Hotline Miami is a hyper-violent top-down action game set in a neon-drenched version of 1989 Miami. Players carry out brutal, one-hit-kill missions guided by cryptic phone calls, rewarded by a pulsing synth-wave soundtrack and an unnerving surrealist narrative.
Hotline Miami is a top-down action game developed by Dennaton Games — Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin — and published by Devolver Digital. Released in October 2012, the game follows a silent protagonist known only as "Jacket" who receives anonymous phone calls directing him to locations across Miami, where he must kill every person inside. The game unfolds in 1989, bathed in the lurid palette and paranoid energy of that era.
Each level is a tight, enclosed floor plan populated with armed enemies. A single hit kills both Jacket and his enemies, so every mission demands methodical planning and lightning-fast execution — often both at once. Before each stage, players choose a mask that grants a passive ability: one allows silent takedowns, another makes enemies drop weapons, another lets Jacket start with a particular firearm. The loop of dying, studying the layout, and hammering through it at speed becomes intensely satisfying.
Combat blends gunplay and melee in equal measure. Firearms are loud and draw enemies from other rooms; melee is quiet but demands proximity. Bodies can be thrown, weapons picked up and discarded, and enemies stunned before being finished off. The game rewards aggression and punishes hesitation, producing a kind of violent improvised rhythm.
The visual aesthetic leans heavily into glitchy, lo-fi excess: screaming pinks and purples, pixel-blood pooling across tile floors, mask-wearing figures silhouetted against Miami neon. The soundtrack — assembled from tracks by artists including Perturbator, Jasper Byrne, and El Huervo — became one of the most celebrated game soundtracks of its decade, a perfect marriage of dreamy and menacing.
Between missions, Jacket visits a supermarket, a video-rental store, and a phone-booth pizza joint, where fragmentary scenes hint at a collapsing mind and a conspiracy that grows stranger as the game progresses. The story is deliberately oblique, using surreal dream sequences, unreliable narration, and recurring masked figures to leave players unsettled and uncertain of what is real. The final act recontextualises everything, though it refuses easy answers.
Hotline Miami was a breakout critical success, praised for its precise mechanics, unforgettable aesthetic, and the confidence with which it weaponised discomfort into entertainment. It placed on numerous best-of-year and all-time lists and is widely credited with helping establish Devolver Digital as a publisher synonymous with daring independent games. A sequel, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, followed in 2015.