10 Incredibly Calm Moments In Otherwise Intense Games

9. The Apartment €“ Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami is a beautiful marriage of fast-paced, addictive gameplay with a subtly implemented meta-narrative. Surrealist, ultra-violent, disturbing, addictive, retro: Hotline Miami is all of these things and more. Stripped down to its bare essentials and it's little more than a 2D top-down orgy of violence. In its fullest form however, it's a frenzied, abrasive meditation on the interplay between violence and gameplay mechanics that's bathed in neon visuals and driven by a pounding, gritty soundtrack. Most of the game's levels involve clearing buildings of white-suited Russian mobsters, one floor at a time. The game's brutal instant-death mechanic forces the player to go about their killing with a haunting level of precision, speedily slicing, shooting, stabbing and bludgeoning their way through each room. There's a jarring change of pace that occurs when our mysterious protagonist returns to his apartment after each level. In these segments we're no longer wandering through crimson-soaked corridors, nor are we methodically planning a killing spree, we're waking up, going to sleep, going out to rent a movie or pick up a pizza. It's this recurring element of disconnect that fuel's the plot's distinct flavour paranoia. The eerie tranquillity of playing a normal guy before going out to coldly mutilate twenty or so unnamed men makes for a unique moment of calm in an otherwise insane world.