Superhot is the most innovative shooter I've played in years. Despite its unimpressive visuals, this $24.99 PC game is a genuinely creative and challenging experience that I recommend everyone try at least once. It injects puzzle elements and a bizarre meta-narrative into quick, bite-sized servings of computerized violence. It might seem like a short and simple game at first, but between the addictive time-pausing mechanic and some very satisfying and repeatable extra modes, you'll quickly find yourself playing it for hours, and the built-in social media features for sharing your best runs will keep you coming back to get more consecutive, stylish kills. Superhot is an easy Editors' Choice award winner.
Have You Tried This Game?
Going too deep into Superhot's premise would spoil some of the fun, but here's a small taste: the story revolves around the concept of receiving a cracked pre-release game from a friend. The entire interface is built around this concession, using an ASCII text menu system, as seen through a barrel-distorted view, to evoke navigating an old BBS on a CRT monitor. Then you start playing the game-within-the-game, and things get surreal.
At its heart, Superhot is a first-person shooter in a graphically simple, untextured virtual world. You're a dark gray humanoid fighting red humanoids in completely white spaces, using dark blue props and weapons to defend yourself. There are offices, apartment buildings, and warehouses, all dressed up in sterile, completely white surfaces. Even the characters are relatively simple three-dimensional figures, with polygonal heads and limbs reminiscent of Nintendo 64 games. It's a jarring style choice that keeps everything visually clean and distinct, if not particularly detailed.
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Why You Should Game on a PC
Stop and I'll Shoot
In Superhot, time only moves when you do. If you stand still, everything in the world is frozen. You can see bullets as they fly at you, while the enemies who fired at you pose like mannequins in the distance. This power lets you perform some remarkable moves that would be nearly impossible to pull off in real-time. As a bullet heads toward you, you can side-step it, fire your own gun where a charging enemy will be in a few seconds, then turn around and punch another enemy to send his weapon flying before he can fire it. Then you can grab the flying gun as it sits frozen in the air and blow away two more red figures before they get close.
This system sounds like it would remove any sense of challenge from the game, but thanks to a single design concession it avoids that problem. Time is still when you're still and moves when you move, but time also moves when you look around. You can't spend minutes setting up your shots when every motion of your mouse sends bullets inches closer to your head. This lets Superhot preserve the core concept without sacrificing challenge. Even if you can freeze time, you still have to deal with multiple enemies with multiple guns, and only enough wiggle room to disarm one at a time.
More to Do in the System
You can run through the game's main campaign in two or three hours, but you can keep playing well past that. Once you play through the story mode, you can access any level at any time. More importantly, there are Challenge versions of the levels, which provide difficult limitations to how you can play while stripping out the story elements. You can also play Endless mode, an extra game mode that places you in large, complex environments and forces you to deal with never-ending waves of enemies. There are also unlockable Endless mode mods that add more variety to the game. And if you want a different take on the Superhot experience, try SuperQOT, a free mash-up of the original Quake and Superhot.
Superhot doesn't offer any direct competitive multiplayer, but there are extensive social elements with the Killstagram website. You can record any of your level or mode playthroughs in the game and upload them to Superhot's own social network site (a YouTube aggregator). These recordings display the action in real-time without the slowing/pausing effect, so every successful encounter looks like a super-fast, expertly choreographed gunfight.
Deceptively Unique
At first glance, it might not look like there's a lot of meat on Superhot's bones. For a $25 game, it has a short campaign and extremely simplistic graphics. Both of those things belie the game's addictive, mesmerizing action. You might beat the game in one sitting, but you'll keep coming back to the different modes just to enjoy the strange thrill of dispatching crowds of gunmen at your leisure and then watching it all play out in a lightning-fast, realtime brawl as though you're Jason Bourne. This is an incredibly innovative, remarkably polished experience that any fan of PC violence should try.
Superhot is a PC-based first-person shooter that offers some of the most unusual, hypnotic gameplay ever seen in the genre.
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