Time moves only when you do.

Super.

What if an FPS played like a turn-based puzzle game? Superhot set out to answer this question, and made it work. Every encounter is deadly - everything dies in one hit, including you. So you need to use the stopped-time ability wisely, as well as everything in your environment, to choreograph a ballet of movement and violence in slow motion.

 Hot.

You walk into a room, see enemies raise their guns to fire. You strafe out of the way, grab a bottle from a counter, and throw it at one of the enemies. It disintegrates into jagged red polygons against the stark white background.

Super.

Punch the enemy nearest to you, grab his gun from mid-air, shoot another enemy, then duck behind a pillar as a hail of bullets narrowly fly past your ear.

Hot.

Quickly check around - you see the tell-tale glow of new enemies spawning in. More fodder to kill. You move, you shoot, your gun clicks - it's empty. No reloading in this game, but you can always throw the empty gun for another kill.

Super. 

After a couple of minutes, the last enemy dies and the scene fades - you're done.

Hot.

You can watch the replay, if you like - they're not as flashy as I'd hoped but it's fun to see your movements in real time. Then it's onto the next mission - a new arena, new enemy placements, new weapons to use, another dance routine of death and violence.

Super. Hot. Super. Hot.

It's a gimmick that just about stays fresh enough for the game's runtime - albeit only just. But it's fun while it lasts, and well worth playing. The game's aesthetics carry it perhaps more than anything else - crunchy DOS-styled menus leading into clean white environments, black objects, and red enemies. Bullets fly with distinctive red trails - for a game played in slow motion, a lot of care is taken to ensure the arenas are clear, bright, and readable.

The levels aren't always as sophisticated or fluid as I'd like - more than once I found myself wiggling side-to-side purely to advance time, so that an enemy spawner closet would finally spit out the last goon and allow me to finish the level. Or occasionally I would die to the game choosing to spawn new enemies behind me, where I couldn't see them - and the game gives you no warning that this has happened unless you see the spawn room glowing. Being thrown back to the start of a level after several minutes working through it in slow-motion helps tire out the central gimmick faster than it needs to, especially when death feels unfair - rightly or wrongly.

Nonetheless, Superhot is a curiosity well worth exploring, so I'd recommend it if you can find it on sale.