Game - SUPERHOT (Xbox One)

Bold, limited colour scheme? Check. Well-worn genre with one game-defining gimmick added? Check. Minimalist art style? Retro menus? Near non-existent plot? Pretty difficult actually? Check, check, check and check. Stir in some meta-commentary on the nature of gaming, pop in the oven on a low heat, look in through the oven door ten minutes later and, yes, it looks like we've got an Indie Darling on our hands.

My favourite kind of enemy: an unarmed one. War crimes ahoy!

Still, let's brush aside the facetiousness and pour our collection of brass tacks onto the table. Developed, funnily enough, by the Superhot Team, SUPERHOT is a first-person shooter with a difference. One difference: time only moves when you move. Well, not quite. Time moves all the time, but when you're not moving, it's a barely susceptible crawl; when you're running as fast as you can, time moves at normal speed. "So what?" you say (yes, you do), "I move at normal speed in all my other shooters". Yes, you do. But one shot in SUPERHOT and you're down. There's no crouching behind a wall and waiting for all the red to fall off your screen here. In fact, there's no crouching, period. SUPERHOT, more than any other game, forces you to think about the geometry and mechanics of a gunfight, and when you're doing all that thinking you can't afford to have the bullets whizzing around at a realistic speed.

Nice! You dispatched that red dude with a single pistol shot. But there's another coming down the stairs behind you, and because you're in slow-time as well, your gun hasn't chambered the next round yet. Well, if you run at normal speed, your gun will be ready sooner. But, if you run at normal speed, so will that red dude, and the bullet he fires at you will go the speed of, well, a speeding bullet. Dodging a bullet in slow time is comical; dodging it in normal time is impossible.

As the red dudes demonstrate, it's all too easy to go to pieces in a firefight.

Truth be told, there's very little game here. Dropped into one of the game's many small, self-contained, pristine white environments, you use your control over the game speed and the available implements to shatter all the polygonal red fellows in the area. There are only four real weapons in the game - the pistol, the shotgun, the assault rifle, and the katana - and each has its own advantages and drawbacks: the pistol is a precise all-rounder but its single shot is easy to dodge or miss by a hair; the shotgun gives a wide spread but sacrifices accuracy and reload time; the assault rifle is accurate and long-ranged but its burst-fire can be hard to time; and the katana is quick and can be thrown for instant kills but, naturally, can only reach its length and is very narrow. You can kill with your fists, but it takes three hits, and you can throw bottles, bricks and other miscellanies at the red guys, but all this does is stun them momentarily and dislodge their weapons from their grip, but sometimes it's all you need to snatch a flying pistol out of the air and gun them down with the weapon that miliseconds previously was theirs. It's fun and easily remixed gameplay, and about halfway through there's an extra wrinkle added when you gain the ability to leap into the bodies of enemies, which is especially useful if you've just critically misjudged your timing and your current body is about to be just so many ruby shards on the otherwise immaculate floor, which will be all too common in the more densely-packed and frantic later stages.

Fortunately, time is moving slow enough for you to see that, no,
this one doesn't have your name on it.

The story, which is little more than a thread stringing together a long series of increasingly difficult arenas, starts innocuously enough as one of your online friends shares this great game all about killing red dudes with you, but it isn't long before things begin to get a little weird and the game starts talking to you directly and telling you not to keep going. It takes a leaf from Spec Ops: The Line's "Why are you playing this game, you bastard?" playbook, but the meta-narrative is more of a varnish on the game than an integral part of the story, and you wouldn't really be losing too much if the levels just proceeded linearly without any of the admittedly-intriguing chatroom conversations or interface screws that grow more and more common as you progress. The thing is, Spec Ops did this so well because it had you thinking you were playing precisely the kind of gruff, macho military shooter it was about to eviscerate for the first third of the game. SUPERHOT almost immediately puts up a big "WARNING: Deconstruction Area" sign at the outset and doesn't even wait for you to get comfy on the rug before it tries to pull it out from under you. It's all very well being clever but trying too hard isn't a good look. Still, it's gameplay we're here for, and SUPERHOT has it in spades.

I leave it to better minds to work out why anthropomorphic figures
of solid ruby with no organs should be susceptible to head injuries.

The game makes it tremendously easy to be stylish, because the slow-time mechanic gives you plenty of time to methodically ponder your next move. By moving carefully, you can gun down a good handful of reds before your gun runs out... but what then? Panic and throw it at the first red guy you find, of course! Whoops, you missed, and now he's readying a shot. You cast around desperately, dithering on the spot, until you see a nearby ashtray. You scoop it up and toss it at the offender, stunning him and knocking the weapon out of his hands. Snatching it from mid-air, you blow him away but turn around before you even see the shot land because you've got a funny feeling that a bunch more have spawned in behind you, and suddenly you have to dash to the side because that big spread of shotgun blast that was halfway towards you before you noticed it nearly had your number. When you're playing you can often feel like a ten-thumbed, cack-handed, ham-fisted lummox mere millimetres from disaster, but watching back the normal-speed replay you'll feel like the godlike lovechild of Neo and Max Payne, as all the while a disembodied voice catchily repeats how "Super. Hot. Super. Hot" you are. Which isn't to say you don't need to be smart or precise. Waste the precious time you've got by dithering or turning the wrong way, and you can quickly find yourself boxed in by red guys, watching their bullets crawl towards you from all sides and knowing that the instant you try and take a step anywhere it'll be a short, sharp trip back to the respawn screen. It's an immensely quick and satisfying turnaround between play, failure, respawn, retry and victory, and while it's getting increasingly tired to compare any moderately challenging game to Dark Souls, it has that same addictive quality of knowing exactly how and why each death was your fault and yours alone, and that same seductive, often-misleading certainty that you only need "one more try; I'll do it this time, I know it".

Once you've completed the main story, there are still plenty of optional extras and challenges to keep you entertained. One of the game's Endless arenas, that dump you in a map of permanently respawning enemies and lets you see how long you last? Or perhaps sir or madam would prefer to go through the campaign again, but with only a sword? There's decent amounts of added value to be found here, which is just as well because twenty of your English pounds is otherwise a bit steep (if not actually vertical) for a story mode that can be polished off in a lazy afternoon. However, it's an easy game to pick up again when you've put it down. Quick, accessible, and good for blowing off some steam, you need to think, but you don't need to commit, and for novelty alone SUPERHOT has most of the competition dead to rights. 

8/10 - It's the most innovative shooter I've played in years