Beard

Beard, also known as The Soldier, Lieutenant or Nicke, is the tritagonist of Hotline Miami and a playable character in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. Though he refers to himself by numerous aliases in Wrong Number as part of a code language (James, Dan, Ben Smith), his real name is unknown. In the outros to the majority of Hotline Miami's levels he is seen manning the counter of every place Jacket visits to unwind. He cycles through appearances in a convenience store, a pizza place, a movie rental store, and at a bar (always in that order before looping back to the convenience store for the next Part), with each location giving him new apparel, hair style, and attitude. His convenience store iteration greets Jacket as an old friend he was worried about, his pizza iteration wears a uniform and relates everything back to his job (interpreting the empty, unsafe Miami streets as people "losing their taste for pizza"), his VHS store iteration enjoys violence, hates Russians, and is excited about the masked killings (encouraging Jacket to "enjoy himself"), and his bartender iteration morosely remembers the past ("I haven't felt this way since San Francisco"). He always appears to be a friend of Jacket and gives him free items every time he visits, despite Jacket never directly doing him any favors. As Jacket begins to wake up from his coma, Beard explicitly tells Jacket that he didn't actually kill Biker and that "none of this is happening." The next level he is "killed" by Richter, and subsequently replaced at each establishment, the stores refilled to serve the zombies of Russian mobsters Jacket's killed. Beard's appearance in Hotline Miami is therefore entirely Jacket's coma dream fantasy, representing how Jacket feels obligated to avenge Beard by killing Russians. In a Hawaiian bar serving US military troops, Beard, Jacket, Barnes, and Daniels are discussing how the heat seems to be making them get drunk faster.