Rating: B
Superhot has got style. If you were to take the minimalistic washed-out aesthetic of Mirror’s Edge, turn all of the enemies into red glass, and add a pinch of the time manipulation from Braid, then you would get something resembling Superhot. It is less than three hours long, but as an action game it is fantastic.
Superhot consists of a series of levels in which your only goal is to kill everyone. The developers’ aim when making Superhot was to recreate the feeling of such ridiculous bullet-time action movies as The Matrix or Wanted, and they accomplish this by having a central game mechanic of slow-mo time manipulation. Time only ever progresses when you are moving; if you walk, look around, snatch a weapon, or attack an enemy, time will roll a few milliseconds forward. This makes Superhot half first-person shooter and half puzzle game, with the player constantly trying to figure out in which is the best direction to move another half inch before the bullet rain starts. There is something intensely satisfying about dodging individual bullets, cutting an enemy in half with a katana, hurling it at another like a javelin, punching a third in the face, grabbing their shotgun before it hits the ground and then blasting their head to pieces at point blank range before the victorious words “SUPER. HOT.” flash onto the screen. This is Superhot’s primary appeal, and it is stunning.
While the gameplay alone makes Superhot worthy of your attention, its narrative structure is interesting if not satisfying. You play as a person sitting at an old DOS-based computer, playing a game called superhot.exe. Har har har, how very meta. Occasionally, you are booted out of the slow-motion fun to chat about the game with an in-game friend, whose identity you never discover, and superhot.exe eventually appears to start working against you in an attempt to steal your identity. The story is essentially abstract, but it contains some genuinely clever moments: in one, the game taunts you by showing you your in-game self while refusing to let you quit, and in another, you must quit the game and restart it in order to anger the program into letting you progress.
The absolute weakest point of the game is not the story or the gameplay in isolation, but where the two try to intersect. It’s been a long time since I played a game in which the plot and gameplay were so flimsily sewn together. The chat conversations are conspiratorial, glitch-filled and genuinely unnerving at places, and the fear that a computer program might steal your consciousness is an idea that could be worked into a very good story. The gameplay, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the story at all. They are utterly disconnected from each other. As it stands, the plot just gets in the way of the action, and offsets the game’s otherwise fantastic style.
What is more of a joke is Superhot’s attempt to market itself. The game assigns to the player the task of recommending it to friends with the phrase “It’s the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years”. Superhot is clever, but it’s too much of a one-off idea. I don’t think much can be done with its gameplay apart from look cool at face value. Yes, the self-promotion ties into the story, but as I said before, the story has nothing to do with the gameplay, the best thing about the game. Also, the current price of Superhot is around $35-50. That is an exorbitant price for a game that you will likely finish in a single session. I would be doing the publishers’ job for them by essentially lying to my friends. I wouldn’t have a problem with this form of promotion if the game were better; by the same token, if the game were better, it wouldn’t need to tell its players to promote it in order to sell well. This strikes me as lazy marketing.
Is Superhot worth playing? Absolutely. Is it worth buying right now, at full price? Good god, no. Superhot has enough going for it just on its merit of being a unique and fun puzzle-shooter. If you know someone who has it, try it out; this is a game that knows exactly how cool it is, and it will make you feel like a badass.