Hotline Miami is another one of those games that I just don’t understand how it got popular. Only one enemy type, and level design consists solely of floor, wall, and door, so the only way the game can add difficulty is by having more enemies and making them inconsistent. One of the loading hints says that the enemies are predictable, but this wasn’t the case in my experience. Firing a gun is supposed to draw their attention, but while sometimes they’d come from across the screen, quite a few rooms away, other times they’d keep doing their rounds right on the other side of the wall. Furthermore, sometimes I could barge into a room and kill all the enemies there without them so much as lifting a finger, while other times I’d suddenly get shot by an enemy that was facing the other way on the other side of the screen (or even OFF-SCREEN!). By the way, attacks are instantaneous, so you can’t dodge or react to anything. I even made it to the first boss, but it has the exact same AI as the rest of the enemies; it just takes more hits to knock him down. Now, normally, you can do a finishing move on an enemy that’s been knocked down, but this straight-up wouldn’t register when I did it to the boss, which gave him plenty of time to get up and kill me. The finishing move finally did register at one point, but I can’t say what I did differently, so I can only assume the controls are literally unresponsive. I gave up on the next level and decided to play a game I knew I’d like better:

This is a puzzle game. You’ve got a train with 1-3 carts, and you have to draw a track connecting the passengers to their corresponding boxes; once you’re done drawing the path, you click the play button at the bottom to start the train. Passengers automatically board the train when it passes by them (unless it’s full) and automatically disembark when it passes by the appropriate box (unless another passenger was already dropped off there). The goal is to get each passenger to their respective boxes and get the train to the exit in one go. Sometimes, levels will have two exits, with each one leading to a different set of levels, meaning you’ll have to solve them twice (but slightly differently, admittedly) to unlock all the levels.

The game’s levels are grouped into constellations, and each constellation has its own difficulty curve, dropping back down to easy at the start of each one. Some constellations are able to get challenging during their last few levels, while others (like Taurus and Vela) remain easy throughout the entire set. You can usually count on the first 7ish levels to be easy for each constellation regardless.

Some constellations have their own gimmick, but they’re exclusive to said constellations until the final one, so they can feel underutilized (especially given the fact that at least 2/3rds of each constellations’ levels are on the tutorial side of the difficulty spectrum). The only gimmick I actively disliked was Cassiopeia’s: Normally, you can just draw the track next to the box, confident in the knowledge that the passenger will make it there, but these levels put the boxes right next to the exit. This is a big deal since the train carts are behind the driver’s seat, so if you try to solve the level normally, the driver will be blocked by the exit and the passenger will be blocked by the driver. With the other one-off gimmicks, they at least build on the core mechanics and are easy to understand, but this gimmick changes a fundamental part of how the game works, meaning the challenge comes from not knowing what you can do (especially when the game changes the number of carts you have). This gimmick doesn’t even get brought back at the end, so once you wrap your head around how it works, you don’t need to use that knowledge anymore.

On a similar topic, I didn’t like how the game handles having a single empty spaces between passengers. If you draw a straight track between the space, neither passenger will board even if you have an empty cart, going directly against what the game has taught you up to this point. This isn’t a constellation gimmick, either: it’s just sporadically used, meaning you’ll likely forget about it the next time it’s needed. I don’t even think the game gives it a proper introduction; it just shows up at one point and you’re just expected to figure it out. The entire reason I prefer these types of puzzle games is because you’re supposed to be able to figure out the solution without trial and error, so when something like this happens, it defeats the purpose.

Overall, the game is okay. It has its fair share of challenging levels, but it also has quite a bit of fluff and a couple frustrating mechanics which run counter to what makes the rest of the game fun. For comparison, although Splotches had more fluff, it at least had consistent mechanics. I say wait for a sale.

EDIT: Oh, and when I beat the game, some of the single-exit levels turned into white stars (this normally only happens if it’s a double-exit level where you’ve only reached one exit), and the game doesn’t say why this is.