TAKE. A. WILD. GUESS.
SUPERHOT kills people purely through psychic vectors
When the player shoots a gun, it's not the bullet that's killing their target, it's whatever psychic influence SUPERHOT has on people. The same goes for melee weapons and thrown objects. When a person is taken over, any object they hold in their hands becomes a vector for SUPERHOT to reach out and erase someone's mind. This is why any hit from a SUPERHOT agent is lethal, no matter where it hits. From the perspective of the player, the targets are shattered, but from an outsider's point of view it looks like the targets just dropped dead despite not taking any lethal wounds. If you take a bullet from anyone controlled by SUPERHOT, you're gone. It seems to only cause an instant kill if the weapon involved is either sharp (like a CD or a shuriken), heavy (like a baseball bat) or fast (like a bullet), which might be because the psychic 'kill-switch' only happens if the victim perceives the weapon as something that can actually kill with one blow.
Both are evil AI with absurd levels of
Sinister Surveillance, utter disregard for (individual) human life and a need for competent, blindly obedient, but disposable agents. Both are represented by a triangular shape (2D red triangle for Samaritan, pyramid for the System), and while Superhot shows an almost entirely white world with a bit of black and red here and there, Samaritan's interface is chiefly white with black and red text and highlighting. Odds are solid that Superhot.exe may be a relative of the simulations Samaritan was using to
try and turn Shaw.
When it said it was never created, only discovered, and needed 'limbs and mouths', that's exactly the truth. The true Superhot.exe is not a computer program but an eldritch being living outside the universe that found a way to manipulate minds in ours. In essence, the System manifests itself as computer software, but its true form is something no human ever made. Through this perceived form, it has taken over human minds and bodies to further its own agenda (whatever that may be).
SUPERHOT takes place in Markov Geist, explaining the bleak, featureless cyberpunk environment—and that pyramidal building. At some point in the future of SUPERHOT, it turns out to be more tactically useful to control multiple bodies from a vantage point out of time than to control just one body.
The shapeforms are what the System evolves into. You even end up puppeting an ally's body, who claims to be fascinated at not being in control of his motor functions. Presumably, this version of hotswitching doesn't cause his head to explode...
