It’s almost hypnotic.
The flashing colours, the spinning hexagons, the bright lights. It feels like you’re in a trance as soon as you start playing. You end up not paying attention to anything else in your peripheral vision, completely focused on the small triangle rotating around a hexagon in the centre of your screen.
The premise of the Super Hexagon is to avoid the brightly coloured, sharp walls which are moving toward the centre of the screen at a high speed. You control a small triangle, and you just slide around the hexagon in the centre making sure to not even slightly clip the walls. The controls are incredibly responsive, although it’s necessary in a game like this because if you move a split second too late you’ll hear the ever repetitive robotic ‘GAME OVER’ from the announcer.
When you initially start Super Hexagon, you will fail over and over and over again only a few seconds into the first level.
Then you’ll start beating your time by a few seconds and you’ll feel happy, just for those few seconds until you give it another go and fail without beating your time. Then you’ll just go straight back to the anger and frustration feeling you’ll become incredibly used to.
The length of Super Hexagon is all dependent on how talented you are at the game.
At the very beginning, level one will seem stupidly hard. Until you do it again, and again, and again, which is when the phrase ‘practice makes perfect’ really becomes apparent. You get used to the patterns in the level, the speed at which you have to move, it all becomes second nature to you. As each level is a randomly generated set of sections, you can never be sure what will come next. When you complete the first level, the next level seems so much faster, and by the time you manage to make your way all the way to the sixth (final) level, you’ll wonder how you ever did so badly on the first one.
The main appealing aspect to Super Hexagon is the fascinating soundtrack by Chipzel.
Every time you restart a level, the soundtrack will commence from a different point to where you last left it which I feel is highly under appreciated; hearing the exact same portion of a song over and over again with no variety could become unbelievably annoying.
Super Hexagon isn’t playing around with it’s difficulty levels either.
The easiest difficulty is apparently ‘Hard’, progressing to ‘Harder’ and then ‘Hardest’. It then increases to ‘Hardester’, then ‘Hardestest’, and the final level is apparently as difficult as ‘Hardestestest’. As soon as you start playing, you’ll find this out to be extremely accurate and not just a joke from the game’s creator Terry Cavanagh.
Terry’s game previous to Super Hexagon was also a fairly popular one; VVVVVV.
It was known for it’s difficulty and frustration, and Terry Cavanagh really hasn’t dropped the ball with Super Hexagon. If you’re unsure if you want to pay the cheap price of £1.99 for Super Hexagon, there is also a free, slightly simplified version of the game just called ‘Hexagon’ which you can find with a simple search of the web.
Super Hexagon is one of the simplest, but best experiences I’ve had in a while.
It plays exactly the same on both PC and iOS; whichever you play on is simply down to whether you prefer pressing the arrow keys, or touching the sides of the screen for movement. It’s stupidly satisfying to beat your previous record on a level, more so than in any game I’ve ever played before.
I give Super Hexagon a 10 out of 10; not a score I’d award lightly. Super Hexagon just does everything you want in a game like this, and it executes it pretty much flawlessly. It’s not to say it’s the perfect game, but for what it intends to, it does it amazingly.
