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SUPERHOT MIND CONTROL DELETE is a sequel with a fundamental contradiction

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• SUPERHOT MIND CONTROL DELETE
• Developer: Superhot Team
• Publisher: Superhot Team
• PC, PS4, XBOX

“DO YOU ENJOY THE KILLING?” Superhot asks, again and again and again. It’s been a continual theme throughout the series, weaving a metanarrative that gestures at the morality of the violence you commit, and drawing attention at the way its abstract aesthetic masks the brutality of your actions. Mind Control Delete turns that narrative onto its own commercial status, almost questioning the place for a sequel. It proves to be a compelling setup, but like previous games, Mind Control Delete can’t help but ultimately feel indulgent, wallowing in the supposed immorality rather than looking to say something about it. 

Mind Control Delete begins at a finale, throwing you into a final stage, having you take down a final wave of enemies before revealing that the one they were protecting was you. You return this moment several times, walking up to a body hunched at the computer and shooting them in the back of the head, with every corpse from your previous assassinations sprawled around you. 

As you repeat this process the area becomes more and more corrupt, glitching out, distorting perspective and rewinding you backwards in the corridor, as if to ask “Are you sure you want to keep doing this?” To which I answered “Yeah, of course.” I was reviewing it after all. 

As I continued the structure of each stage became more and more naked. The maps repeated, declaring each stage as if they were a set of deathmatch maps. And ultimately, that’s what they become. Weapons, enemy placement and abilities are shuffled each time, but I was ultimately here for the killing, and each element was there to keep it fresh. And as the larger narrative began to fall into more corruption, more killing implements revealed themselves, giving me more toys to play with. 

Mind Control Delete then asks again, “DO YOU ENJOY THE KILLING?” to which my reply came, “Yeah, of course. After all you made it sick as fuck.” How can I feel any way else after throwing a pen in a guy’s eye, grabbing his katana then teleporting to another guy to cut him in half and chaining it into three more kills?

Then, I stopped enjoying the killing. When the game asked if I wanted more, finally I thought, “Naw, I’m good.” I’d seen each map a hundred times, each configuration became more familiar, and none of the new elements were going to fundamentally change that. Mind Control Delete kept giving me more, asking me to continue and rewarding me, even as it kept telling me how fucked up everything I was doing was. 

That’s the fundamental tension in Mind Control Delete. It returns again and again to the emptiness in doing a sequel, drawing attention to the meaninglessness in repeating cycles of violence. But it ultimately never actually pushed back on me. It never tested my willingness to repeat myself, or made it truly miserable to play. Mind Control Delete keeps asking questions, but it’s never willing to make a statement.