N.P.P.D. RUSH: The milk of Ultraviolet

Hotline Miami is the reference point people reach for when this one comes up, and I get why: same era, same appetite for violence rendered in colors that hurt to look at. The difference that actually matters is legibility. Hotline Miami teaches you its grammar in about ninety seconds and then trusts you to speak it fluently. N.P.P.D. RUSH teaches you nothing. It hands you a stanza, a control scheme, and a closing door. That stanza is not my invention. The text Rail Slave Games put on the store page is verse, not copy. Nauseous pines, a noxious abyss, a floating twin, being the key to nothing. There is no bullet list of systems, no genre pitch, no reassuring caption telling you what your hands will be doing for the next few hours. Steam files it under Action and Indie, released February 2014, single-player, PC, with Trading Cards attached as the one concession to normal storefront life. Everything else about it is a refusal. What you are buying is one person's interior weather rendered as software you have to operate, and the operating is the hard part. When it works, it reaches somewhere almost nothing else on Steam reaches for. There is a particular sensation this game produces, a kind of pressurized dread where you cannot tell whether you are failing or whether failure is the intended texture, and I have never gotten that from a game with a competent tutorial. The visual noise is not decoration laid over a normal action game. It is the thing itself. I will happily defend an opening that withholds, and I will defend a work that assumes you can sit inside confusion without demanding a waypoint. Plenty of small, strange releases from this period got buried for being difficult in ways that had nothing to do with skill, and I would rather a solo developer swing at something this uncompromising than sand a good idea into a shape that reviews well. Here is where I stop advocating. The Steam consensus sits at Mostly Negative, 33 percent positive across 771 reviews, and I do not think that number is a crowd failing to appreciate art. Obscurity has a cost, and this charges it up front with no installment plan. There is a version of deliberate opacity that pulls you deeper, where each thing you figure out reframes the last thing you figured out. There is another version where opacity and dysfunction become impossible to tell apart, and you stop asking what the game means because you are still stuck on what the game wants. This falls into the second category more often than its defenders admit. Intent is not the same as execution, and a work can be sincere, personal, entirely uncompromised, and still leave most people holding a controller with no idea what just happened to them. It also does not have the pacing discipline I usually praise in short games. Knowing when to end is a craft, and knowing when to explain exactly one thing is part of that same craft. So who is this for. Not people who want a good action game, and honestly not people who want a good game in the ordinary sense. It is for the specific reader who collects difficult objects, who has a folder of abandoned Steam oddities they revisit at two in the morning, who thinks of a purchase as funding a strange transmission rather than buying entertainment. If you have ever finished something baffling and felt grateful anyway, you already know whether this is your kind of thing. If you have not, this is a bad place to start, and there are far kinder experimental games that will show you the same territory with a hand on your back. I am glad it exists. I am glad someone made it exactly this way and refused to blink. I just cannot stand here and tell you that you will enjoy it, because most of the people who tried did not.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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