Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

2025-12-19
Hellraiser’s Rubik’s Cube: The Game. It lures you in with dark, lurid gifts of a bumping soundtrack and torrents of bullets and gore but as soon as you start the first level and puzzle your way along the perfect route through a hail of bullets to brutally murder everyone–it’s already too late. Some gimped out albino is telling you “We have such sights to show you” as you run the same level 50 times over because you started it with two bullets off the tail end of the last level. “Two bullets?! There are like fucking 20 guys in this level with automatic weapons! What the fuck do you want me to do?” Pinhead’s laughing his ass off in the back munching on blood-soaked popcorn as I die luring in the last fucking enemy of the level around a door to melee him only to get insta-gibbed by his shotgun at the last second. Hurtling me back to the start yet again.

I think playing the sequel made me realize that in a lot of ways Hotline Miami’s formula is a Puzzle Box. Certainly so in the sequel that endlessly ramps up the difficulty and contrivances with ever more aggressive, tanky, and lethal enemies. Melee, to semi-auto, to auto, to snipers, to tanks that don’t fucking die in one hit like everyone else you bastards. They will die, then you will die, so on and so on until you crack the level design puzzle. I know there’s more masks and characters and some level of creativity that could be added to levels but to me it just felt like you did it the right way or you died over and over and over again. Or you cheesed everyone by luring them to a doorway and cracking ‘em with a bat like Joaquim Phoenix at the end of Signs. Swing away!

All of that is to say it rules but it’s also frustrating. Perhaps not approaching Hellraiser soul-rending levels of pain but certainly on the same wavelength. Oh and the story? Just like Hellraiser I couldn’t fucking tell you. It’s been 3 years and I must have found whatever cynical depths it was trying to plumb about humanity's inherent violence and nihilism to be so much buzzing in my ear that it has faded since then. But hey, you wouldn’t watch a Hellraiser movie for the plot would you, you sick freak!

???2022
Incredibly fun game but excruciatingly difficult. Enemies are so quick to react and there are so many of them with increasing varieties that counter your strategies at every step that the game ends up feeling like a series of puzzles. Each level is a puzzle where you try to find the perfect path to take, the perfect series of weapons to equip yourself, the perfect tactics. And while it frustrated me to no end at times I also had a ton of fun trying to master it.

There are however some caveats. Some levels constrain you to a single weapon with ammo you have to pick up from little bins that are--of course-- in hard to reach places. You're often forced to play peekaboo with enemies to lure them into rooms and melee them for an instant kill. The "tank" enemies that take multiple hits before dying realllllly frustrate me more than add an interesting wrinkle to the gameplay as they're no doubt added to do.

One final note: the music is bangin'.