Hotline Miami - Doing things I taught you, gettin' nasty for someone else

[raocow]

right in time for the game to get weirder, let's say it's on purpose

[Nesera]

A little late to the party, but this was not a game I expected to see on rao's channel, hahaha.

[QuiEstFaba]

A little late to the party, but this was not a game I expected to see on rao's channel, hahaha.

After the weeklong field day that was Ape Out, I'm a lot less surprised.
He makes a pretty good case for this type of game in particular--I even bought the latter for a friend on the basis of that LP.

[strongbadman]

I'll say this now since I don't know if you'll think to go back and check after the fact: after you complete Part 5, there are two bonus levels to play in level select that aren't part of the main story.

[thatguyif]

Yeah, so to answer a game mechanic question on new guy: When you throw your cleavers, you can get them back if they get planted in a wall. You cannot get them back if they hit a person, though. It's why, particularly for that first level, you have to pick your targets. Once you lose them all, you're just full melee.

But honestly, it really only mattered in the two chapters you just played. The next two...well, let's just say we're gonna have another two-chapter video, certainly.

And yeah, after you finish the rest of this part

(probably tomorrow)

, there's a two-level postgame, just silly bonus levels.

[raocow]

I'll say this now since I don't know if you'll think to go back and check after the fact: after you complete Part 5, there are two bonus levels to play in level select that aren't part of the main story.

thank you for letting me know, I don't know if I'd have necessarily noticed!

[EllenHouraisan]

It's kinda funny on a meta level how the title of the video displays fine on my PC, but on mobile it's completely corrupted. At the same time that it's a new start, it's also a continuation of the madness.

[raocow]

interesting, I didn't think that phones would have trouble with monotype

what a cool happy accident

[oobitydoo]

You were right about that ending being meta discussion of violence in video games from the developers, but it's an early example of that kind of device in indie games. They were asking you from the beginning if you liked hurting people. From what I know, the story is intentionally a bit fuzzy, but I'm not sure if it adds to or muddles the message.

Here's an article I found that I really liked about the devs' intentions when the story: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/wh ... rtant-game

[Grounder]

[strongbadman]

I believe earl and jones are in the two bonus levels if you didn't pick them up in the main game. So that's neat.

What I don't get is that in the good ending, the janitors say l, paraphrased, "the best way to get people to do what you want is to make them think there will be consequences if they don't." Which implies that 50 blessings might not execute you if you don't follow through, but Richter did show up at Jacket's apartment, and Jacket did get called in to deal with Biker, so consequences do exist. The easy answer is that consequences are carried out by other mask wearing assassins who are also scared into carrying out orders, and that's all well and good. But then you get into the possibility of nationalists who would be in board with the group's goals and carry them out gleefully.

[thatguyif]

What I don't get is that in the good ending, the janitors say l, paraphrased, "the best way to get people to do what you want is to make them think there will be consequences if they don't." Which implies that 50 blessings might not execute you if you don't follow through, but Richter did show up at Jacket's apartment, and Jacket did get called in to deal with Biker, so consequences do exist. The easy answer is that consequences are carried out by other mask wearing assassins who are also scared into carrying out orders, and that's all well and good. But then you get into the possibility of nationalists who would be in board with the group's goals and carry them out gleefully.

Well, that's the nature of blackmail: You don't need to have actual consequences for the person to be coerced. You just need to leverage their fear of said consequences. That's what the janitors meant: Make people afraid they'll get in trouble (or worse, get killed) if they don't follow along. It proved effective, as we saw in the epilogue chapters.

As for the nationalists, well, there's always going to be people like that: Those whose devotion to whatever cause they back is so wholesale that they can carry out the cause's more insidious affairs without coercion. At the same time, of course, such people are not something you can build an army with, at least not initially. For one, people like that are often far too few in number to be an effective force. Second, and more importantly, their devotion often betrays a gross incompetence at doing, well, anything. They can't be trusted to follow through with these tasks not because they don't want to do it, but because they'll fail miserably in doing so. Fear is not just a great motivator, but a great way to keep people focused, which helps make them competent.

Anyway...I feel like people going on and on in the comments (and, in some ways, raocow's comments) about how one ending was better or worse than the other kind of misses the point. I don't see the three endings (the end of the main campaign, the non-password ending in the epilogue and the epilogue as separate and distinct but rather one combined ending that explains the nature of the game as a whole. It's worth remembering that the two characters we play are not reliable narrators at all, with one character suffering from a severe mental illness with symptoms of psychosis and hallucination, the other possessing some oversized ego. Their encounter at the phone company, told from both perspectives, is proof of this, since it is clear both survived the incident. Thus whatever "ending" they have doesn't necessarily mean it's actually true or correct. They are all true...and yet none of them are true at the same time. "Canon" only bears significance in the future, not the present.

It goes back to the whole metacommentary the game presents. The nature of a violent video game is in many ways ephemeral. That it "ends" one way or another ultimately doesn't mean anything. It only ends when you put your weapons down. Anything else is ultimately irrelevant at that moment.

To quote Roscoe

/Beard/The Soldier

, "All of this is not really happening."

Thanks for playing, raocow.