SUPERHOT is five years old.
And I've been playing it since the beginning.
In case you've never heard of the most innovative shooter I've played in years. No, not just because I have been programmed to say that – it literally is the most innovative shooter I've played in years.
The core idea of "time only moves when you do" is pure electric gold. It turns what is a frenetic experience into something more akin to a complex turn-based experience, one in which you have ample opportunity to consider how badly you just screwed up as you watch a bullet that you don't have the means to intercept hurtle right to your head – and beyond.
When you're successful, when it's over, when the deadly dance of death has played itself out and you stand atop a pile of exploded red guy corpses, you get the chance to watch your magnificent ballet in what would be real-time. You catch that fleeting moment where you sliced a bullet in half or reflected it back to the shooter with the katana. That fleeting second when you left over a shotgun blast and landed on top of another guy whom you dispatched with a quick bullet to the head. Or that time you dodged into the middle of a group of killers and then used your ability to possess one in order to swap out to someone 30 feet away who had just fired a burst of machine gun rounds where you used to be standing and where your enemies are currently standing.
You know how hard it was to pull that off given consideration. Watching it and playback – sometimes you have to ask "who was that guy?" Because that guy was way cooler than you.
And that's before we get to the question of the plot – which has been speaking to an increasing recursive question of the virtual vs. the "real" that has only ramped up as more people have been chained indoors with their only social outlets being screens to mediate the experience with others. In a lot of ways, SUPERHOT was prescient when it came to some insightful comments on the human condition of the modern age.
It's been a killer time, and there is no one who can express the wonder of it as well as the SUPERHOT Team themselves.
They've made both an excellent blog post and a brand-new video featuring the entire history of the game from the seven-day prototype all the way up to Mind Control Delete, the Roguelike inheritor of the SUPERHOT torch.
If you haven't played SUPERHOT yet, this is a good time to do so.
You've been missing out on the most innovative shooter in years.
I've definitely put my time in.
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