Call Back Later: Hotline Miami 2 Releasing Q3 2014

When I first learned of Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number's existence, it was set to storm into our lives armed with nothing but a pool cue and the steely resolve of someone who's died in the same room, like, 58 times in a row at the tail end of 2013. It is now the tail beginning of 2014, but still the storied hotline goes straight to the answering machine. So then, when will we finally get to feel deeply uncomfortable about gruesomely killing a whole mess of people again? Try mid-to-late 2014.

Developer Dennaton made a characteristically terse announcement on Twitter:

"Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number will launch in Q3 2014. Act accordingly. New stuff, old stuff, weird stuff and violent stuff all converging with some surprises. Should be worth the wait."

So that means sometime around July, August, or September. But will it be worth the wait? Will it really? Seems like a pretty outrageous thing for a game developer to say about its own sequel to one of the most acclaimed, nearly perfect breakout successes of 2012. I'm suspicious, naturally.

But seriously, I've sent a mail to Dennaton to find out why Hotline Miami 2 has managed to slip so far into the sadly not-neon-psychepink future, and I'll let you know if I find out anything. Perhaps the game has expanded its scope markedly since I last saw it. Maybe Dennaton has spent months making the doors somehow even better. Or maybe, well, there were certain story elements that at least warranted a little rewiring, if not outright removal.

All plausible reasons for delay, certainly, but I'm going to assume the real reason is that they've decided to replace all the blood with geysers of unkillable kitties. They cascade from fresh corpses, and the world immediately becomes a quantifiably better place.