Reservoir Dogs by way of Gormley, with those basic artist mannequin shapes conveying a surprising amount of humanity. The whole thing is high intensity - for a short game, it's completely knackering to play - and the art direction opts for sheeny white-box settings and enemies made from sharp fragments of red glass. A jump/slide move, and then locations to use it in. Shotguns or katanas replacing standard revolvers, say. This kind of thinking continues to unfold in ten-second chunks across an inventive array of locations, most of them snug or warrenous or both, and with a suite of entirely coherent tweaks to keep things fresh.
And any weapon caught is instantly ready to be fired again. Anyone hit by a thrown item will instantly chuck their own weapon in the air for you to catch. Superhot's carnage doesn't just give you the time to overthink everything, it is also controlled by strict rules, and two of those rules are very helpful here. Maybe you were out of bullets anyway, or waiting on a reload from the last bit of business. Or better yet, a bullet of your own, but then you'll be vulnerable again as you reload, an agonising few seconds that will unfold only as you inch into your next position. A punch? One two three and he's crumpled. Now to the left, as the guy who fired reloads. So you move to the left - no good, a bullet to the head from an unseen assailant.
There's generally about ten seconds' worth of action here, but remember: time moves only when you do. One by one you are dropped into hard-nut set-pieces: a stick-up in an elevator, a truck charging down an alleyway, a man who's just itching to be chucked out of a window. I never saw a game with such a smirking sense of its own potency. Also, time rarely actually pauses completely - there's generally a little forward momentum even in rest. There's enough play in the scenarios to stop most of them from lapsing into memory tasks - even the more limited ones gain a bit from random weapon spawns. The triumphant crescendo afforded by a popping of the human skull. And, as is often the case, you are choreographing a very specific kind of dance. You're not quite the writer or director, as these scenarios are very tightly defined from the off, but you are the choreographer. I read about this trick recently in a book about the author of the Jack Reacher novels, and then I saw it implemented - and gloriously so - in Superhot, a first-person shooter in which time only moves when you do. The compression wave cast through the air. Approach at glacier speed, alive to the possibilities. "Give me the highlights, doc." "In English, professor?" Someone getting a load of buckshot through the head, however? Ease into that one. Someone doing crucial research into a baddie's tax affairs, or the ballistics analysis on a bullet lodged in cartilage? Montage, I reckon. Turns out there is a killer trick to creating hyper-violent entertainment: do the slow stuff fast, and the fast stuff slow. Digital violence has never been so intoxicating - but there's more here than mere slaughter.
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