Tag: Superhot

News

Superhot VR’s new update challenges you to beat the game in 10 minutes

In our friends at Versions’ end of the year wrap-up of their favorite virtual reality interactions of 2016, Superhot VR stood out. Superhot VR takes after the bullet-time videogame it spawned from, except with one clear difference—as your actual head and body moved, as did time. This lends itself to a variety of great VR-bound interactions: punching people in the head and watching them shatter ever-slowly, catching a gun in mid-air. Yet one stood out above the rest for our list: ricocheting a minuscule bullet off a pistol. In an update to the Oculus Touch-exclusive game, Superhot VR is going to…
SUPERHOT VR
News

SUPERHOT VR might end up being the most meta VR game yet

The Superhot Team announced SUPERHOT VR for the Oculus Touch this week, a project that’s been in the works since late 2013. Anyone who’s completed the original game, released earlier this year, will surely shiver with anticipation at the countless storytelling possibilities this virtual reality endeavor presents. If, on the other hand, you’re someone who avoids spoilers and has plans to play the current build of SUPERHOT, you should probably read no further. SUPERHOT is a special experience—one that owes much of its brilliance to VR-centric cyberpunk works like The Matrix (1999) and William Gibson’s Sprawl sequence. An inventive, tongue-in- cheek critique of traditional first-person shooters, SUPERHOT introduces…
Review

Shadwen is a stealth game trapped in adolescence

Playing a stealth game is like dancing. Or, more accurately, it’s like the evolution of how you approach dancing over the course of your life. Starting out, you’re a junior high pubescent: every move is a little awkward and the rules of appropriate conduct somehow seem both unclear and inviolate. You accidentally put your body in the wrong place and a whole goddamn army of humiliation descends upon you. Then the game progresses, and you’re in high school: you’re starting to get the hang of things, in terms of physically navigating the environment but also in appreciating that while there are…
PUSER TOH
News

A classic arcade game gets the SUPERHOT treatment

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. PUSER TOH (PC, Mac, Linux) SOS SOSOWSKI With the arrival of the Polish-made first-person shooter SUPERHOT, fellow Polish game creator Sos Sosowski decided to make a small tribute to the game’s “time only moves when you move” concept. But rather than make another shooter, Sosowski applied the principal to classic videogame Pong (1972), making for a surprisingly fresh result. In PUSER TOH (an anagram), moving your paddle up and down the screen causes the ball to speed up, while keeping it stationary results in the ball travelling very slowly. It…
Review

SUPERHOT turns the shooter into a power ballad

Nothing happens without the player’s say-so in SUPERHOT. Their avatar—represented only by a pair of black, jagged-polygonal hands and a gun—is in complete control of the world. Enemies depicted by shimmering red silhouettes run into gauzy, white-washed rooms, ready to fight. Their figures and the black of bullets and nearby weapons stick out like exclamation marks. But nothing moves. Despite the action of every level’s opening, the impending violence hangs suspended in the air until the player is ready for it to begin. The enemies form a tableau that moves as slowly as cold molasses, only speeding up when the…
SUPERHOT
News

SUPERHOT is so close it’s burning our skin

The wait for SUPERHOT is over. Almost. With a newly announced release date of February 25th, the high-contrast, low-poly fever dreams of the Poland-based Superhot Team are only a few weeks away. A teaser trailer that accompanied the announcement shows these highly-stylized bullet hallucinations in action. While the “time only moves when you do” mechanic gives SUPERHOT the complexion of a puzzle game, it’s the frenzied, John Woo-inspired combat that’s center stage in the new trailer. But behind the brief and seamless action of this last look before launch lies a longer road to development. What was originally born of a…
Article

SUPERHOT and the unique temporality of videogames

When the Wachowskis transported bullet-time over from Hong Kong cinema to The Matrix (1999), mainstream western audiences were wowed. This was the beginning of something new for action cinema, the ability for the camera to pivot around action, playing a moment from a multiplicity of angles that stunned and awed in equal measure. The camera was unhinged from static points, instead echoing the orbital movement of a clock or pendulum. In the years following, slow-mo sequences in games misguidedly attempted to convert what was so fascinating about that spectacle into something the player could experience. Instead, it only introduced the…
News

SUPERHOT teases something scary in new screenshot

SUPERHOT is getting an official release date soon, according to its latest update, but until then, the team has some screenshots and gifs from the upcoming space-time-shooter to share. One in particular seems to tease something eerie: the silhouette of a writhing, dragon-like creature cast down from a skylight onto the tiled room below. Anyone who’s seen footage of the SUPERHOT beta from a few months back is aware of the game’s trippier aspects, regarding things like sinister .exe files and secret groups. The original prototype for 7DFPS had hints of an underlying narrative within its super stylish core, but it certainly dives much…