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SUPERHOT PS4 Review

by Omar (@siegarettes)

• SUPERHOT
• SUPERHOT Team
• SUPERHOT Team
• PS4, PC

SUPERHOT is a shooter that screams postmodern. It takes its place alongside Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line as a shooter about shooters–something interested in deconstructing the act of pulling the trigger. Unlike the others, SUPERHOT feels consistently satisfying to play, not simply to intellectualize. That’s something it makes clear that it’s aware of, building the compulsion towards progress into its narrative in insidious ways.

All of this taking place in a virtual world where time only moved when I did.

Presented as an illicit computer game, SUPERHOT placed in in the middle of situations that have gone bad. Bold text flashes across the entirety of the screen, giving single sentences that allude to the situation, or barking orders to clue me in on a change in state. The world is presented as a series of pristine white boxes with vibrant, faceless red enemies. I was never given real context, only vague allusions to a series of action scene archetypes. Alongside the rapid pace and quick restarts, it encouraged me to see everything as nothing more than a set of challenges. Each of which I was more than happy to see through.

SUPERHOT’s gunplay turns time into a resource that’s spent with every action. It turns every encounter into a puzzle, a test of wit rather than reflexes. A single mistake means death, so I found myself constantly considering the next course of action, weighing distance and the if I had enough time to reach a point and act before taking a bullet. It reminded me of those tense moments in older PC shooters where I’d made a quicksave in a dire situation and found myself reloading again and again attempting to find the right sequence of moves that’d let me scrape by. Each situation carried the same triumph, and as I became more comfortable with the time dilation I began to take more risks, to see if I could not only finish a sequence, but look cool doing it. This was made even better by the replays at the end of each run, which sped up my actions to full speed, making it look like something straight out of a FPS kill compilation video.

The way SUPERHOT evokes PC games culture is also part of the reason it never feels at home on PS4. Sessions of combat are interspersed with a return to an old PC style text terminal, with plenty of references to era specific programs and aesthetics. There are folders of ASCII art, primitive games, and even cellular automata that include Conway’s Game of Life. At one point I even received a crack that allowed me to continue playing the main game. All of this is frame in conversations with an anonymous friend, where I had to type an automated response. Of course on a PC this would happen by pressing on the keyboard, but here it’s a pull of the triggers on a controller. It lacked the same tactile feedback, and broke the illusion a bit. 

The further I got into SUPERHOT the more it relies on this framing, using the replication of its intended interface to shave down the barrier between me and the character I was playing. It used common insecurities of living in an online world to put me in the same paranoid state as my character, and took control in ways that let me buy into that same feeling of being powerless. It felt illicit, it felt frightening, and it compelling me to keep playing in a way that felt like it was reflected in game. At one point the game flashed in bold text “GOOD DOG” for following its commands and at that point I felt almost violated, but knew I was all in. Still, the discomfort of it was diluted by the disconnect between the interface presented and the one I was using, which acted as a clear reminder of its artifice. 

In its best form, I imagine SUPERHOT would hit the same notes as a good alternate reality game. Nowhere is this more clear than the ending, which not only provides a unsettling context for its Endless mode but plays with the way we interact with and talk about videogames. It’s a clever conceit, and shows awareness of the format its working in and the conversation around it without feeling too obvious and tired. It got me to laugh in the way the best dark humor does–part genuine appreciation, and partly out of the discomfort it made me feel.