Superhot is going to make you lose your mind.

You’re in a chat room with a friend when the subject of Superhot comes up. Your friend says that there’s a crack called superhot.exe and it lets you log into a company’s site and play a game. You download the files and log in. It’s a first person shooter with barebones graphics. Enemies are red, weapons are black and all the other things in the environment are white or gray. As you begin to play, words appear in the screen: TIME ONLY MOVES WHEN YOU MOVE.

Superhot is a creative FPS that challenges the norms of the genre with one simple question: what if every time your character is not moving the game goes bullet time? The result is a very addictive, strategic and hard shooter. You’ll play through about 30 increasingly hard levels in which you have only one objective: kill everybody before they kill you.

If normal shooters are all about reflexes, Superhot is about a combination of strategy and improvisation. As the game is in first person, your vision is often limited and you have to really be careful, because you’ll die with a single bullet. Luckily, you’ll be respawned in some seconds for another round. These quick deaths followed by quicker comebacks add fluidity to the game. It gets addictive because you really don’t have time to mope that you died, you’re thrown in the area again and have to repeat. With time, if you keep dying, you’ll probably learn where all the enemies spawn and will beat the level. Because of this, you’ll probably beat the game in one sitting if you have the time.

The mechanics of time are great. As you shoot, walk or pick up a weapon, time will run normally, but if you don’t, it won’t. Because of this, you can dodge bullets, as you see them coming to you. When you shoot someone far away, you have to calculate the trajectory of the bullet or it’ll miss the enemy. One interesting aspect is that time doesn’t really stop, it slows down a lot. If you wait forever, the bullets will hit you, so you have to move, but in really well calculated moves, or you’ll be ambushed pretty fast.

During the main campaign, you’ll be interrupted by random crashes, followed by conversations with your friend in the chat. Initially, superhot.exe seems like just a random game about shooting people, but as you progress, you’ll discover that there’s a much more obscure truth behind the game (which I won’t spoil, because you really should play Superhot).

Superhot’s idea was born during the 7DFPS Challenge of 2013 (a challenge in which the devs have to make a FPS game in a week). Later, the Superhot Team created a Kickstarter to back the project. The game is about 3 hours long (it really depends on how much you’re gonna die). After you beat the main quest you can open a challenge mode and an endless mode that will let you play the game forever.