Welcome once again to PCGamesN’s Spotlight on Greenlight, our regular Saturday feature where we look at the best and the most interesting Greenlight games that are hoping to make their way onto Steam. We’ve already looked at dozens of other titles in weeks past, so do take a look at our back catalogue.
SUPERHOT’s a shooter which moves only when you do.
It nails the John Woo cool of Max Payne, advancing up corridors watching bullets rip past you in slow motion while firing off perfect headshots; touches on the puzzles of Braid that ask you to approach a space thinking not about what’s happening in the present but where everything will be in a few steps; and has the stripped down aesthetic of Frozen Synapse.
It’s got our attention and it should have yours.
This may all be sounding a little familiar; I already wrote about SUPERHOT earlier this week. I’m not writing about it again because I’ve run out of ideas. Since we (along with every other gaming site under the sun) wrote about SUPERHOT the developers have decided to take the game to Steam Greenlight. They’re also promising to expand on the original concept to create some wicked sounding set pieces
“Think about falling into a ballroom full of enemies,” they write on their Greenlight page. “Through a glass ceiling. With shatters of glass everywhere and enemies firing at you. As you fall, everything moves fast and suddenly STOPS when you land. With debris and bullets roaring slowly all around, you plan your dance – killing your foes WITH STYLE.”
That sounds pretty cool but the main addition to fleshed-out game, effects-wise, at least, would be explosions. Your first moments in SUPERHOT see red enemy tumbling away from you into a pile of stacked boxes. Seeing them all tumble to the ground is a slick show of slow mo but it’s nothing on what an explosion would be. Seeing an enemy’s grenade burst into shrapnel before your eyes, all at a hundred times slower than normal speed, now that would be SUPERHOT.
It’s also exactly what the developers want to achieve: “Witness explosions in glorious SUPERHOT slow motion. Fragments of concrete flying around… while YOU WALK. Not even looking at the explosion. Cool guys don’t do it. SUPERHOT guys don’t even think about it. GRAB THE GUN and throw yourself into this condensed hell where YOU MAKE THE RULES. You decide WHEN IT’S TIME.”
These are all aesthetic updates that they’d bring to a full release. SUPERHOT’s clearly a game where aesthetic’s important – it’s a luscious thing to look at – but it needs to be more complex mechanically, too, to hold our attention. To that end, the developers are also planning to add enemies who move like you do and will dodge your bullets. You’ll need to “checkmate them into a corner” where they can’t dodge your shots.
SUPERHOT’s a little bit awesome and full version of the original concept (which you can play here) would be a great thing. Go throw it a vote on Greenlight, it’s worth it.