Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami is a 2D top-down action video game by Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, collectively known as Dennaton Games. The game blends top down perspective with stealth, extreme violence and surreal storytelling, along with a soundtrack and visuals influenced by 1980s culture. At the start of most chapters, the unnamed protagonist wakes up in his apartment and listens to cryptic messages on his answering machine. In each stage, the player navigates a building from a top-down perspective, and the goal is almost always to kill every opponent therein. To make up for this, the game allows the player to restart each stage the moment they die, allowing them to quickly fine-tune their approach over several attempts. He finds a package outside which contains a rooster mask and instructions to perform a hit on a group of criminals and steal a briefcase in their possession, threatening that he is being watched and that "failure is not an option." After Jacket completes this mission, he receives further messages on his answering machine, each asking him to take care of an innocuous "problem" at a specific address; these locations invariably contain a criminal operation, usually run by the Russian mob, that he must eliminate.