Hotline Miami will take a violent, retro-flavored trip back to the Magic City of the mid-1980s.
Jonatan Söderström, better known in indie gaming circles as “Cactus,” has revealed his newest project as Hotline Miami, a top-down, blood-soaked action game being developed in collaboration with graphic artist Dennis Wedin. “Dennis Wedin and I have collaborated on some unique projects before but with Hotline Miami we wanted to take our game design to the next level and create an experience that people would think about long after they’ve stopped playing,” Soderstrom said.
Hotline Miami sounds more than a little strange at this early juncture. Set in the “neon-soaked underground of 1980s Miami,” players will find themselves urged to commit acts of great violence by bizarre messages left on their answering machine. It’s not much of a setup, although one would assume that it’s all driven by some dark, twisted power or conspiracy, but on a more viscerally attractive level the game promises to “overflow with raw brutality and skull-crushing close combat,” with 35 unique weapons and 25 masks, “each altering your reality and changing gameplay to bring a fresh level of mayhem to each twisted mission.”
That’s about the extent of what the announcement trailer shows, too: a brief conversation about a maniac in a rubber mask, followed by brain-busting violence set to a groovy backbeat. Hotline Miami is being published by Devolver Digital, better known as the guys who helped resurrect Serious Sam, and will be out “soon” for the PC and Mac, with console versions planned for later release. I’m not generally a fan of the retro form, but this looks like it could be very cool, or at least weird enough to be interesting. To find out more, hit up hotlinemiami.com.
