SUPERHOT
Every Bullet Has a Story
By: SUPERHOT Team
Platform: PC
Released: Feb 25, 2016
Minutes Played: 480
I’ve never been in a fight, like an actual physical altercation. Come to think of it I don’t even think i’ve witnessed an actual full-on fist fight in person, even at a distance. I’ve certainly never seen a gun fired in anger or witnessed a protracted gun battle. My understanding that in real life, all of those types of things are over FAST. Like, one maybe two punches and someone is down. A few bullets fired and everyone who is going to die is dead or has given up. But it’s also like a car accident (something I have been in) where when you experience it in the moment everything slows to a crawl and you can recall every minute detail in sharp focus.
My understanding of the latest science indicates that this is not some kind of survival bonus in a moment of heightened threat giving you extra reaction time; it’s in fact a trick played by your brain for some reason — it’s essentially laying down extra slices of memory, like all of the sudden turning up your Gopro to 120 FPS but playing it back at 30 fps. Who knows what value this actually has from a survival standpoint. Like, what kind of evolutionary pressure would produce a result or feature like this? I’m not qualified to answer any of these questions.
I can speculate. Maybe being able to analyze near misses in minute detail allows you to plan for the next time you encounter a similar situation, therefore making it more likely that you can survive again (or avoid it altogether) and pass down your knowledge and genes.
Most modern movie fight choreography is built around precision and timing; the power fantasy of a movie like John Wick is that you’re so awake and observant that you can react perfectly to threats as you observe them and kill with brutal efficiency. Of course in real life no one man can take on a house full of trained killers armed with automatic weapons and bestowed with the element of surprise, but the illusion of film created by canny acting, clever editing, expert camera placement and meticulous planning and practice combine to create breathtaking action sequences that go off without a hitch.
SUPERHOT uses a mechanic similar to the Trials games, where you can restart instantly after you fail. In SUPERHOT, unlike Trials, there isn’t any slop (charming, wonderful physics slop) — it’s all precision and determinism. Physics is irrelevant; you’re planning against AI that is exactly complex enough and observing the vectors that they project in the form of bullets as represented by slowly moving red trails. Restarting quickly is essential; your last series of actions is stored in your head and you know how you can dodge to the left a little at a particular moment or prioritize one enemy after another and rearrange your plan of the space and time to complete each kill puzzle.
It’s only after the main game that you can realize the quality and depth of the mechanics on offer. The KATANAONLY challenge sequences reveals another layer of planning that the player cues offer; as an enemy is rushing you and raising his weapon to the ready position you pray that he gets close enough that his shader changes to indicate that he’s in range for a kill before he can fire his weapon. You learn how long it takes an enemy to ready his weapon and can judge the distance between you, and if you can get within range before he gets off a shot, you get the kill.
Really interesting design happens more often in the features you leave out than in the innovations you try to cram in. In the vast majority of modern First Person Shooters, there’s a variety of factors that determine how much damage a bullet does when it impacts an enemy. The weapon damage is modeled so that the actual damage an individual bullet causes is based off of it’s distance traveled; there’s an initial damage, then it hits a linear falloff, then the end of that falloff and it continues on through until it hits a non-damageable surface. Combined with conceptual models like “bullet drop” “bullet spread”, you create a system where the little details about each individual gun really matter, at least in the context of that game.
SUPERHOT has an achievement which I think is funny and makes this point — it’s called “Cool but Pointless” and is rewarded for getting 100 headshots. Usually headshots are important because they trigger a damage multiplier that results in instant death. In SUPERHOT, any hit with any bullet is instantaneous death — Just like I imagine it is in real life. You shoot a person in the knee, they’re not gonna keep fighting. And if you have more than one person to deal with, you get one chance to get it right. It’s funny that it a game that’s clearly a simulation of a simulation is more realistic than meticulously detailed simulations that are meant to represent reality.
SUPERHOT gives you infinite chances to get it right through permutation and iteration on a plan. It thinks the standard trappings of FPSs are cool, but pointless. They’re not what this game is about. It’s about practice, planning, observation, adjustment, re-trying and ultimately achieving perfection. It’s the process of creating an action scene for a movie.
Towards the end of the classic genre-defying Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character Phil plaintively asks a perplexed Andie Macdowell a question he is uniquely positioned to answer — “Well maybe the *real* God uses tricks, you know? Maybe he’s not omnipotent. He’s just been around so long he knows everything.” And so it is with SUPERHOT.
