3/5 ★ – NiGHTS108's review of SUPERHOT.

Interesting little oddball shooter I suppose. I've been on something of a puzzle game grind lately after I noticed a Steam sale of some after I picked up The Witness, and Superhot's a pretty sweet one. It doesn't feel as puzzle game-y though as just kind of a strange first person shooter. The game is simple. Time only moves when you move, everything dies in one hit including you, kill all the Red Dudes. It’s easy to imagine how this concept could’ve been formed, it feels like an idea birthed from accidentally saving on 1 health in Doom or Quake, and then having to perfectly manoeuvre around enemies to make it to some health. It's not as thoughtful as, say, something like Braid is, it never really builds on this time freezing mechanic like that game, it's more of a baseline for a zippy action game. The story's a little weird, feeling like a mishmash of a lot of different existing elements. It's like, 1984 if it was based on the Polybius urban legend with some hints of Portal and Undertale in there. Actually, maybe Undertale has some hints of Portal itself in there... I'm getting ahead of myself though. The story's fun and entertaining and good for what it is, but I don't particularly care for how... loud it is. It's totally in a similar school as Ultrakill's abrasive phrasing, "mankind is dead, blood is fuel, hell is full", with all this "the system controls you" nonsense. Also, it's a little anachronistic? Like c'mon. It takes place in (I think, going off a Steam achievement here) 1987 with a polygonal first person shooter that looks like Killer7 that unfortunately feels written in the 2010s. Now, I don't often care for accuracy when it comes to stuff like this, Celeste is My Favourite Game Ever and I'm in the minority who think the Final Fantasy pixel remasters and those "HD-2D" games actually look great, but c'mon. If you're making a game that feels so distinctly textured with a specific point in history, you can do better than this. Superhot has its problems. It's a little frustrating in the last handful of levels and the story is peculiar in places, though it's short enough to never outstay its welcome. Not quite the most innovative shooter I've played in years, but hey, check it out some time. Please update the game to let me disable the enormous subtitles. You have smaller text options. They're not even in the last few hardest levels where you're dying a lot so clearly you knew sometimes they gotta go.