HEXA
The first game of Rae Days made me feel like my memory is pretty good, actually. This second game… I’m too dumb for this second game.
HEXA is a thinky, fast-paced puzzler. You have a timer and a grid of five interlocking hexagons filled with six triangles each. The triangles are white, gray, or black, with set point values for each color, and your job is to rotate hexagon-shaped groups of six varied triangles into matching hexagon shapes of one color. If you’re really good, you can match multiple HEXA’s at once, and, if you’re lucky, you might start making combos of multiple matches in a row.
You know who’s really good at HEXA? GreenMan, whose top score on the global leaderboards is nearly double that of the creator’s. Compared to him, I’m no better than Greendog, who is known nowhere besides my local dentist’s office when I was young. They also, for some reason, had Astal on the Saturn. Who was in charge of buying games for this random dentist office in northern Utah? It had an effect on me and I don’t know if it was good.
Anyway, if you are of a particular mind that is good at rotating block puzzlers instead of my basic Tetris brain, there’s a lot to offer you here. There’s a daily run mode where everyone gets the same initial set of blocks and has ONE chance to get a daily top score. There’s a mission mode, with 50 unique missions that include tasks like “clear the screen in as few moves as possible” or “make this particular shape.” There’s a chill mode where you can practice without a constant timer. And there’s a timed mode that doesn’t reward you additional seconds for matching HEXAs like you get in the normal arcade mode.
This is a game that many on the Playdate Discord play every single day. I’ve read the strategies, and tried and tried and tried, but I can only feel myself getting marginally better at it. Maybe your brain has the perfect hexagon-shaped grooves for it. Me? Maybe a few more runs, what could it hurt? (Many hours later.) Oops, there went another afternoon lost to HEXA!
(Released July 30, 2024, on Catalog.)