![]() ![]() It so fully occupies part of the brain that the other parts are cut free and left to drift in a way that can either be liberating or distressing, depending on the state of the mind it is happening to. Still, sometimes, today, I play it when I’m trying to think of a new idea for something to write about, and wonder what to create next. Afterwards, I played it while I was making big choices about where my life was going, wondering if I was doing the right thing then and there, wondering if there was something I was missing. I first played the game in between episodes of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, reaction and spatial understanding completely subsumed by the hexagon while I thought about the journey I’d been on, wondered if the tragedies were avoidable, wondered if I’d done the right thing. Super Hexagon provides the slightly odd sensation of completely occupying part of the brain while leaving the rest free to do whatever it wants. It’s strange to feel your brain acted upon, developed, topiaried, in this manner. ![]() I have close to 60 hours played now and I can see the game this way for maybe 5 seconds at a time in every 15 minutes of play. Sometimes, though, once you’ve spent many hours with the game, you can see everything, you can see all the walls collapsing in around you and understand exactly where you need to be right now to survive. When you’ve spent a while playing, you start memorizing the patterns, and see each set of obstacles as they come, navigating your way through half by memory and half by reaction. When you first start playing Super Hexagon, you react to each obstacle in turn, and frantically try to react as it reaches you. Like learning to draw or getting a new pair of glasses, you start to be able to see things you couldn’t see before. ![]() If you spend enough time in the game, things start to happen to you. The feeling when you first tread beyond that familiar ground of snippets you’ve heard hundreds of times and start to hear the less familiar parts of the track, that little fragment of exploratory achievement, is one of the most exciting things I have ever felt when playing a video game. This serves the obvious purpose of keeping the first few seconds of the track from becoming obnoxious and repetitious as you start a level over and over again, but because it’s only three pre-set points in a several minute long track, it means that there are parts of the music track you tend to hear a lot more often than the rest, three thirty-second chunks right after those selections that become intimately familiar while the rest goes largely unheard. Each time you start any level, and each time you die and restart it, the music will start in one of three selected starting points. There is a rhythm, it’s just your job to find it, rather than mimicking what you are given. The music doesn’t tell you when to move, but by measuring it against the movement of the walls you gain a finer sense of the motion of time. And yet, the obstacles have their own rhythm and the music has its own rhythm, both stable, and each becomes a metric to measure the other. The obstacles don’t time themselves to the beat, and if you try to play to the music directly you’ll soon lose. It’s not a rhythm game in the traditional sense. ![]() You aren’t going anywhere, just surviving in place, dancing as the winds of chance dictate. Everything is caught up in a relentless inwards tide except for you, and all you can do as a player is avoid being swept up for as long as possible. You aren’t running away from or towards anything, but rolling along the inner rim of an endlessly collapsing geometric shape. The biggest difference between Super Hexagon and other similar games, fast paced reaction endurance challenges like Flappy Bird and Canabalt and Race the Sun, is that the presentation is inverted. ![]()
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