Here’s the thing about Superhot that you absolutely need to know: it fucking rules.
There’s no real other way to put it. Superhot has the style every piece of art wants, the absurd yet totally fucking rad story every writer wishes they could tell, and the mechanics that every game thinks it has but totally doesn’t. It’s a complete package of totally wrecking your shit for the year. Even as I’m writing this, all I want to do is go back and play more. You know, for research.
It’s a necessary gestalt, too. If you take any component out and stand it apart, it still is exemplary stuff. But you have to smash it all together in this defiant bundle of cool. Starting from the top, there simply is no other game that looks like this. It’s a striking contrast of whites and blacks and reds that make everything juuuust surreal enough to matter. The way enemies don’t just crumple but they fucking shatter with the appropriate accompanying sound effect.
And as you progress through the game, a strange, odd, totally bonkers meta narrative merges that eventually and hilariously collapses in on itself. It feels less like it crashes in under its own weight and more like the developers purposefully poke at the bottom layer of a horse of cards just to watch it all fall. I’m not going to say it’s brilliant (though it totally fucking is), but it’s more like the exactly perfect thing that needed to happen to tie it the whole thing together.
Then there’s the obvious gem in the crown: the gameplay. At every possible moment, you feel under duress. You’re never safe. But with the mechanics at your disposal, you are fully capable of becoming a god. You slice an arm off, snatch the gun out of the dismembered hand, pop off a headshot, throw the gun out into the distance, zip across the map, and catch the gun to keep snapping off kills.
I don’t know how else to say it other than it’s fucking sick. If I were of greater constitution, I would even give up all other pursuits to go play Superhot just one more time. And that makes it the number four game of the year.
