You lose early and often, yet you can restart the game almost instantaneously. Super Hexagon has excellent timing and patterns.The beat and voice overs give the player a little bit of an edge in conquering the difficult pathways and fill out the entire experience.

The chip tune (is that what it's called?) sound track sets the perfect tone, the voice over cues are great and the few necessary sound effect areВ exquisitelyВ integrated into the audible fabric of the interaction. The graphics even pulse to the music, which is a nice touch. The palette mixes nicely and uses subtle cues to teach the player new patterns of difficulty. There is no need for fancy 3D or excessive flare. The game is pretty - the colors are nice and the shapes move smoothly through the space. Super Hexagon has simple, beautiful graphics.The developers put a lot of thought into creating a control scheme that responded exactly to your will, and it shows! So many games are broken because of poor controls - particularly ones that require quick reactions on a touch screen. You can move smoothly and change directions when you want to - the fault of losing is your own, not because the controls are touchy. The key to a game of fast reflexes (such as Super Meat Boy) is perfect controls. Super Hexagon has very precise controls.And that's a huge reason why the game is fun. We call that an early Nintendo kind of difficulty. At some point, you may hit 30 seconds in the easiest difficulty. The game doesn't hand hold at all, if you're going to play, you're going to lose. The first level of difficulty is called hard- that should be your first clue. The game also involves a simple goal - avoid the lighter colored regions. Anyone can pick it up and master the controls in minutes. The cursor (which is a friendly little triangle) is on a fixed path that moves smoothly around the center hexagon - hold the right side, it moves clockwise hold the left side, it moves counterclockwise. A player touches the right or left hand side of the screen to move the cursor around a hexagon. Super Hexagon is exceedingly hard (more on that later), but to understand the game is simple. Please excuse my images, as it's hard to hit the screen capture buttons without promptly losing! The game is amazingly clever in it's simplicity, and every game designer should use it as a reference for some of the finer points of game design. Super Hexagon is a recently released iOS game that challenges your mind and reflexes in a simple and terribly frustrating way.

Super hexagon free to play