In the best way that games can possibly manage, you feel every stage of your progression towards the game’s finale. Don’t worry triangle, we’ve got your back.Īs you start becoming more accustomed to the way the Walls of Death charge into battle, you’ll realise you are always adding precious seconds to your high score, edging your way even closer to triangular triumph. The triangle was just sat there eating his sandwiches and thinking about kittens when the right bullies that are the walls came over to steal his pocket money and kick him in the shins. What did it do to piss the walls off? Probably nothing. Rotations start suddenly changing direction, pulsing wildly and making it more of a challenge even to just keep an eye on your poor little triangle who, really, doesn’t deserve any of this grief. As you master one brutal gauntlet of a level, the subsequent level is just harder enough to throw a spanner in the works and change the way you think about your tapping strategies. It’s six levels of pure gameplay, with a difficulty progression that every developer should be jealous of.

You’ll be motivated by the disembodied voice that commences the game with a stately ‘begin’, before marking your progress through The Longest Minute Of Your Life with ‘line’, ‘triangle’, ‘square’, ‘pentagon’ and finally ‘hexagon’, the moment you jump out of your chair, kick it over and punch the air like a complete fucking bossmaster without giving a second thought to the expensive iPhone now leaving your hands and being propelled through the air towards an actual hard, cold wall, because compared to the elation you are currently experiencing after beating a level of the video game Super Hexagon, nothing else really matters. A super-fast restart after a game over means you’ll be trying again the moment you become intimate with a wall, reinforcing your personal vendetta against the King of Walls in a desperate bid to survive just a few more seconds. Super Hexagon is addictive gameplay at its simplest and most thrilling.

What satisfaction that final victory brought me! Played for a couple of minutes at a time, Super Hexagon took me a year and a half to complete. You’ll need lightning fast reflexes and the ability to make snap decisions as you try to stave off your wally demise for just a little longer. You would perhaps think that the game would end with level three’s ‘hardest’, but then it throws Hyper Mode at you, gift-wrapping for you the joys of ‘hardester’, ‘hardestest’ and ‘hardestestest’. ‘Easy’, I hear you proclaim! ‘The whole game only lasts six minutes’! Well, just consider the six stages’ difficulty levels.

Your goal? Survive 60 seconds on each of the game’s six levels. Accompanied by a wonderful, blood-pumping soundtrack by chiptune hero Chipzel, Super Hexagon’s gameplay involves rotating a triangle around a hexagon as you frantically attempt to avoid the walls that are hurtling towards you. If you were to refine gaming to its simplest, purest level, you would probably be looking at Terry Cavanagh’s minimalist 2012 game Super Hexagon (iOS, Android, PC). So, I ask you, can there ever be a truly perfect, utterly flawless game? Even Dark Souls, which I pretty much worship, has glaring design flaws which fans just have to live with (COUGH COUGH Bed of Chaos COUGH COUGH). Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the Batmobile, but when every single story mission has you using it to blow up hordes of drones, it does get a bit much. Batman: Arkham Knight is without a doubt a 10/10 game and one of my all-time favourites, though developer Rocksteady were so intent on their innovative new Batmobile gameplay that they overdid it a blemish on an otherwise perfect piece of art.

Sometimes, that ambition just goes too far. As developers push for unique gameplay and more realised open worlds, their ambition, sadly, simply cannot be met with optimum, real world results. In our age of PS5s, Dreamcasts and LeapFrog tablets, can a game really be flawless? Certainly games have come close, Grand Theft Auto V for example, but with many big games these days being rushed out with a plague of tecnhical problems and design missteps, that goal of absolute perfection is seeming harder and harder to achieve.

Super hexagon all levels complete