Personally I see the whole thing as a sort of joke on the developers part after getting to the secret ending it’s just a bunch of Cold War gobbledygook no one cares about. They just to upset the “Russo-American Coalition” which is mentioned for the first and only time moments before the secret ending is over. I don’t think the janitors (or anyone else) were making any money from the killings. Why does Jacket apparently attack them for revenge? It makes no sense. The Russians aren’t behind the animal mask killers, anyway (obviously! They're the animal-masks' target!). I find these to be the parts of the game that most suggest themselves as not really happening. This murder also leads up to the most ridiculous parts of the game the assault on a police station and the VERY absurd showdown with the Russian mob boss. Why would they want to have him killed (his girlfriend apparently being gunned down just for being there)? The janitors should consider him a valuable pawn. We see Jacket's girlfriend murdered by an animal-mask wearing assassin.but why? Jacket always obeys the phone messages for whatever reason. This explains why the horse mask shows concern for Jacket's well-being, why the rooster mask asks questions to provoke reflection, and why the owl mask constantly expresses hatred for Jacket. Jacket himself is the wearer of the rooster mask, and the owl mask is worn by a generic Russian gangster. The person wearing a horse mask is a woman, and the woman Jacket carries away from that one level is the only female character in the game.
Here's a detail of the figures who appear over the words "Hotline Miami": Here's one example of it I just quickly got from Google image search: I'm not sure if this was actually intentional as part of the story and script but if the two janitor types behind the whole thing were making so much money etc, why do they seemingly not care one bit when the alternative (biker) character is about to kill them? -The identity of the masked people is pretty obvious if you look at the "cover art" for the game. If there really were no consequences for ignoring the messages, why is the main character's girl (that he rescues, somewhat ironically) killed by the guy who's in the police station? I'm unsure how that fits into the rest of the story. Who are the masked men the main character visits? Is this 'real' or the character's loss of reality? However, I have two or three main questions which I'm not sure warrant their own thread (?) Warning, spoilers (obviously). I was surprised how much the game actually made sense towards the end, in a way (as described perfectly above). Originally posted by Himitsu:That all makes sense.