I realize everyone and their super hot moms have played Superhot or at least are aware of what it brings to the FPS table, but half the reason I do this feature is for an excuse to play the Indies I ought to have already played. In this case, I have tried Superhot before: according to my Steam achievements, I got about halfway through the story mode before bailing sometime in 2019 because even a bunch of textureless walls and characters were apparently too much for the system I was using back then. 2023 has been a renaissance year of sorts though thanks to a new system, which means getting back to a great many games I've been leaving on the vine for far too long, including this 2016 maverick of the point-guns-at-people-and-shoot genre. The conceit of Superhot, just to be semi-professional for a moment, is that you're surrounded by enemies who are either shooting at you or charging at you with malicious intent; however, as long as you stay perfectly still, time will stand still with you. This gives you as long as you need to plan your next action, line up your shots, duck behind cover, and anything else which facilitates one's short-term survival in an FPS game.

This "turn-based" shooting was the game's eye-catching gimmick when it was being shown around all those PAXes ago, but it's also the core of a surprising amount of mechanical depth. For instance, though it's immediately apparent that you can clear a room of red-tinted goons by carefully walking around their shots and returning fire in kind, with a little nudging you realize there's other techniques at your disposal courtesy of this extreme slow-motion ability. Techniques like throwing a spent gun at an enemy to stun them, grabbing their still-loaded gun out of mid-air after they drop it in surprise, and then blatting them in the face with it. Or that you can pick up an object, throw it at an incoming bullet to deflect it, and then move into fisticuffs range of your opponent before their next shot in order to disarm and incapacitate them. You have almost all the time in the world to consider your next move—time is always marching forward, but slowly enough that you could walk around raindrops if the need arises—and the game is gracious enough to keep throwing scenarios at you that would be invariably fatal without this slow-motion benefit; a progression that seems purpose-built for the sake of replaying back to you what you just did except in real-time to make you feel like John Wick's cooler older brother.

Credit, too, should be given to the imaginative short scenarios that comprise the game's level set. Each of these scenarios drops you into a new environment surrounded by enemies, usually with a cinematic flourish, and part of acing a level is knowing when and where more opponents will enter and where you ought to be standing to better deal with them. Some levels will even throw fast-moving hazards at you like a speeding truck that require a split-second reaction to survive, which of course won't be an issue with your mastery of time. Since you'll probably be dying often from surprise attacks, the restart feature is near-instantaneous and the scenarios are never so long that you'll feel stuck or repeating the same content for hours on end; even if it's your tenth attempt at a level, you'll have polished your approach to an extent that you'll be dancing around eliminating vermilion mannequins in a matter of seconds and so even when you're struggling it never feels like you're stalling.

It's one thing to chance upon a neat hook for a game, but another to able to exploit it fully. Goat Simulator leaned into its physics engine ridiculousness with a sympathetically guileless animal protagonist in a world of non-sequitur nonsense, PowerWash Simulator knew precisely what manner of dings and shimmers the user experience would need to turn the act of spraying fertilizer off a tractor with a hose feel engrossing instead of just, well, a gross thing. Likewise, Superhot plays into being a shooter with a tenuous grasp on how time works by presenting the game as a training tool to help humans reach the next level of consciousness by giving them the processing speed of a supercomputer and sending them out to murder who-even-knows-whom for the sake of some equally unknowable puppet master. Superhot uses a delicate balance of horror and science-fiction in its narrative approach, letting you know in no uncertain terms just how much trouble you've fallen into after chancing across this program via a mutual hacker friend. As you slip deeper down the rabbit hole, the game's unseen antagonist starts mentally playing with you like a horror game might, futzing with the UI and your control over the game's progression. A sense of control, the game is quick to inform you, that was never real to begin with. Even for as short as the "core" game is, the pace of this meta slice of psychological horror is effective while being courteous enough to arrive in short bursts as not to interfere with the killing of many random red dudes in rad ways, if that's the draw for you personally.

The lengthy post-game content is also conscious of the player's desire to get back to the stylish murder grind, offering a huge assortment of mostly narrative-free bonus content that either recycles the game's two dozen or so scenarios with extra rules (examples include a katana-only run that prioritizes getting into melee range quickly, and a time trial mode that prioritizes doing everything quickly) and many endless levels that task you with surviving for as long as possible with the tools at hand. Your protagonist's OS also has a few surprises for those willing to poke around an early DOS equivalent for a few minutes. Overall, between the lo-poly look, the fancy, balletic dispatching of crimson mooks, and the memetic "SUPER HOT" chant that closes every successful scenario, the game's definitely awash with a strong sense of abstract style. I'm certainly preaching to the choir at this point but it's worth stating for the record, with no ulterior motive, that it's the most innovative shooter I've played in years and that everyone should try it if they've yet to do so.

Rating: 5 out of 5.