
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But there are far more characters that dominate  larger portions of the story that don’t follow   this arc at all, and moreso, if this is  intentional, I don’t know what the game  
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has to say about it. Because none of these feel  confrontational about the violence like the first  
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game does- Hotline Miami 2 does the “music stops,  exit the level” thing just like the first game,  
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but it’s expected now, not a subversion. And the fans, for example, ARE confrontational,  
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but about a completely different topic- that is,  audience expectations for the developers of a hit  
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indie game. The fans are an intentionally hollow  recreation of the first’s theme, violence for  
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the sake of violence, even unlocking new masks and  new abilities in a similar fashion to the original  
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Hotline Miami. They’re also all killed relatively  early on. Aha! Maybe that’s the Hotline Miami  
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2 killing off the expectations of the first game  and going forward with something new? I guess? But  
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some of the most similar levels to the original  game, mechanically and thematically, happen after  
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the death of “The fans,” so I don’t think their  killing off can be so neatly deconstructed.  
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There’s also the problem of how this story is  communicated. As I talked about with the first  
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game, Hotline Miami 2 also has 3 main modes  of interaction- the talking, the non-violent  
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wandering, and the violence. And just like the  first game, those two sections that aren’t bashing  
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people’s teeth out feel intentionally flat. In the  first game, I think you’re supposed to reach the  
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point where you’re skipping through the answering  machine messages to get to the fun killing again,  
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mirroring the protagonist’s detachment from  the other things happening in his life.  
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Even the screen setup enforces this- the  picture of who’s talking is on the right,   but the dialogue is at the bottom left, meaning  it’s actually easy to ignore who is talking and  
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just briefly scan through what’s being said. The dialogue setup is completely unchanged in 2,  
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but the difference is there’s massively more  dialogue and the scenes are more important to  
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understanding what’s going on. Conversations  happen between several different characters at  
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once and important plot points are only hinted at.  It’s a style that necessitates close reading. But  
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the dialogue still feels very much like a stopgap  between the actual gameplay because killing stuff  
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is still the meat of the game! And so you’re  caught between the need to pay really careful  
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attention to who’s talking and what’s being  said and when this conversation is taking place,  
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and the want to just get through all of it  because that’s not really why you’re here!  
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That tension worked beautifully  in the original game, but that’s   not- the goals aren’t the same in Hotline Miami  2, and so that tension feels misplaced. I really  
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hope my body of work shows that I’m not someone  who wants or needs to be spoonfed plot points,  
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but in this case it just feels like there’s  a fundamental disconnect between, again,   the written plot and what the game is about. The most infamous part of the game,  
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but also I think the most interesting, are the  prequel levels, a linear sequence of military  
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missions. I say infamous because these  levels are unbelievably hard. They’re-  
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-actually, sorry, I have to talk about the  difficulty for a minute. There’s an interview   where one of the devs says that the difficulty  is going to be about the same as the first game.  
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This isn’t true! It’s a lie. It’s just not true.  Hotline Miami 2 is so much f*cking harder than  
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the first game, it’s not even a comparison. It’s  such a ludicrous statement I halfway wonder if he  
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was making a joke here. Hotline Miami 2 is cruel.  It’s downright unfair. Enemies react faster than  
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the first game, spot you from further away, pounce  on you from around corners. The levels themselves   are massive and full of windows, meaning that the  sightlines between you and a bad guy’s muzzle are  
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near-limitless. Gun combat is required far more  than the first game but many of the guns are   WEAKER than in the first game. In this level a guy  sees you immediately and will literally kill you  
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while you’re still offscreen in the first  second of gameplay. There are additions,  
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like the trailer-touted “dual wielding,” that are  almost completely useless because I cannot imagine  
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a single situation in the game in which spraying  and praying in two directions at once would do   anything except get you killed. I do not  get mad at games often, and Hotline Miami  
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2’s difficulty pisses me off. I frequently  return to the first game simply because it’s  
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fun to play. Whenever I try to do that with the  second, I feel like it punishes me for it.  
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Okay. Back to the prequel. So there are these  series of missions where you’re playing as “The   Soldier,” an actual member of the US Military,  and you’re just sent out into the jungle,  
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over and over. There’s a funny thing  that happened with these levels actually,   which is that I was talking about them  with friends and we all referred to them as  
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“oh yeah, those levels in Vietnam.”  You’re even offered an unlockable   flamethrower while playing through. But they’re  not in Vietnam. They are, absurdly, in Hawaii.  
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You’re a troop and you’re sent out, over and over,  to kill cold war soviets hiding out in Hawaii.  
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And these are some of the hardest missions in  the entire game. For one, you can’t pick up  
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enemy weapons- you have one gun, and one knife,  and when you run out of ammo, you need to find  
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more from ammo crates sporadically spread around  the level, but the odds of that actually happening   vs the odds of you getting shot in the back by an  enemy you never saw are- you don’t want to roll  
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those dice. It’s just brutal level after brutal  level. But, in this part of the game specifically,  
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the level of difficulty feels like it serves  a purpose. These levels are fascinating.  
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The way you’re forced to play is much more  surgical, risk-averse. You can’t hold down the  
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trigger because you can’t afford the ammo.  You can’t combo enemies together because you   have to hide and peek around corners and  wait for patrol patterns to line up just  
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right. And the result of this is you’re forced  into a gameplay style that is more...military.  
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Because of how radically different this  is, it feels like one of the only times   that the game is actually able to interrogate  the player in the same way as the first game.  
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Is this murder more acceptable, maybe? Because  you’re not in public spaces, and you’re acting  
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with more consideration and you’ve been told  by the government to kill all these people?  
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This is a section in which the gameplay feels  about something, in the same way the first one  
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is about interrogating the player’s enjoyment  of violence. This is storytelling and a point  
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made through gameplay, and although the  gameplay is often maddeningly difficult,  
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I feel like it makes sense! In this section, I  understand what the game is trying to communicate  
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and I think it does it fairly well! And although  the problems with the dialogue presentation are   still present here, if you can look past that,  there’s some really good stuff going on.  
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So this section is a “prequel” because  it takes place before the first game,   obviously. But the link between the events of the  two games is surprisingly nuanced. The soldier  
26:52
that you’re playing as is actually “beard”  from the first game, the guy who was always at   the shops you stopped at after each level. And  another NPC, one of the only other troops that  
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survives all the missions in Hawaii is Jacket,  aka the main character from Hotline Miami 1!  
27:09
Prequels often face the problem of overexplaining  things that didn’t need to be explained,  
27:15
adding unnecessary detail and backstory, but  I think this, showing past military service,  
27:21
is actually an incredibly effective plot point.  Jacket’s entire vibe in the first game was a shell  
27:26
of a character, one who took direction seemingly  without thinking and killed without provocation.  
27:32
The idea of putting that in context  of his past military service,   giving him history as something  very much like a Vietnam vet...I  
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mean it’s not the most original plot  point in the world, but it absolutely   works. The language in this section makes that  link even more evident; the military uses the  
27:50
same communication style as the voicemails  from the first game- obviously coded terms,  
27:56
referring to “guests” and “cleaning suites,”  rather than directly addressing their killings.  
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There’s even stuff that seems to have been part of  a long-term plan. At the end of Jacket’s plotline  
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in Hotline Miami 1, he stands on a balcony  and lets a polaroid slip from between his  
28:15
fingers into the wind, an enigmatic action that  we don’t have any context for. In the second game,  
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during the Hawaii missions, a reporter takes a  picture of Jacket and Beard together, and Beard  
28:27
gives that picture to Jacket after the final  level of this section. So the photograph that   Jacket throws off the balcony was that photograph,  which means he had held onto it for all that time,  
28:38
so it’s clearly a way to indicate that he’s  letting go of his past and maybe even letting go  
28:43
of player expectations. And it also means that- -Well, that Beard has actually been dead the  
28:51
entire first game because he was killed in the  prequel by a NUCLEAR BOMB. Ohhhhh god. I said  
28:58
that everyone in this game dies at the end because  of a nuclear bomb, right? Did I mention that?  
29:09
I was talking with a friend about Hotline Miami 2,  who said that if you saw any single scene in the  
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game, you’d be like “wow this is doing something  really cool and specific, can’t wait to see where  
29:20
it goes with this,” and then it just...doesn’t.  You might think, with how elegantly that prequel  
29:26
section dovetails into the first game, that  those would be the final levels. But they’re not.  
29:32
No, you go back to the sequel timeline  and you play more as the mob boss   who takes a whole bunch of drugs and kills his own  men and hallucinates a two-headed duck dragon who  
29:42
you behead with a fire ax and then walk out over  a rainbow bridge which probably just means you  
29:47
jump off the building, and look that’s  f*cking cool, like that’s a rad final level,  
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but what is it doing here? What does it mean?  I just...I don’t know man. I don’t know.  
30:11
Hey it’s future editor Jacob here, who   hasn’t been able to sleep for weeks because  I keep thinking about Hotline Miami 2.  
30:20
I think I gave this last level too little credit.  Something that’s obvious in retrospect but didn’t  
30:26
occur to me on my many playthroughs is that this  is the reverse perspective on The Fans’ last  
30:33
level. The mob boss here takes a bunch of drugs  and then hallucinates killing monstrous animals;  
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a bear, a lion, a duck-dragon. These are,  of course, the masks worn by The Fans,  
30:45
who were assaulting this place at the same time.  SO, if we take The Fans as a representation of,  
30:52
you know, the fans of Hotline Miami 1, it’s fairly  poignant to show them mutated and monstrous and  
30:58
then murder them, especially when you consider  that the mob boss you’re playing as is the son  
31:03
of the final boss of the first game. Does this  make the game more cohesive? Well...no….f*ck!  
31:14
Also, while I’m here in the future, in the  time between filming and editing this video,   a channel named Ovandal released a video that  attempts to untangle things in the same way  
31:23
I have here, and comes away with a much more  positive conclusion. It’s a really good video,  
31:29
and I’ll link it below. Multiple perspectives! Are  good! I am so happy for people who love this game!  
31:38
Anyway, back to it.  
31:48
If I was reviewing Hotline Miami 2, I’d say that  I felt that it was less than the sum of its parts,  
31:54
a bunch of intriguing ideas without the  thematic glue to hold them all together.   But I’m not reviewing Hotline Miami  2. I just want to understand it.  
32:04
There are lots of games that are nonsense because  they just didn’t have the time or budget to pull   it together. There are lots of other games with  mountains of content that, even with all the time  
32:14
and money in the world, fail to pursue meaningful  ideas or wrestle with challenging topics.  
32:20
This? This isn’t either of those! There was so  much effort put into this game, and I can feel  
32:26
all of it and even though I can’t agree with every  decision here, I respect it so goddamn much!  
32:35
This game kind of defies my critical eye  because yes, all criticism is subjective,  
32:40
and yes, the only experience we can definitively  speak from is our own, and no, my subjective,  
32:45
personal experience of this game is not something  that forms into any kind of broader whole.  
32:52
But I can’t bring myself to say that it’s a  bad game. I think it deserves more credit than  
32:57
that. And while I don’t think the attitudes  of developers should factor into the critical   analysis of a game, for what it’s worth, they seem  to have made exactly the game they want to.  
33:10
At the end, we see every surviving character in  a slice-of-life scene that lasts only seconds  
33:17
before they’re each wiped out by a nuclear  blast. It feels, after so much plot and so  
33:23
many characters and such intricate a web of  connections, like a return to the nihilism  
33:29
of the first game. Everyone’s weird little  details and anachronisms don’t matter any more.  
33:35
And then, a flash of static, a  roar of synth, and a title screen   for “Hotline Miami 3” comes up for just a moment,  bleak futurism in front of an apocalyptic skyline.  
33:49
And then it rewinds back to the main menu.  It’s a flash of punk brilliance, reflecting  
33:54
another thing the devs have said over and over  again. There will never be a Hotline Miami 3.  
34:02
Like it or not, understand it or  don’t, this is all you get.  
34:23
This video was sponsored by  CuriosityStream and Nebula.   You know, on YouTube, there are about a  thousand things you need to work around.  
34:32
For instance, talking about the first scene  of Hotline Miami 2 has probably dropped the ad   revenue on this video to almost nothing. I talked  about how rad the music in both these games is,  
34:43
but there are many songs from the soundtrack I  can’t include at all because they’ll cause the   video to get copyright claimed. I could continue  complaining, but my point is all that makes the  
34:54
goodness of Nebula stand out even more. Nebula is a streaming network created and owned  
35:00
by people like me, writers and video people who  want to fix the downsides of this gig. Revenue  
35:06
isn’t based on the “cleanness” of the topic, we  can use media examples with the knowledge that   we’re protected from improper copyright claims,  and there are no ads! In fact, instead of this  
35:17
sponsor, on nebula I’m running down my favorite  Hotline Miami 2 songs, just for kicks.  
35:23
You can get Nebula for an entire year  for less than $15 by clicking on the  
35:37
link in the description, and that’s only  half the deal because, along with Nebula,   you also get access to CuriosityStream! You might  not think that a site with tons of documentary and  
35:47
non-fiction titles is The Ultimate Chill Spot,  but I’m here to tell you that’s exactly what   it is. As soon as I’m done with this, I’m gonna  keep watching this thing about deep sea vertical  
35:58
migrations and man lemme tell you, the vibes are  so much more chill than...whatever this is.  
36:05
Look, this video’s too long already, but if you  wanna hear me list some of my favorite songs from   this confounding game AND get a year to Nebula  AND CuriosityStream, just follow that link.
36:18
And I'll...you'll see me later. 

analyze the actual political view of the writer separate from the politics of the content that the writer talks about. then put on a political compass, return 1 if the political view is extreme alt left and 5 for extreme alt right