Ultra fast-paced reflex tester that was an absolute indie darling of yesteryear, but I’m afraid I just can’t see the appeal.
A number of years ago now – I’d say maybe eight or nine - when I first became properly aware of YouTube as a website of regular content creators, like many in my generation, I had a phase of watching a fair amount of videos made by channels which revolved exclusively around an online personality playing games while offering their live thoughts.
Perhaps it’s just that kids are stupid, or easily entertained, or often don’t have the money or skills to play as many games as they’d like, but they did fuel the demand for these ‘Let’s Play’ YouTubers, and as someone who shopped around for one I liked before I settled on a rotation of a few for a couple of years myself, one game in particular would always be a mainstay on every gaming YouTuber’s highlight reel. That game was this one, Super Hexagon.
Maybe it was just because it was very bright and flashy and would easily attract the eyes of the youth. Or maybe it was because it was (and still is) particularly cheap and easy to run, but every single gaming channel I saw always had one video in their backcatalogue which heaped endless fawning praise on this one game.
The game itself seemed very simple: you control a small shape in the middle of the screen, barely a few pixels wide, but you still need to be quick in using your arrow keys to revolve around a central axis in order to just barely avoid the incomplete insta-kill borders which rapidly fly in from the outside of the screen in at you. To be perfectly honest, the concept did seem especially thrilling to me then, and it still doesn’t now that I’ve played it. But, at the time I kept the fact that seeing it passively might be a whole different experience to actually controlling the action cognisant, and I kept Super Hexagon in the back of my mind as something to eventually try some day.
As it happens, I ended up getting it during the 2020 mid-year sale just gone, and found myself keen to play it at long last. The near-universal praise I had seen for it online back then tempered my usual lack of expectations into just a tiny sliver of hope that having my hands on the controls at long last might make me a believer, but alas, I’m still not a fan.
I have to admit, I’m still not a fan of Super Hexagon, and I can’t in good faith recommend it. You might think otherwise however, and that’s fine - and more power to you if you can have fun with this, but it just isn’t for me – but my odyssey of getting around to eventually playing this game didn’t pan out exactly as I had hoped.
