Ludography
77/100
Players100 ratings
84/100
Critics10 reviews
More scores
Metacritic35 critic reviews
78/100
Metacritic usersuser score
68/100
GameFAQsJust Right
3.42/5
Player reviews
85% positive9,293 reviews
Steam Deck
Verified
Runs on
Windows, Mac, Linux
Price
US$24.99

Where to get it

Superhot: Mind Control Delete cover

2020 · Superhot Team · First-person shooter · Indie

Superhot: Mind Control Delete

The third game in the SuperHot franchise - Mind Control Delete gives you more insight into the world of SuperHot, more story, more signature gameplay. Hours and hours of timeless combat. Keep dancing the slow motion ballet of destruction for so much longer than ever before.

Released
16 July 2020
Platforms
LinuxPlayStation 4StadiaWindowsXbox OneXbox Series X/SmacOS
Genres
First-person shooterIndiePuzzleShooter
Developers
Superhot Team
Publishers
Superhot Team
Modes
Single-player
Perspective
First person
Themes
ActionScience fiction
Country
Poland
Age ratings
PEGI 12USK 12GRAC ALLCLASS_IND 12ACB PGESRB T
Languages
Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, English, English (UK), French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish and 3 more
Time to beat
7hmain story14hcompletionist

About

Superhot: Mind Control Delete is a 2020 independent first-person shooter video game developed and published by Superhot Team. It is a sequel to 2016's Superhot and expands on the game mechanics by utilizing roguelike elements.

Players say

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Superhot: Mind Control Delete retains the core mechanics of its predecessor and adds roguelike elements: Players are placed on a level (represented as a text mode graph) and must complete each node to access the other nodes connected to it. To complete a node, the player must complete a sequence of consecutive maps of Superhot. These maps themselves feature endlessly spawning enemies, and the player must kill a certain amount of them to complete the map; unlike Superhot, however, the player has a certain amount of hearts they can lose before they are killed - if they are killed, the sequence is regenerated and the player must begin the sequence again from the start. There are four levels in total, with the ultimate goal being finding the node to move to the level above: As the player goes on, the difficulty increases, with longer sequences, some enemies holding guns that break when the enemy is killed, enemies who are only partially vulnerable, enemies that explode into projectiles when killed, environmental hazards and glitching scenery.

Throughout the game, the player can utilize two kinds of power-ups they can find in certain nodes: one of four "core" power-ups - "More" adds an extra third heart to the player's health, "Charge" teleports a player to an enemy and punches it, "Recall" causes a thrown katana to return and slice everything in its way, and "Hotswitch" is the switching ability from the first game - can be selected before each map sequence, while choices between two random "hack" powerups may be offered at certain points during a sequence; both types only last for the duration of that sequence. The power-ups may increase health, shorten reload time, increase player speed or ammo capacity, or offer some other gameplay benefit. Finding a power-up node unlocks that power-up to be available from the random pool, and also provides a short tutorial for it; "core" nodes also require players to complete a map sequence before unlocking the power-up.

Story

Mind Control Delete's storytelling is more sparse than its predecessor's, and is largely told in text fragments found in nodes; the story alludes to four characters - the player and the three boss enemies - inside the Superhot entity: The protagonist, "Avarice", is shown to be obsessed with getting "more" (a theme that permeates the game UI by using the word "MORE" as e.g. the button to start the game), and is presented in a recurring sequence where the player is in an abandoned building and has to kill a lone enemy sitting in front of Superhot; "Dog" appears to be a mentally disabled person crippled by anxiety, "Nindża" appears to be a school student using Superhot to gain katana skills in order to take revenge on their bully, and "Addict" appears to be a person addicted to the game, with allusions that the Addict is in fact the protagonist of the original Superhot.

After the fourth level, the player can reach a fifth, glitched level, where the game demands them to "give up" their core power-ups, through a level sequence with the corresponding boss, after which the game removes that core from the game permanently. Following that, the game then forces the player to give up their hacks as well, and finishes on a lengthy map sequence where the player has no special abilities left. The game then insists that the player must give up even more things, and in the following level sequence, the player must give up all basic game functionality like shooting or looking around one-by-one, until the game declares the final thing to give up is "control", and it ends the game with the same recurring Avarice sequence as it has done previously.

Development

Superhot: Mind Control Delete was released into early access in December 2017, and was officially released on 16 July 2020. Players who owned the original game before Mind Control Delete came out were given free copies on the release date.

The game features a soundtrack by Zardonic.

Reception

The game has received "generally favorable reviews" on the review aggregation website Metacritic. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received strong approval, being recommended by 83% of critics. Destructoid's Anthony Marzano called it "possibly one of the most fun games I've ever played", and "an improvement on everything that made the original Superhot great." GameSpot's Justin Clark was more mixed in his review, writing "The fundamental flaw of Mind Control Delete is that it's adding complication to a game premise that works largely because of its simplicity."

Releases by platformdates and regions as published

PlatformReleasedRegions
LinuxEarly Access7 December 2017Worldwide · Worldwide 16 July 2020
macOSEarly Access7 December 2017Worldwide · Worldwide 16 July 2020
WindowsEarly Access7 December 2017Worldwide · Worldwide 16 July 2020
PlayStation 416 July 2020Worldwide
Xbox One16 July 2020Worldwide
Stadia18 August 2020Worldwide
Xbox Series X/S26 February 2021Worldwide

Editions and related releases

Included in
Superhot: One of Us Bundle
Follows
SuperhotSuperhot VR

Games like this

Collections6 collections

Years

Description adapted from its source, CC BY-SA 4.0.