Like riding a bicycle
I have recently started to develop an obsession over the use of dimensions in games.
It started with Crypt of the NecroDancer, which I consider to be the absolute best rhythm game ever made. I have thought about why I think so for a long time, and I concluded that one of the reasons is the way it uses spatial dimensions. Most rhythm games follow the basic conventions of sheet music: one dimension (left-right) is used to represent time (when the notes are played) and a second dimension (up-down) to represent the "pitch" (what notes are to be played). One obvious example would be the "note highway" in Rock Band, which is a simple transpose of sheet music (the horizontal is the vertical, and vice versa). I found NecroDancer to be very exciting since instead of using one dimension to show a deterministic pattern of notes, it uses two spatial dimensions to show a procedurally-generated set of possibilities. It made me think about how additional dimensions can be used in different ways to add complexity and expressiveness to a game. It made me think that maybe the more dimensions is used, the better.
Devil Daggers have been in a lot of people's minds lately (including mine), and that's what actually kicked this review off. Devil Daggers is often compared to Geometry Wars, but it reminds me more of Super Hexagon. It's not by comparison of the mechanics or whatever, it's simply triggered by memory of feelings. What I feel when I play Devil Daggers, or see Devil Daggers being played, is the feeling I felt when I played Super Hexagon. It's the feeling of survival in the face of immediate despair, of pointless living for the sake of, what, a stopwatch timer. It's adrenaline, triggered in under a minute. This is why I ended up playing Super Hexagon again, after about a year of not touching it (though to be honest, it's mostly because Super Hexagon is on my phone and Devil Daggers is not). It feels as I remember it.
"LIke riding a bicycle," is always my first thought after my first death in a session of Super Hexagon. It's like riding a bicycle, because I do not forget how to play this game no matter how long it has been since I last played it.
Before I actually get to Super Hexagon, I would like to talk about bicycles.
Back in boarding school, it was a pain to get around the school campus on foot. It was my roommate's idea to get bicycles, so we can get around the school faster and spend more time doing homework or whatever the heck it was that we did in school back then, I honestly don't remember. The three of us spent time after school getting to a nearby shop and buying new bikes. We got out and saw the pedestrian crossing light blinking red. In a hurry, my friends got on their bikes and biked straight across the road. It was a wide, 6-lane road, and it had been years since I last rode a bicycle. I tried running for it, pulling the bike along on the handles. The bike wobbled left and right in my hands. I tried getting on the bike, and I fell over. I blushed. The light turned solid red, and the cars and motorcycles are getting ready to move. I got back up, back on the bike, and started pedaling furiously. I crossed the road, and then caught up with my friends. It felt good.
Things are often added to a tool to limit its usage, not to add more functions. The second wheel, the handles, and the rider of a bicycle can limit its spin and movements to just one direction in just one dimension: forwards. An unridden bicycle, or even a unicycle can move in more dimensions, more freely. We ride bicycles because we do not always need to move in all those dimensions. We just want to move in one direction, but more efficiently. Bicycles do this, and they do it wonderfully. The utility of that focused movement is undeniable, but there is also joy in that single-mindedness. All I have to do is pedal the bicycle and hold my hands steady and, for a short moment, all there is in the world is the movement of my legs and the wind on my face.
Super Hexagon is the bicycle of video games.
Super Hexagon has two inputs: left and right. These inputs will move a small triangle around a hexagon in a circular fashion. Lanes extend out of the hexagon. Walls come in from outside the screen and into the hexagon. When a wall moves into the triangle, the game is lost. It is very difficult, because the walls move fast. That is the entirety of the game.
With just that, Super Hexagon is probably a unicycle at best. It is the additional bells and whistles that make me consider this game to be the bicycle of video games. The world rotates around the hexagon in unpredictable ways, and the colours shift between retina-burning hues. Pumping electronic music plays in the background. These things often add to the "polish" of the game, adding layers onto the experience, but I would argue that they actually take things out of the game.
The game uses space in a strange way, with one (looping) dimension around the hexagon and another extending out from the hexagon. The unpredictable rotations and colours of the screen distract the eyes from the Cartesian rectangular screen, leaving you to focus on the important circular axis of movement. The music plays to its own beat while the walls come in at a separate accelerating pace, so there is practically no rhythm element to it (although a sense of timing is still necessary.) When I play Super Hexagon, only two things exist:: my sight and my touch. Even my own heartbeat can become distracting sometimes. This simple, yet intense experience is what makes it so easy to want to and to go back into.
The conventional elements of this game are used to great effect. There seems to be a finite set of wall patterns that are used one after the other, which makes the game a nice blend of reaction and muscle memory. This, in conjunction to the timing-based gameplay, makes Super Hexagon almost a rhythm game, if not for the arrhythmical aspect that I mentioned already.
The simple controls translate very well to the capacitive touchscreen of a modern iOS/Android device. I personally think that touch controls is the best way to play this game, as it provides even less resistance to my hand movements. There is a feeling of freedom, of almost going out of control, in playing well with the touch controls. It is not unlike the feeling of pedaling a bicycle going quickly downhill.
The only thing I do not understand about this game is the one element only present in the initial difficulty level. In the difficulty level, the hexagon would sometimes collapse itself into a pentagon or even a square, and then eventually expand back up to a hexagon. I do admit that it gives an intriguing hook when I had just started playing (a promise of twists yet to come?), but it seems to be a very out-of-place element to an otherwise laser-focused game in retrospect.
It is that focused identity that makes me keep coming back to Super Hexagon, years after I first played the prototype in that dodgy-looking thousands-in-one game jam pirate kart. My desire to play Super Hexagon comes and goes, and it is fortunately easier to satisfy than riding a bicycle, since the game practically lives in my phone. It doesn't matter if I am waiting for a train, or if I am just relaxing at home. For a short moment, all that matters is the triangle on the hexagonal lanes.