Super Hexagon is designed to break you.
Indie developer Terry Cavanagh first launched this unforgiving beast of a game on an unsuspecting App Store in 2012. Your first foray is like touching a hot stove. Surely this is some cruel joke?
Yet we’re still playing it today.
Super Hexagon is not for everyone. It’s for those who take pride in honing their reaction time, who obsess over high scores and can carve out tiny victories from huge blocks of failure. Still, the game is compelling because of its simplicity. You understand how to play instinctively, and always know why you lose. The trick is surviving.
This merciless rotating maze of geometry and snarling electronica has proven influential too. It helped popularise many core concepts for great App Store arcade games, from the elegant, responsive control setup to the ultra-quick restart time after failure. Super Hexagon’s play sessions may be over in a flash, but they cast long shadows across the App Store catalogue.
If you’re going to play, we recommend attemping higher difficulty levels. This way trying for high scores at lower difficulties will be relatively manageable, sort of like how baseball players warm up with weighted bats before stepping up to the plate.