Reviews
[Review] ‘SUPERHOT’ on Switch Brings the Ultra-Cool Puzzle Shooter to a Fitting New Home
The beauty of SUPERHOT is in its reverse use of the action replay. Usually, you watch in real-time and see the action replay at a slower pace, to really appreciate the finer details of what you’ve just witnessed. In SUPERHOT you get the opposite, and it is applied to starkly-designed gun-fu action. You play in relative slow motion, then see the fruits of your destructive labor in regular time, letting you marvel in the quick and ruthless chaos you’ve just caused.
You’re playing a secret computer program that reenacts Hollywood-style action set pieces in a largely blank white world, where certain objects are grey and any person is a polygonal red humanoid shape. From a first-person perspective, you are in control of when the action starts and stops. Every time you move the world moves with you. You can look around before committing to doing so, but otherwise, everything plays out at a significantly slow pace as you figure out how to get through the scene unscathed. A guns-blazing action game that just happens to be a slow-paced puzzler.
In each scenario, bad guys are moving towards you, ready to take you on with fists, baseball bats, knives, guns, and more. You, with the benefit of effectively having bullet-time on your side, can survey the area and take appropriate action.
Say a goon with a gun has you in his sights and all you have is this skill and a nearby pool ball. You pick that pool ball up, hurl it at the goon’s gun hand, causing him to release his grip on it and as the weapon tumbles through the air, you move forward, grab it from the air, and fire it point-blank at the goon’s face, which shatters into red crystals. This gloriously cool action is but a small part of a larger scale fight. SUPERHOT is extremely good at making you feel like you could take on an army of John Wick clones and not be out of breath at the end, let alone very, very dead many times over.
That might not sound all that different from most action games on the surface. You’re an action badass like so many others, but you are as fragile as your many opponents. Take just one hit and it’s curtains for you. There’s no surviving a ship essentially landing on you or heading back into the fray after healing twenty gunshot wounds by hiding behind a bin. No, this is a puzzler first, and to be hit is to have failed, meaning every small movement has to be calculated. That’s SUPERHOT‘s unique selling point, it fuses strategy with action in a fresh and inventive manner, and makes you look good in the process.
Each sequence is relatively brief, making it a good fit for an on-the-go console like the Switch, but these sequences have replay value to them. For starters, there’s never just one exact way to pass them, especially as you end up in increasingly complex scenarios with bad guys coming at you from all angles. There’s a natural flow to fights as a result, rather than a rigidly choreographed brawl, so coming back to them provides ways to experiment. Like any great action scene, feeling compelled to see it again and again shows it’s done its job, and SUPERHOT definitely belongs in that company. The fact you can alter them with different choices is what adds to that compulsion.
SUPERHOT‘s port to the Switch seems to have come off without any hitches. The very setup of SUPERHOT certainly makes it that bit less intensive for the console to run, but it’s honestly almost exactly like its PC-based kin with the added bonus of portability.
SUPERHOT is one of the most interesting gaming fusions of the decade, and it’s been pulled off spectacularly. It leaves you wanting more, which is exactly what it should do. On Switch, its bite-sized action set-piece puzzles have found their most natural home.
SUPERHOT review code for Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher
SUPERHOT is out now on Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One, and PS4
Your enjoyment of Strung will depend on your tolerance of clichés, contrivances, and overused plot devices. There are plenty to go around in Malcolm D. Lee’s new thriller—and each one lands with a conspicuous thud. Yet this is also a movie where the formulaicness leads to amusement.
Strung is already off to a tropey start when the protagonist, a bereft violinist named Laila (Chloe Bailey), is vividly hallucinating during one of her recitals. Who does she see in that ghastly vision on stage? The sister whose death she blames herself for, of course. That’s when Laila wakes up from what’s actually a hallucination within a dream.
After a one-night stand with a handsome rando, another too-good-to-be-true opportunity soon falls into Laila’s lap. Because she’s broke, couch-surfing and forced to practice the violin inside her best friend’s closet, she jumps on it without much forethought. That opportunity is indeed suspicious, though; a wealthy grandmother (Lynn Whitfield) hires the main character to be her granddaughter’s live-in music teacher. The pay and accommodations are definitely good, but what about the client? Or clients, as it turns out.
Strung: Anna Diop as Imani, Lucien Laviscount as Marcus. (Photo by: Ilze Kitshoff/Blumhouse)
First, there’s pianist-in-training Zuri (Romy Woods), the walking definition of “precocious child in a horror movie”. She hides behind the bizarre mask once belonging to her late father, and her preferred form of communication is sharing obscure facts. Eventually, though, Zuri is the least of Laila’s problems; it’s her neglectful, demanding, and temperamental mother (Anna Diop) who proves to be the greatest obstacle at each turn. Diop just about snatches every scene with her zealous performance as the expectant Imani. Yet as amusing as that moody matriarch can be, her behavior brings up a good question: Is this cartoonishly devious character the legit villain here, or is she simply a red herring?
The kid’s creepy mask, along with Blumhouse’s involvement, might suggest a different kind of horror movie is at work here. Strung, however, is more like a smutty modernization of classic domestic thrillers that feature big houses, imperiled women, and heaps of paranoia. Keep in mind, this is not a bait-and-switch situation; Alan B. McElroy’s screenplay never leads the viewer down a different path, only to then send them another way.
Strung feels stitched together from other (and better) movies, and your sussing out the suspects is never a hard task. But on the plus side, this movie is often bright and even a little colorful; it’s not too riddled with scenes of flat darkness or washed-out palettes. The music is also another area of interest; certain choices corroborate that comparison to old Hollywood thrillers.
Chloe Bailey as Laila. (Photo by: Ilze Kitshoff/Blumhouse)
So while Strung does string out a number of overplayed twists—with some being less foreseeable than others—it’s a bit comforting to see how some ideas never cease to be used, no matter how familiar they’ve become. The cast’s eagerness also compensates for the general been-there-done-that quality. So often, their commitment to the story is integral to the movie’s best hand-over-mouth moments (and there are quite a few).
Joe Bob Briggs once said the best source of exploitation movies today is the Lifetime network. If you agree, as well as love Tubi’s own efforts in similar filmmaking, then Strung is made for you. This movie taps that same vein of suspense schlock, all while adding a few flourishes of its own.
Strung streams on Peacock starting on June 26.
Strung (photo: Peacock)
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