Stop spinning the view! I can't focus! Who designed this? Whoever it is is a bastard and I love them!
— Nerd³ Plays... Super Hexagon
Super Hexagon is a game designed by Terry Cavanagh as an expansion of Hexagon, a browser-based Flash game made for Pirate Kart V, a 48-hour community game-building project.
The rules are simple. You control a small triangle attached to the edge of the central hexagon. Your goal is to avoid being caught by the onrushing waves of walls coming in from the edge of the screen by dodging clockwise and counterclockwise around the perimeter of the hexagon for as long as possible. Watching the trailer will give you a reasonably good idea of what this is like.
The game is currently available on iPhone and iPad via iTunes, on Windows, Mac, and Linux via Steam, on Android via Google Play or the Amazon App Store, on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and Steam via the Humble Store, and on Blackberry 10 devices via Blackberry World.
The soundtrack, by Northern Irish chiptune musician Chipzel, is available for purchase on her Bandcamp page.
See also RFLEX for simplistic yet difficult and reflex-oriented gameplay.
Begin!
This game provides examples of:
- Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The "Battlefield" part is debatable, but there's no doubt about "Amazing" and "Technicolor".
- Anti-Frustration Features: Played with. The game can still be pretty frustrating, but you can go against the sides of the incoming walls without killing yourself, and your hitbox is the tip of the triangle you're playing as, which are features that were not implemented in the prototype, Hexagon.
- Bullet Hell: The waves and waves of walls coming in at dizzying speeds, and common player reactions create an effect not too different from the genre.
- Color Contrast: The regular levels to their Hyper counterparts.
- Hexagon uses warm background colors (red, orange, yellow), while Hyper Hexagon inverts their hues into cool background colors (cyan, azure, blue), then into magenta, salmon, and vermilion after sixty seconds.
- Hexagoner has a black background and green/yellow walls, while Hyper Hexagoner is the complete RGB inverse with a white background and pink/blue walls. Another sixty seconds and the background/wall colours switch places.
- Hexagonest cycles through all kinds of colors, while Hyper Hexagonest is completely grayscale. And then it goes into black-and-white mode...
- Deadly Walls: The entire point of the game. You can, however, bump into the sides of walls without getting killed, which will prove VERY helpful for spiral patterns.
- Difficulty Levels: The three regular levels — "Hexagon", "Hexagoner" and "Hexagonest" — are indicated to be "Hard", "Harder", and "Hardest", respectively.
- Endless Game: Modes are completed for unlocking purposes after 60 seconds, but the game continues until you die. The changing backgrounds goes like this: The level you picked -> That level's hyper mode -> The next level's hyper mode until you reach Hyper Hexagonest, and finally the black and white Hexagon.
- Endless Running Game: You aren't actually running anywhere far, you're just moving around a central hexagon, but it's still one in spirit since the goal is to avoid Deadly Walls as long as possible. Just imagine a traditional ERG, but with wrap-around.
- Harder Than Hard: Every level beyond the first onenote — and the Hyper modes take it up to elevennote .
- High-Tech Hexagons: As the above screenshot makes obvious, although Hexagon and Hyper Hexagon occasionally switch to pentagons and squares.
- Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: The sub-seconds place in the game timer does not actually display hundreths of a second, but rather 1/60ths of a second, based on the refresh rate of televisions and monitors in NTSC-based countries. This may not make as much sense if you're not using a screen with a multiple of 60 as the refresh rate.
- Hitbox Dissonance: In the original Hexagon, the entire triangle was the hitbox — now, it's only the tip. (You can use this at your advantage.)
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The three Hyper levels: Hardester, Hardestest, and Hardestestest!
- Interface Screw: Part of the difficulty comes from the way the screen is constantly moving — sometimes very quickly. Hexagonest in particular will suddenly spin very quickly, basically requiring you to react to the patterns with memories.
- Mickey Mousing: The screen will often pulse on the beat.
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Nintendo Hard: Most people survive for around 5 seconds on their first few runs. (One of the screenshots on the PC Gamer review shows a score of 3.18 seconds, captioned "For a while, this was my best time.") To reach the maximum rank for a difficulty level, you need to last a minute. - One-Hit-Point Wonder: As Nintendo Hard games tend to have your character be.
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
- Randomly Generated Levels: Each level consists of a family of patterns which are strung together in a random order.
- Title Drop: The final rank in Hexagon.
- Title Scream: "SUPER Hexagon!"
- Unlockable Content: The three "Hyper" levels are unlocked as their corresponding regular levels are beaten (or when Arcade mode is turned on).
*zap* GAME. OVER.
