Broom

Lore & Background

In the world of Hotline Miami, the line between a household chore and a homicide is essentially nonexistent. The broom exists in the same visual grammar as the kitchen knife, the garden shears, the baseball bat propped in the garage. It's a tool of the home, repurposed by a city that has forgotten the difference between cleaning and killing. The pixel-art aesthetic renders it with the same flat, saturated confidence as a neon sign or a chrome bumper—no judgment, no commentary, just a thing that can be picked up and used. The broom's place in the weapon hierarchy tells a small story about the game's design philosophy. Hotline Miami doesn't gate its weapons behind skill checks or inventory slots. Everything is on the floor, in the hand, on the counter. The broom is no exception. It's there because the level designer needed a melee option in a room where a bat or a knife felt too specific, or because the player simply walked past the better options and grabbed what was closest. The game trusts you to make it work. There's a darkly comedic energy to the broom that fans latch onto. In a game full of elaborate mask personas, synthwave soundtracks, and rooms carpeted in pixelated blood, the broom is the straight man. It's the equivalent of a character saying, 'I don't have a weapon,' and then picking up the nearest thing. It's Miami pragmatism distilled into a single sprite: if it's in your hand, it's a weapon.

In Their Own Story

The apartment smells like old coffee and bleach. You're in the hallway, third floor, and the last guard rounded the corner two seconds ago. You didn't grab the bat by the door. You didn't reach for the knife on the counter. Your hand closed around the wooden handle of the broom because it was *there*, because your fingers found the grain before your brain finished the thought. You swing. The bristles catch the back of his jacket, the thwack muffled by the bass line thumping through the walls. He stumbles. You swing again. Slower this time. The rhythm is wrong, the arc too wide, and for a half-second you're just a person in a hallway with a cleaning implement, and the synth track keeps spinning, indifferent, beautiful, while the pixel blood spreads across the linoleum in a flat, bright red that looks almost decorative. He goes down. You stand there, broom in hand, breathing. The music doesn't stop. It never stops. You lean the broom back against the wall, bristles down, and walk to the next room.

Reader's Guide

The broom is a short-range, multi-hit melee weapon. You pick it up by walking into its sprite, and it attaches to your character's hand for the duration of the level. There is no holster, no drop mechanic—once you have it, you have it until the level ends or you die. Swing speed is the broom's defining trait. Compared to a bat or a knife, the wind-up is noticeably longer, and the recovery between swings is slower. This means you cannot spam attacks the way you can with faster melee options. Each swing is a commitment: you see the arc, you see the follow-through, and if you whiff, you're exposed for a beat that a bat-wielder would have already recovered from. Spacing is everything. Step in, swing, step out. Let the animation finish before you commit the next. Damage-wise, the broom is not a one-hit kill. Most enemies will require two or three clean hits to drop, and heavier opponents may need more. This makes the broom a riskier choice in multi-enemy rooms: while you're working through a guard, the second one is already raising a pistol. It shines in one-on-one corridors, in rooms where you've already cleared the immediate threat and just need to finish the last straggler, or in moments of pure desperation where nothing else is within reach. Where it appears: the broom is scattered across several levels, typically in domestic or office settings—kitchens, hallways, storage rooms. It's not guaranteed in every level, so you'll often walk past it and never notice until you need a melee option and realize you're holding a broom. Its placement is deliberate: it's the fallback, the 'this is all you've got' weapon, and the game expects you to make it work. In the flow of a run, the broom is a tempo weapon. It slows your kill pace, forces you to be deliberate, and punishes greed. If you're in a high-energy, fast-clear mindset, the broom will feel like fighting with a wet towel. But if you slow down, match its rhythm, and treat each swing as a small dance step, it becomes surprisingly satisfying. The thwack of bristles on a pixelated guard, the flat red splash, the synth track still spinning underneath—it's Hotline Miami at its most absurd and most committed.

Did You Know?

• The broom is one of several 'household' melee weapons in Hotline Miami, sharing a design family with items like the kitchen knife and the baseball bat—everyday objects elevated to lethal tools without any in-game justifi
• Because the broom is a multi-hit weapon, using it in a room with multiple enemies creates a significantly higher risk window than a one-hit-kill melee option, making it a deliberate design choice to reward players who cl
• The game's pixel-art style renders the broom with the same visual weight and saturation as a machete or an axe, reinforcing the tone that in this world, no weapon is 'lesser'—it's all just a thing you swing at a person.
• Hotline Miami's weapon pickups are location-based and level-specific; a broom in one level may not exist in another, meaning the player's melee toolkit changes from run to run based on what's physically in the room.