So I finished Hotline Miami today, and it was a pretty great game, but then you get the the end, and it wants you to have a password to do a certain thing, and your character doesn't have the password, and you're sad but you move on and see the end or whatever.

Then I pressed escape and noticed there was a "puzzle" menu option. When you go to it, it has a row of squares and asks you to fill them in with letters. I only had one letter, a "T". Turns out, these are hidden on tiny, like, 3x3 purple squares with a white pixel in the middle throughout the levels. If you have the owl mask equipped, they hover in the air like weapons. I must've picked one up at some point on accident.

But I was really not in the mood for replaying the whole game again, especially if it meant I'd have to equip a different mask than good ol' Don Juan... so I started poking around with the saves.dat file, and noticing what changes in it when you pick up letters.

TO UNLOCK EVERY LETTER:

Then you have to figure out the correct order of the letters. When you load up the PUZZLE screen, it places them randomly, and, sometimes, with logic I don't quite fully understand, sometimes the letters will "stick" when you place them in the correct spot, but then other times they won't.

So after a ton of randomly dragging the letters around until they randomly stuck, I found out the password.

THE PASSWORD IS:

Or, if you're super duper lazy and still have saves.dat open:

TO MAKE THE GAME THINK YOU SOLVED THE PUZZLE CORRECTLY WITHOUT ACTUALLY SOLVING IT:

This changes the way the final final chapter of the game plays out, but only slightly, and, honestly, kind of disappointingly. I'm pretty glad that I just cheated and did this, because man, if I'd've gone back through and done all the legwork to find all those secret square thingies and not wearing the Don Juan Fuck Your Shit I'm Going To Kill You With Door Almost Exclusively mask in the process... I'd be pretty frustrated.

Oh, and here's a bonus cheat:

TO UNLOCK EVERY MASK:

So yeah, mystery solved, it's not that great, but Hotline Miami is pretty awesome, even if the plot is largely incoherent, and not even in the way I expected from a cactus game.

Anyways, I'ma go back to listening to the title screen music on loop and just zoning out now.

Thanks, I really appreciate this since I didn't want to go back and pick up those purple tiles. Still a great game!

You sir, are a saint. I believe that if you edit the second line with all 1s, it will unlock every weapon.

Where do i find the save.dat file? I do not have the game on steam and cant find it :S

Wow thats pretty great of you. BUT my way of cheating for the secret ending was Youtube.

@generalxsurgeon said:

Where do i find the save.dat file? I do not have the game on steam and cant find it :S

c:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\hotline_miami usually

This is why we have the internet, for people like you @takua108 , thanks.