Covered in 8-bit gore, Hotline Miami 2: the Wrong Number is ready to once again blur the lines of reality and make you question your own blood lust.
The trailer, released this morning, shows the quintessential Hotline Miami style, retro and pixelated with a great deal of bright red blood. Dennaton games has said that this, the final offering from the franchise, is about “the escalating level of violence through multiple factions born from the events of the original game and driven by uncertain motivations.”
While the initial game played a lot on disturbing visuals and the badass feeling one gets from clearing a level of bad guys, Dennaton Game’s founders Jonatan Soderstrom and Dennis Wedin said that they wanted to make the sequel express different emotions. Dennis told Eurogamer that, “We want to add a bit of sadness to the game, because this is a finale – this is the end of Hotline Miami. We want to work with that emotion: that all things end.”
Hotline Miami 2 will feature an expanded cast of characters beyond “the jacket” main character of the first game. Included in this group are The Fans, groups of masked, wannabe thugs who want to be like the character in the first game. Wedin said that these characters represent “the players that want Hotline Miami 2 to be exactly like Hotline Miami One with unlocking masks, and getting phone calls and stuff like that. Which will still be in there, but we also don’t want to make the same game one more time. We want to tell a different story with a different approach.”
Masks will still be a part of the gameplay, but you will no longer be able to wear any mask on any level. Instead, levels will be tailored to specific mask types—like The Butcher, a character in a hog mask. The Butcher is starring in a movie adaptation of the first events from Hotline Miami, but reality, as in the whole game, will be slightly skewed.
For those hoping that Hotline Miami will still have the frenetic, fast paced murder action that was in the initial game, fear not. “The gameplay is pretty much exactly from the first one…But we’re going to add more weapons and enemies and gore,” Wedin said.
Hotline Miami 2: The Wrong Number, is set to release sometime in 2013 on PC, Mac, and Linux.
