Superhot

For those who are cynical about the future of video games, I give you Superhot. I don't care how pessimistic you are about a world filled with half-broken Call of Duty clones; this mind-bogglingly clever first-person shooter is the antidote. It's not only one of the most inventive games I've played in recent memory, but also creates an endlessly fascinating world I desperately wanted to know more about.

Without giving too much away, you play a guy who has been sent a mysterious game called Superhot. It's a first-person shooter that has us killing faceless red enemies in a series of sterile white rooms. But what first seems ordinary quickly becomes anything but as we're treated to new updates and patches. Suddenly the game becomes about a lot more than just a series of VR training missions, giving players a story they will definitely not be expecting.

The gimmick here is that time only moves forward as you move. That's not to say time stands completely still, but everything slows down to a fraction of the speed as you stand in place looking around. With so much time on your hands, this gives our hero the ability to pull off the kinds of super-human moves I've been dreaming about ever since watching The Matrix in 1999.

Because you can essentially stop time, this allows us to weave through speeding bullets and take those red guards by surprise. We can punch our foes square in the chest, grab their gun out of the air and riddle them with bullets, all before they even have a chance to blink. And with countless guns and melee weapons at your disposal, you'll never get bored finding new ways to slaughter the clueless villains.

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Each stage plays out like an elaborate VR training mission, giving our hero an enclosed area filled with a set amount of enemies to kill. While this sounds simple enough, you'll quickly realize that there's almost no room for error. All it takes is one shot to send you back to the beginning of the stage, so you'll need to constantly stay alert to where the guards are. But with so many weapons and strategies, you'll be able to tackle each attempt in completely new ways. Even when I found myself dying over and over again in later stages, Superhot never felt repetitive.

It helps that the scope of the stages and gameplay continues to expand the deeper you get into the game. This could have easily been little more than a series of challenge stages built around the killer gimmick, but Superhot takes it to a whole new level. The same goes for the story, which starts out simple enough and quickly turns into something else entirely. I was blown away by the experience and immediately compelled to tell everybody I knew about it. That's about as much as you can hope for from a video game.

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It's also worth noting that Superhot goes out of its way to sell the game-inside-a-game premise. We log into what appears to be an old computer terminal, complete with folders filled with videos, apps and even other games. The thoroughness to the presentation won me over from the very beginning, perfectly setting me up for the wild trip I was about to experience.

While the story mode will only take a few hours to complete, Superhot is bursting with content once you're done. Between the Challenge and Endless modes, players will find a lot of new ways to play through the game multiple times. You'll also be able to edit and upload your favorite moves to Superhot's social media page, cleverly known as Killstagram. Here you can see how the rest of the community is using their new-found skills to rid the world of red soldiers.

From the retro computer terminal to the staggeringly original gameplay, I loved every second of Superhot. I never got tired of finding new ways to take out large groups of enemies, and the extensive list of extras means I'll be at it for many hours to come. And best of all, this is a stark reminder that talented game developers still have a lot of good ideas up their sleeves.