Jenn Frank, who does the voice-over for the game, is a well-known journalist who once said all games are about death. That principle is even more meaningful in an age of games that intend to be cinematic experiences with clear beginnings and ends Cavanagh is more interested in the repetition of movements and behavior in studied rehearsal, a process Killingsworth compares to the practice and performance of music. Just the act of using simple geometry for the game creates a certain aesthetic harmony that stands out.įor Cavanagh, the idea of incredibly difficult gameplay isn't about cruelty at all, but in the satisfying intellectual experience of engaging with a system that doesn't care if you can defeat it. Visually, the final version of Super Hexagon is not especially different from the prototype. ![]() I settle on something very, very quickly." ![]() "I try to make things look interesting but I'm not really much of a visual artist. "Most people don't think my games are very beautiful," Cavanagh says. Players who watched Cavanagh play were not only engaged by the gameplay, but enthralled by the colors and hypnotic look. He meant the way that players who are quite good at Super Hexagon have the option to take a long loop just because it looks prettier, even if the game's mandate is sheer survival. In a Q&A on stage, Killingsworth asked Cavanagh about "the idea of playing stylishly in a game where the result doesn't depend on stylish play." He gives the impression of someone under whom a placid exterior lurks dreamlike depth - much like his work.Įdge Magazine features editor Jason Killingsworth is one of the only people close to being as good at Super Hexagon as Cavanagh himself. After revealing to an awed audience the reward for meeting the incredible challenge of completing Super Hexagon, he smiled just slightly. He decided to start by making it harder - of course.Ĭavanagh has a gentle, open demeanor that's somewhat at odds with the extreme difficulty people associate with his work, and he isn't known to seek out speaking engagements or to do them frequently. Hexagon was a small prototype intended for the IGF Pirate Kart, but Cavanagh found himself dwelling on it and saw further potential. The folders are labeled simply by number, one through seven, and in the seventh is a prototype called Hexagon. The prize is just a simple kill screen and a single word of praise: "Wonderful."īehind him, the projector showed his folder of bright, offbeat and minimalist prototypes on his computer, from things made in jams (there's a game where you have to drive a speeding bus the wrong way down a cluttered highway) to popular VVVVVV. Of course, he's a master of his own game, in part because of his persistence - it took him a few tries, but he was able to complete the game in full before a live audience, even through its final Hyperhexagonest mode unlocked after 60 seconds surviving the hardest difficulty. "I like to think the first two modes are just practice," Cavanagh joked. ![]() Super Hexagon has three modes: Hexagon, Hexagoner and Hexagonest, and they're labeled "hard, harder and hardest." Or maybe the real problem is making sense of the information quickly enough, and more of it wouldn't help.At England's independent game festival GameCity, Terry Cavanagh was introduced as "brilliant and unforgiving," and his popular iOS action game Super Hexagon is certainly an example of both. Maybe the combination of all those forms of information would make the game trivial. So what if you could add a few more forms of sensory bandwidth? I'd love to see a version of Super Hexagon where the state of the screen is reflected in sounds as well as visuals or, better still, touch. The time it takes to recognise objects visually becomes a significant bottleneck. On the harder difficulties, any hesitation between seeing the state of the screen and pressing the keys on the keyboard is instant death. One of the unique things about Super Hexagon is that the game is so difficult and fast that you very quickly feel like you're pushing up against your own processing limits. Strange to think that there must be some small part of my brain dedicated to high intensity hexagon-related activity.Īnyway, it got me thinking about sensory bandwidth. I completed the "Hardest" difficulty in a few tries (there's also hardester, hardestest and hardestestest). It was frankly a bit scary how easily it came back. ![]() I played a bit of Super Hexagon for the first time in probably a year or two. com About Projects Now Do Not Erase Super Inceptagon
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