The new Superhot game does something a little different: it makes you wait hours after the ending before you can play the game again.
THERE MAY BE SPOILERS AHEAD.
I’ll keep the spoilers very light here, but essentially, Superhot: Mind Control Delete, a time-bending puzzle shooter that came out on 16th July 2020, has a running theme of guilt – a guilt the player feels for wanting to play more of the game. There’s a sense throughout that Superhot itself feels like the player is an addict who struggles to let go. It’s called Mind Control Delete, after all.
And then we get to the ending. There’s no real way to “beat” Superhot: Mind Control Delete, in the sense that players can continue to play it for as long as they like before triggering the ending. But once you do trigger the ending, which I won’t spoil, the player is forced to leave the game running for two-and-a-half hours in order for Superhot to “recover deleted data”. There is no other in-game way to continue.
If you want to see how this looks, the video below reveals it. Spoiler warnings, obviously:
Superhot MCD ending Watch on YouTube
Interestingly, Superhot: MCD shipped with this lock set to eight hours, but the game was patched to reduce it to two-and-a-half hours (this patch is still not available on all platforms, so some on console still have to wait eight hours). Still, there’s been an interesting reaction to this ending, speculation as to why it’s in the game, what the developer is trying to do with it, and plenty of opinion on whether it’s clever – or just plain annoying.