Superhot

Superhot sets the player in a minimalistic environment, taking out hostile attackers that are trying to kill them. Weapons picked up by the player have limited ammunition and break easily, requiring the player to rely on defeating enemies to attain new weapons, or making melee kills. Taking a single hit from an enemy bullet kills the player, requiring them to restart the level. Though the game mechanics are typical of most shooters, time only progresses normally when the player moves or fires a gun, otherwise time is slowed; this is described in the game's tagline, "Time Moves Only When You Move".

The game originally was a three-level prototype browser game. In expanding to the full game, Superhot Team created a campaign mode across approximately thirty-one levels, estimated to be as long as Portal. The full game includes additional weapons, such as new kinds of firearms, explosives, melee weapons, and improvised weapons like billiard balls that can be thrown at enemies, and introduces AI enemies that have similar awareness as the player and can dodge the player's bullets. One significant change from the earlier prototype is that the player does not automatically pick up a weapon when they pass over it but must enact a specific control to do so, enabling the player to selectively choose and use weapons, or grab weapons dropped by enemies. The full game enables the player to jump and as long as the jump button or key is held, the player can slow down time to plan and perform actions, enabling aerial gun combat.

The Superhot narrative works in several metanarrative levels: the player plays a fictionalized version of themselves sitting in front of their DOS prompt, getting a message from their friend who offers them a supposedly leaked copy of a new game called superhot.exe, claiming that the only way to access it is with a crack. Launching the game immediately thrusts the player into a series of seemingly unconnected levels via different points of view, all based around killing hostiles, after which the game glitches out and disconnects. After this crash, the player's friend sends an updated version of the .exe file, apparently a new version of the game that fixes the "glitches".

As both the player and their friend play through superhot.exe, it becomes apparent that the player's presence in the game is monitored by whoever is responsible for the game – referring to itself as a "system" – and demands they cease playing via various methods, such as ominous threats showing the player's in-game residence, and altering the player's messages to their friend to urge them to stop playing, eventually harassing the player's friend into giving up on the game and engineering a fallout with them. As the player goes through more and more levels, each apparently targeting specific locales, the system's warnings grow more ominous, telling them the player is unaware of the consequences of their actions, eventually forcing the player to walk to their own in-game house and to their in-game player character, a figure wearing VR headgear, and punch themselves into unconsciousness. Upon doing so, the "game" glitches out, and the player character wakes with a severe head injury. Afterward, the system warns the player once again to stop using Superhot, and forces the player to quit the game entirely.

Superhot was originally developed for the 2013 7 Day FPS Challenge, held that August, in which teams of programmers were given a week to develop complete, functional prototypes of games. Superhot's director Piotr Iwanicki stated that he was in part inspired by the Flash game "Time4Cat", in which the player controls a cat trying to collect food on a busy road intersection; time only moves when the player moves the cat. The team also took inspiration from the music video for the 2013 song "Bad Motherfucker" by the Russian band Biting Elbows, which shows a special agent from a first-person perspective escaping from a hostage situation through parkour and gunplay. They combined these ideas for their Challenge prototype. The name of the game is based on how the two words "super" and "hot" best represent the game being "positive" and "intense".

The Challenge prototype only featured three levels across three computers, which, to meet the deadline, the team strung together in three separate applications and called the game episodic. They then refined it and released it as a free browser game in September 2013, whereupon it received extensive attention from players. They also submitted the game through the Steam Greenlight process, and within five days, it was successfully approved for later distribution by Valve, making the game the fastest to be approved through Greenlight at the time. Iwanicki stated that the positive reaction to the web demonstration was a result of players looking for any variation in the standard formula of first-person shooters, which had not really changed since the development of Doom.

The web demonstration proved popular, drawing attention to the game and aiding in the success of its Kickstarter. The game has been compared thematically to The Matrix film franchise and the Max Payne video game series, and with environments described by Wired UK's Philippa Warr as playing "through Quentin Tarantino's version of the Mad Men opening credits". The "time moves only when you do" mechanic, as described by its creators, has been called the "Braid of first-person shooters", in which the time mechanic makes the shooter more like a strategy game than a shooter.

On its full release, Superhot received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. Kyle Orland of Ars Technica believed the game had a "short but sweet running time" for its campaign mode with plenty of additional playtime available through the challenge and endless game modes to keep the game interesting. Eurogamer's Christian Donlan considered both the gameplay and the narrative around it working well together to form "that rare piece of charmingly curated violence that dares to provoke difficult thought". Chris Plante of The Verge found that while the narrative was passable, the gameplay and design choices that drive the title away from being a simple first-person shooter, such as the inclusion of a red trail to show the path of bullets that subtly allow the player to identify their source, made Superhot "something wholly original in a genre that has become bereft of originality". Christopher Byrd for the Washington Post called the game a "soulful, artistic shooter", using its metafiction to "[flaunt] its understanding of the discourse around video games".

The success of Superhot allowed the Superhot Team to establish a "Superhot Presents" funding system for other small indie games, looking for more quirky titles that need financial assistance. At its launch in August 2019, the Superhot Presents fund was already supporting the Frog Detective series by Worm Club, and Knuckle Sandwich by Andrew Brophy.