Fast and vicious, strange and surreal.
The tale gets told through cutscenes in the same, stylized sixteen-bit style as the rest of the game. Your nameless character receives messages on his answering machine (an allusion to Hotline Miami's 1989 setting) requesting various seemingly mundane chores to be completed. You then drive off in a Delorian and commence killing people immediately. It is never gets made clear exactly how these messages relate to your killing sprees. The obvious assumption is you are a hired killer and the messages are your hits given to you in a sort of code, which is simple enough. However, this motive becomes obfuscated after later interactions with a group of masked men and a very strange convenience store clerk.
The fact that you really don't know why you're killing everyone is driven home by game play. Your character is best controlled by using the keyboard to move and mouse to aim your weapon. Enemies come at you mindlessly and the AI is very easily tricked--so much so that the levels play out almost as puzzles where you figure out how to game the AI rather than true action/shooter levels. Death comes to you easily but you restart the level immediately w/o even the music missing a beat. Though when you do finally complete a level, the music cuts and gives way to an agonizing drone and as you walk back out to your car on the way out it becomes very clear that what you have just done is a wonton, vicious slaughter: dozens of dead bodies piled up and you still don't know quite why you did it.
There are very few games that combine storytelling and gameplay so effectively as Hotline Miami. It never really offers up a complete explanation but it expertly uses the tension built by that bit of confusion to draw you into the gameplay, which might feel a bit repetitive. Aside from the occasional frustrating boss or group of enemies though, it remains engaging throughout the half-dozen hours it will likely take to complete and works well for both short and long gaming sessions. While it does offer plenty for those who just want a quick and viscous kill fix, Hotline Miami will be most satisfying for those who like to immerse themselves in strange, twisted stories and don't necessarily need every little lose end tied up at the end of the day.