Violent video games are an enduring and well-documented cultural phenomenon. Of the 10 best-selling video games of 2013, seven contained some form of armed combat. One one hand, this isn’t surprising. Since video games are games, they usually have conditions for winning and losing, and more often than not, these conditions are synonymous with killing and being killed, respectively. Sometimes this practice is defended as harmless fantasy, while at other times it’s claimed that the violence is indicative of the form’s maturity. Neither is true: no intake of culture is without its consequences, particularly so in a participatory medium like video games. While some texts are informed meaningfully by their violence, a game like Call of Duty is not one of them. Hotline Miami, however, might be. The game, described by Eurogamer as a top-down “f**k-em-up”, was released by Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin in 2012. The average level plays out like this. You wake up in your apartment. There is a message on your phone, innocuously phrased, giving you an address. You drive to that address. Outside, you don one of several animal masks, all of which have names of their own, such as a rooster named Richard, a dog named Ted and a horse called Don Juan. Then you enter the building and kill everyone inside.

Or, more accurately, that’s what you’ll try to do. But make no mistake: everyone you’re trying to kill is trying to kill you, too. Realistically, what will happen is you’ll burst into the house and immediately be stabbed or shot by one of the dozens of bald men in white suits that stalk the building’s halls. If any of them see you, you have about a half-second to react before they do. If you don’t use that half-second well, only the improbable grace of sheer luck will keep you from being killed instantly. So you have to be strategic about it: if enemies pace along the perimeters of a room, knock one down with the door when you enter; if you’re out of ammunition, throw your gun at someone; if you can kill someone quietly, without alerting his friends in the next room, do so. The game develops a natural rhythm: there’s a long period of deliberation, followed by a quick inhalation as you slam open the door to the next room and attempt to execute your painstakingly devised plan perfectly in three seconds. And it has to be perfect, or it won’t work. This game punishes your mistakes, even the small ones. This level of accountability makes the game difficult, but it also makes it exciting, and it’s extremely rewarding when you finally pull it off.

But there’s also a moment of sickness afterward, as you walk to your car past the mutilated bodies. It’s clear that Hotline Miami contains elements one could find distasteful, and its violence is the most obvious of them. While it lacks the snuff-film photorealism of a game like Manhunt or Mortal Kombat––the game is two-dimensional, with blurry sprites and a neon-soaked palette––the violence has a visceral quality, the intensity of which had been unmatched for me since the illicit, horrifying thrill I got when I first played Doom at a friend’s house in elementary school. Which brings me to the second potentially distasteful aspect of Hotline Miami: it makes violence fun.

Of course, this is true of most violent video games, but most of them also provide the player with a justification for their acts of murder. The protagonist of Assassin’s Creed II, for example, becomes an assassin to avenge the murder of his family, and even Modern Warfare 2’s civilian slaughter, a controversy in its own right, was done in the name of counter-terrorism. Hotline Miami has no such justification, but its absence reveals the unsettling complacency of the player in their surrender of agency to the murderous narratives of video games. This self-awareness is mirrored in the game’s plot, which consciously oscillates between aping the clichés of action movies and undercutting them with bizarre lapses into existentialism. Of course, this isn’t to say that Hotline Miami is able to justify its senseless violence or that it lacks problematic aspects––far from it. Particularly troubling is its treatment of women, which it borrows wholesale from the sexist tropes of the same action movies it wants to satirize. This is precisely what makes Hotline Miami troubling: it’s an honest reflection on the culture of violence it contributes to. It doesn’t give you a reason. It just gives you an address.

Hotline Miami is available for Mac and PC at hotlinemiami.com.