
This serves the obvious purpose of keeping the first few seconds of the track from becoming obnoxious and repetitious as you start a level over and over again, but because it’s only three pre-set points in a several minute long track, it means that there are parts of the music track you tend to hear a lot more often than the rest, three thirty-second chunks right after those selections that become intimately familiar while the rest goes largely unheard. Each time you start any level, and each time you die and restart it, the music will start in one of three selected starting points.

There is a rhythm, it’s just your job to find it, rather than mimicking what you are given. The music doesn’t tell you when to move, but by measuring it against the movement of the walls you gain a finer sense of the motion of time. And yet, the obstacles have their own rhythm and the music has its own rhythm, both stable, and each becomes a metric to measure the other. The obstacles don’t time themselves to the beat, and if you try to play to the music directly you’ll soon lose. It’s not a rhythm game in the traditional sense. You aren’t going anywhere, just surviving in place, dancing as the winds of chance dictate. Everything is caught up in a relentless inwards tide except for you, and all you can do as a player is avoid being swept up for as long as possible. You aren’t running away from or towards anything, but rolling along the inner rim of an endlessly collapsing geometric shape. I recently caught up with Chipzel in an interview following the release of her Super Hexagon EP (out now on Bandcamp).The biggest difference between Super Hexagon and other similar games, fast paced reaction endurance challenges like Flappy Bird and Canabalt and Race the Sun, is that the presentation is inverted. The way sections flow into each other feels entirely natural, and Chipzel avoids the common trap of sounding too repetitive as she develops each part with special care to create a fantastic tune. The amount of complexity in the deceptively simple songs is staggering, especially in "Otis," the soundtrack for the "Hexagoner" and "Hyper Hexagoner" game modes in Super Hexagon. Chiptune wobbles are expertly meshed with more melodic sounds, and all that laid over a standard 8-bit beat that works wonders for the songs. She essentially takes on a lot of the popular elements in today's electro (especially electro house) and reworks them through a chunky 8-bit lens. The game itself isn't all that makes up the experience, though: the game's soundtrack is a fantastic little slab of chiptune that caught my attention immediately thanks to its high energy and the way it fits perfectly with the game.Ĭhipzel, the producer behind the soundtrack, has created a masterful 3-track accompaniment here. It sucks you in for minutes at a time and doesn't let you out because you just want to go a little farther, you're sure you can do it this time (for a video of some iPod game reviewers failing miserably at the game, look here). The game itself is deceptively and devilishly difficult: you play as a little arrow rotating around a hexagon (or pentagon, or square) trying to dodge the incoming waves of lines trying to cut you off. Recently, I've been addicted to the iPod Touch game Super Hexagon. Album Retrospective: Radiohead - In Rainbows.Album Review: KOAN Sound - The Adventures of Mr.Album Review: Frightened Rabbit - State Hospital (EP).Album Review: Circa Survive - Violent Waves.Album Review: Digital Summer - Breaking Point.Live Review: Joyce Manor & Algernon Cadwallader, T.Album Review: Night Shift - Trespassers Guide to N.Album Review: Blaqk Audio - Bright Black Heaven.Album Review: The Avett Brothers - The Carpenter.Album Review: I Am Carpenter - My God Clara.



Artist of the Day: Between the Buried and Me.Album Review: The Faceless - Autotheism.Soundtrack Review: Seeking a Friend for the End of.Album Review: A$AP Mob - Lord$ Never Worry.Album Review: Plastician - Start Select Reset.Album Review: Olafur Arnalds - Two Songs for Dance.Live Review: Richard Hawley, O2 Academy, Newcastle.Artist of the Day - The World is a Beautiful Place.Artist Spotlight - Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely.Album Retrospective: Mount Eerie - Lost Wisdom.Album Retrospective: Sufjan Stevens- The Age of Adz.Album Review: Photographers - Nostalgia The Country.Album Review: Go Radio - Close The Distance.Jukebox: Modest Mouse - Gravity Rides Everything.
