Super Hexagon Review: Ultra-Hard iOS Game Is Instant Phenomenon (PHOTOS)

Super Hexagon: Ultra-Hard iOS Game Is Instant Phenomenon

Do you like your eyes? Do you like your brain? If so stay away from Super Hexagon.

But if you want to live? Well... read on.

Super Hexagon is a brand-new game for the iPhone and iPad in which you have to pilot a triangle through a series of shrinking geometric shapes.

It's horrible, and hateful. It is a spiralling pit of noise, panic and despair. But ultimately, like life, it's worth the struggle, because it's also fantastic, original and an instant legend of iOS gaming.

From the first doomed moment, the experience of Super Hexagon is an overdose of blindingly psychedelic lights, music and frustration. Flashing colours and shapes rotate, fold and spin across the screen to deceive and disorient you, and your ship is almost pathetically small, lost amid this awful landscape of warring lines. Meanwhile jarring, evil chiptune music pounds through your headphones - occasionally helping you time your spins, at times throwing you off.

But that's not the real soundtrack of Super Hexagon. The real soundtrack of Super Hexagon is two phrases, intoned by a robotic voice without mercy or emotion, again and again and again.

"Game Over. Begin," the voice says. "Game Over. Begin. Game Over. Begin."

Because let's be clear - you will die constantly in Super Hexagon. There are just two controls - spin left, spin right - but they are so responsive and precise that one momentary lapse and the game is over. Which it will be. All the time. The game literally starts on 'Hard' mode and gets harder - you can progress through 'Hexagon' to 'Hexagoner' and 'Hexagonest', but you probably won't, because you won't be good enough.

Simon Prytherch

Persist, through, and you'll start to learn how to navigate the game. At first you'll just have to find the gaps and spin to the right segment of the hexagon. Then the shapes will start to shift around you, requiring timed moves and precise twitch adjustments. Then it gets harder - you'll be thrust into sudden mazes, patterns that on first glance appear impossible, and later become just almost-impossible.

So why, if the experience of Super Hexagon is so troubling, is it such a hit?

For one, all the basic elements are perfectly honed: it's slick, simple and quick. The controls are perfect and the level design is suburb.

But really it succeeds because the microbursts of happiness you experience as you very gradually improve are so profoundly joyful.

Once you hit an average of about 10 seconds of survival, you will transform mentally from a weakling lost to destruction to a plucky gladiator, gamely facing the ultimate test and failing over and over for the spark of a moment's victory against a tricky square or death spiral.

And, when these short-lived victories come, as they will, you will be lifted, for a few half-seconds, to the status of a god. No one will know of your glory. And you will also die. Of course you will die.

But before you do, you will live, in a transcendent state of lucid, palpable mania previously unkindled in your confusing human soul.

Which for 69p, isn't bad.

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