There are a lot of stupid games in the world.

If you weren't the kind of person who plays videogames very often, you probably wouldn't be able to see the why these kind of games continue to be the object of obsession of some otherwise very intelligent human beings. Much game criticism exists for the purpose of pointing out to you why dismissing all these games as mindless sludge fails to understand the network of very fragile, finely-tuned elements that are all simultaneously at play in an effective stupid game. The genius in the design of these games, we say, is in the nature of the complexities of the interactions between the game and the player, which can only be properly understood by someone who has played and mastered at least one of them.

Hotline Miami - a new game by well-known indie developer Cactus and partner Dennis Wedin - is one of these games. HLM follows the "high difficulty, quick death, quick respawn" pattern of recent commercial indie games like Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, or Limbo. This approach efficiently maximizes the time the player spends directly engaged in the game, and not having to frustratingly endure anything else that is not the game for very long. In this particular instance the action takes place in a top down view (similar to Mission Impossible for the NES) and our "hero" is a man who runs through a bunch of small buildings with different creatively-assembled configurations of enemies and wonderfully colorful rug patterns. Our hero's only goal is to massacre every living thing in his vicinity before he is shot dead himself. Somewhat like Super Meat Boy, the levels are short and difficult, sometimes requiring a massive number of retries. There is also a letter-grade scoring system at the end of each level that that evaluates your performance based on your methods for killing the guards, how confidently you moved through the level, how long you took, and so on.

HLM is a very finely-tuned game. Every little part of the system seems to hold together impeccably. The goal of players is merely to find the most effective way to penetrate this system. This requires excellent timing, which is most of what the game is about - effectively completing each level means anticipating the the positions of the enemies and getting to them before they have very much time, if any at all, to respond to you. The intensely varied layouts of the rooms and the constantly shifting positions of the guards mean that the player has to be able to effectively manage a pretty large number of different situations to be able to beat a level. Some have compared this kind of play to the oft-praised beat 'em up God Hand, which is not a bad comparison, but the mechanics here are much simpler.

HLM, while difficult to play, is very approachable for people who regularly play games, so its critical and (I'm assuming) commercial success is hardly a surprise. Anyone who has become immersed into these sorts of games for any period of time will confirm how completely exhilarating the experience of playing them can be. Each new life is a wonderfully, gracefully rhythmic dance with the AI as you wait for the chance to turn your enemies into more blood fountains and paint those glorious carpets red. This is the rapturous release that often comes from all the tension that builds up over many previous failed attempts. The tension that comes from the terrible fear of lack of planning, or an unpredictable AI leading to situations falling out of your control and resulting in an unceremonious death. This is the sort of beautiful, nuanced play that videogame designers have spent years trying to perfect, and now the indie game world seems much closer to finally achieving it! Games that have attempted this sort of play in the past were often not nearly as successful at it, because they were both constrained by commercial demands which forced developers into narrow existing genre tropes, and just did not yet understand how to effectively deal these sorts of experiences. And now, these games like HLM are the ones that the old game industry veterans can tearfully hold up and say "yes!! this is what I have waited my whole life to make!!", right?

And how could we forget the game critics, those very serious young white men in their 20's and 30's, who will join them to celebrate of the final refinement of these sacred formulas. These critics would never stoop so low as to see these games at face value, oh no. They are on a very important mission to bring to light the great achievements of art that these games truly are. So what if they stretch them so paper-thin that they'll start to resemble something completely different from the actual games themselves.

How can you rhapsodize at great lengths about the joy of violence in a videogame without sounding like a complete psychopath?