Review: Superhot: Mind Control Delete Takes Killer Aim at Gamer Expectations

The game feels like the brainchild of students who were into debate club as much as programming.

Superhot: Mind Control Delete
Photo: SUPERHOT Team

When Superhot was released in 2016, much praise was heaped on its novel “time moves when you move” gimmick, though some criticized the game for its brevity. Superhot: Mind Control Delete, initially planned as DLC but now releasing as a standalone game that’s bigger than the original, is a brilliant rebuttal to that criticism. Whereas Superhot subversively riffed on the tenebrous nature of control, Mind Control Delete slyly questions the purpose of extra content and how long a game should or shouldn’t be.

Mind Control Delete at first appears to exist for one reason: to deliver more Superhot. The blinking red box that greets you each time you boot up the game promises as much. “MORE,” it reads, and that’s what the game delivers. And not just more of those first-person fights where you step between slow-motion bullets to punch a shooter, grab his weapon and use it to pick off a sniper, hurl it at another foe, and then jump-punch your way to another enemy.

To this already volatile mix, there are now more levels, more abilities, more enemy types, more story. In-game, “MORE” is repeated as much as “SUPER HOT,” and so much so that the word practically loses all meaning, which is when you begin to see the way the game serves as a critique of itself. “There won’t be any closure,” we’re warned, “just more senseless killing.” There’s a fine line here between entertainment and annoyance, and the developers at SUPERHOT Team ride it like they’re playing the nerviest game of chicken, pushing players to the point at which the joy of pulling off that perfect sequence perhaps begins to sour.

Advertisement

Though Mind Control Delete has clear intentions, it never resorts to cheap tricks to make players step back and realize that sometimes less is more. There are two new and improved endless modes, each of which can be tackled with a variety of superpowers and “hacks.” These abilities shake up the basic concept of Superhot, so while you’re still throwing objects or shooting guns at bright red enemies, carefully clearing a room of its foes, your options for doing so are broader. With the grenade.hack enabled, every once-innocuous item—be it a stapler or a billiard ball—now detonates when thrown. And if you utilize the recall.core, you can summon a thrown katana back into your hand, just like a Jedi.

Elsewhere, you’ll have to make use of new skills like ricocheting bullets and close-range invulnerability, because levels may now include explosive mines and spiky enemies that release shrapnel when hit. You’ll also sometimes be faced with unkillable enemy archetypes like the charging Dog, katana-master Nindza, and position-swapping Addict, each one reflecting a toxic aspect of the gaming community such as avarice, addiction, or anger.

Though it’s an intentional choice, players may find themselves missing the deliberate encounters of the original Superhot, which featured pre-set scenarios to fight your way out of. Mind Control Delete instead randomly generates most of its challenges. Players wander through an ASCII map of interconnected nodes, each one containing somewhere from five to 10 levels, all of which must be completed within a set number of lives in order to progress. Fail a node, and your next run may pull an entirely different lineup out of its pool of over 30 maps, some of which are noticeably easier than others. The Kitchen’s meat locker and the Prison’s guard station are easy to camp in, whereas the Disco and Dojo have dangerous wide-open spaces. Levels like the Yakuza hangout are filled with useful weapons, whereas the Library and Studio leave you with non-lethal books and paintbrushes.

Advertisement

It’s not uncommon to have a run cut short because of bad luck with the hacks you get, your starting locations, or even the spawn patterns of enemies within each level—and this can quickly get frustrating as players go longer and longer without the respite of a checkpoint. Still, this randomness does a fine job of amplifying Mind Control Delete’s message about meaningless violence, and if it’s a bit too pointed, perhaps that, too, is the point.

Mind Control Delete feels like the brainchild of students who were into debate club as much as programming. Each new layer of gameplay exists to both argue for and against its inclusion, right up until the final twist, which allows players to progress only by their being willing to give up some of their hard-won new abilities. Until this point, players have been free to do as they like, experimenting with all the different combinations of power-ups in challenge nodes that send infinite waves of foes at players. But to keep that freedom, and to not have to give anything up, players must stop progressing through the campaign. And it’s at that point that you must determine what you value more: the ability to play a game ad infinitum or the opportunity to reach the ending, even if that comes at the cost of your enjoyment.

This game was reviewed using a press key provided by Evolve PR.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Developer: SUPERHOT Team  Publisher: SUPERHOT Team  Platform: PC  Release Date: July 16, 2020  ESRB: M  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.