Hotline Miami is a 2D top-down action video game by Dennaton Games, a team composed of Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, who had previously collaborated on Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf. The game is being published by Devolver Digital and was released on 23 October 2012 for Windows. The game has been described by the developer as a "top down fuck'em up"[citation needed], blending top down perspective with stealth, extreme violence and surreal storytelling, along with a soundtrack and visuals influenced by 1980s culture. The game itself was heavily influenced by Nicolas Winding Refn's neo-noir crime drama film Drive,the director is specifically thanked in the credits.
Hotline Miami is divided into several chapters, each of which is further broken down into several stages. At the start of each chapter, you are asked to select an animal mask to wear, each of which provides unique advantages or handicaps. In each stage, you navigate a building from a top-down perspective, and your goal is almost always to kill every opponent you come across. Occasionally you must also defeat a boss at the end of the chapter or find key items as you explore, but most levels are very straightforward. You have access to a wide variety of melee, thrown, and ranged weapons, and will need to handle challenges through either stealthy tactics or overwhelming force as you progress. Your character is no more resilient than your enemies, however, so any mistake is usually fatal. On top of that, although enemies always start each stage in the same location, their AI varies slightly, causing them to occasionally move unpredictably and making it difficult to plan a perfect approach. To make up for this, the game allows you restart each stage the moment you die, allowing you quickly fine-tune your approach over several attempts. As the game ranks your performance at the end of each stage, giving you more points and unlocking more masks and weapons for shrewd and polished gameplay, a successful run through a stage is usually fast, efficient, and uses a wide variety of weapons.
