Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number takes place in a heavily anachronic order before and after the events of the original, focusing more on the latter between October and December 1991. During the events of Hotline Miami, the player's character, "Jacket," is unwittingly manipulated into killing off the leadership of the Russian Mob by 50 Blessings, a neo-nationalist terror cell that masquerades as a peaceful activist group. The persona of "Richard", a mysterious figure in a rooster mask that occasionally appeared to Jacket in the original game, appears at different points to the game's playable characters. The player controls these individuals in a series of intersecting plotlines exploring both the background and the aftermath of Jacket's rampage.
After his rampage, Jacket has been arrested and brought to trial. He has gained national notoriety as a result of his macabre and horrific mass murders, committed while wearing rubber animal masks; the game's tutorial level takes place in a slasher film adaptation depicting him as "The Pig Butcher", in which his rescue of a drug-addled sex slave during the first game is re-envisioned as a lurid rape and kidnapping scene. The film's star, Martin Brown, is a sociopathic sadist who relishes at being able to act out his violent fantasies during filming. Martin dies early in the game when accidentally shot with live ammunition on set during the shooting of the film's final scene. A journalist, Evan Wright, is writing a book about Jacket's spree and trying to learn more about the people behind it. Evan is given leads from Manny Pardo, a psychotic police detective who uses his position to go on killing sprees during stakeout operations, justifying them as self-defense.
The Fans, five thrill-seeking killers who are emulating Jacket's spree, carry out a string of murders against petty crooks and drug dealers, unaware of the larger context of Jacket's campaign of violence. Eventually they kill a former henchman of the Russian Mafia, now run by the original boss' son, and when the Son attempts to reconnect with said henchman the Fans follow his call to attack his new hideout. The Fans are all killed during this attack; their last survivor, Tony, is personally killed by Pardo after surrendering to the police, to deny him his "fifteen minutes of fame."
The story of The Soldier, the bearded convenience store owner from the previous game, shows him fighting a war against the Soviet Union in Hawaii alongside Jacket in 1985, prior to the first game's events. America appears to be losing this fictitious war, with cities and islands falling to the Soviet Red Army. The Soldier's elite Commando unit has been engaged in a campaign of deep penetration harassment against Russian fortifications and supply depots, however their increasingly detached and psychologically troubled Colonel appears to be losing his grip on reality as the war proceeds, volunteering them for increasingly desperate and dangerous missions while ruminating on their likely impending deaths and the loss of the war. Their last assignment involves besieging a heavily guarded Power Plant controlled by the Russians. As they make their way into the building, the Soviet commander in charge of it, having apparently gone insane, murders the plant's technicians and begins a meltdown on the main reactor before shooting himself in the head. The Soldier saves Jacket's life during their escape attempt, after a booby trap explodes and severely injures two members of their unit including Jacket, but later dies in 1986 during a nuclear strike on San Francisco which decisively terminates the war, revealing his appearances in the previous game to be Jacket's comatose hallucinations.
The game also follows two other 50 Blessings agents from the original game, Jake and Richter. Jake, a virulently nativist Southern patriot, realizes the officially-peaceful 50 Blessings organization is giving him his orders when he meets with one of their representatives, and praises them. If he avoids the fate depicted in the original game (being captured and murdered by the Russian Mafia during a mission), 50 Blessings takes him to a safehouse but kills him anyway to silence him. Richter, the agent who killed Jacket's girlfriend, is revealed to be reluctant to work with 50 Blessings until they threaten his ailing mother. Like Jacket, Richter is captured and imprisoned, but manages to escape during a prison riot orchestrated by 50 Blessings during which other incarcerated members were to kill him to keep him from corroborating Jacket's testimony.
In 1991, the escaped Richter tells his story to Evan in exchange for plane tickets for his mother to come to Hawaii. Evan's marriage and finances, however, are under pressure as he spends more time working on his book, and the player must choose whether he abandons the book or his family.
The final act of the game is centered on the Son, who is trying to reclaim his father's empire from Colombian gangsters who filled the power vacuum the old boss' death left. Pardo also appears, having a nightmare revealing himself to be the "Miami Mutilator", a serial killer he has supposedly been hunting. Fearful of his colleagues catching on to his crimes, Pardo boards himself up in his house. After the Son eliminates the Colombians, he invites his old henchman to visit their new hideout, inadvertently giving away his location to the Fans and triggering the attack depicted earlier. Under the hallucinatory influence of his own designer drugs he goes on a rampage, killing the superhuman monsters he sees the Fans as, then walking off the hideout's roof on a rainbow bridge to his apparent death.
An epilogue shows Richter, reunited with his mother, hearing on the news that the American and Soviet presidents were both assassinated in an attempted coup d'état, with the prime suspect being an American general. The Soviet Union declares this an act of war, and launches several atomic attacks against the United States which obliterate Miami and Hawaii. Each of the surviving characters are then shown in their last moments - Manny, Evan, the actress from Midnight Animal, and finally Jacket alone in a prison cell - before being obliterated by the bombs. Subsequently, starting a new game adds an extra introductory scene where Richard berates the playable characters for, once again, starting down a path that can only end in their deaths.
violence