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Publisher: Superhot Team

Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox One

Release Date: Feb. 25, 2016 (Xbox One in March)

Price: $25 / ~£16

ESRB Rating: T

Links: Steam | Official website Superhot Team: Superhot Team: Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox OneFeb. 25, 2016 (Xbox One in March): $25 / ~£16: T

As I slowly transition from my early 30s to what is inarguably my mid-30s, there are moments when I explicitly notice that my reflexes aren't what they used to be. As someone who enjoys twitchy, reflex-based action games as a hobby and as a large part of my career, this is more than a bit concerning. Thank god, then, for a game like Superhot, which slows down the gameplay of a traditional first-person shooter in a way that requires nearly no reflexes of any kind.

The game spells out its own chief gimmick in big block letters almost as soon as you start: "Time Moves Only When You Move." That's not quite true—time actually crawls forward at a snail's pace even if you stand perfectly still. For the most part, though, Superhot lets you get your bearings and think about how to deal with the stylized, often-armed red figures surrounding you before you have to commit to any one action.

It's a massive change that makes Superhot play out more like a turn-based strategy game than a shooter. At first, it requires you to rethink the usual mental map you'd usually use in a game played from a perspective behind a gun. You don't have to dive for the nearest cover every chance you get in Superhot, for example; if the enemy isn't too close, you'll probably have plenty of time to see the incoming bullet frozen in mid-air and simply sidestep out of its way.

The usual split-second pause between squeezing off shots becomes an interminable wait in Superhot's time dilation as well, forcing you to bob and weave and plan precisely where you want to stand when your gun finally loads a new bullet. The slow-motion path of your own shots (even when time is moving regularly) means you have to lead your aim pretty precisely to hit far-off moving targets as well.

The overall effect is a good simulation of what it must feel like to have super-speed and recalls some of Quicksilver's memorable scenes in recent X-men movies. But there are a few clever design choices to prevent your superpower from becoming super-overpowering in a gunfight. For one, you die if you get hit by a single bullet. Your enemies are just as fragile—their angular red avatars shatter like glass as soon as they're nicked—but there are usually tons of them and only one of you, so the balance is still weighted against you.

For another, you can't reload your projectile weapons. When you're out of bullets, the best you can do is throw the empty piece at a nearby enemy, stunning him and making him cough up his own weapon, which you can easily grab out of the time-slowed air in your best impression of a cool action hero. Picking up a new weapon (or one of many black projectiles sitting around the stark white environments) means moving your limbs, though, which makes you briefly defenseless as time races forward.

Hackers and crackers

As the action and difficulty slowly ramp up through a few dozen short vignette levels, a meta-narrative plays out in the world outside the shooting. The Superhot you're playing is actually presented as "superhot.exe," a cracked game-within-the-game sent to you by an anonymous friend through a charming MS-DOS-like text interface. There's a loving authenticity to this retro-computing shell around the game, from an emulated cathode-ray glow around the pixellated lettering to the gentle ambient background noise of whirring hard drive access. There's even some ASCII art and demoscene-style videos if you poke around the fake directory structure a bit.

As the game progresses, your illicit use of superhot.exe attracts the attention of some shadowy and seemingly omnipotent figures, who make it clear through text messages that the shooting portions are more than just harmless entertainment (though the details are left pleasingly vague). Layered on top is a somewhat creepy higher-order allegory distinguishing the mind's "software" from the body's replaceable "hardware," and a lot of Matrix-style claptrap about freeing yourself from your own perceptual prison. It's all suitably techno-thrillery in the campiest of '90s style, but it's also high-concept and self-aware enough to avoid being unbearably corny.

In any case, the narrative serves as a good carrot driving you forward through gameplay that feels a bit like a continuing tutorial right up until the game's narrative ending, which comes relatively quickly. I was able to see the credits after less than four hours of play time, and that's with dozens of restarts as I was learning the ins and outs of the game's rules. The narrative campaign seems almost like a training mode for the meaty challenges that unlock afterward: punishing time trials (measured in both real time and "in-game" time), modifiers that limit your weaponry or increase the difficulty, and an "endless mode" that keeps throwing enemies at you until you finally succumb.

Completionists will no doubt be able to sink many post-story hours into perfecting their time-bending skills, and the expert-level speedruns are going to be marvelous to watch. Even for those who don't dive into the endgame content, though, Superhot's short but sweet running time will stick with you well after you've shut the game down for good. Writing these words after an extended play session, in fact, it feels a little odd that my word processor cursor is still blinking while I stop to think of the next word to type. After all, if I'm not moving, shouldn't the world around me have the decency to take a brief pause, too?

The good

Clever time-bending mechanic turns first-person shooters on their head

Heady techno-thriller story told through charming retro-computer interface

Lots of end-game challenges for completionists to work through

Highly stylized, evocative art style

The bad

The main story is over incredibly quickly

The Ugly

Transitioning back to punishingly linear "real time" after a long play session

Verdict: Buy it if you're looking for an intriguing twist on the usual twitch shooter.