SuperHyperCube leverages virtual reality as a space for three dimensional thinking. The scientific accuracy of this claim would (probably) be disputed, however, SuperHyperCube remains adept at creating a problem and employing VR as the preferred means of solving it.
It starts with a shape. A simple square. A wall approaches on the horizon and, oh, look, my square perfectly fits through the equally square hole in the wall. Next, more cubes appear out of the neon ether and become attached to my square, creating an L shaped block. The next wall appears and my L needs to closer to an ___| shape. This is now a crisis.
Thankfully, SuperHyperCube provides the player with complete 90-degree rotation of the incrementally assembling object. It can be flipped left or right and turned up and down. Whatever shape the hole in the wall presents, you must furiously rotate your shape-with-protruding-cubes in order to properly shove it through. After each victory, more pieces attach themselves to your evolving shape. Oncoming wall patterns are equally in flux and your shape demands adjustment. This, essentially, is everything SuperHyperCube has to offer.
Performance is more complicated than you may think. As a weird obstruction, your developing shape starts to block a direct view of the oncoming wall. The solution, quite naturally, is to crane your head around the shape and get a better vantage point of the wall. This is a neat gimmick that kind of adds another wrinkle to an otherwise basic premise, but there’s a lingering suspicion that SuperHyperCube could have been presented without VR and with a basic option to adjust the field of view manually.
This feeling pervades until you gain an appreciation for different ways of looking at objects. Your shape quickly starts approximating nightmare combinations of square geometry, and evaluating it as a 3D object makes some of the judgment parts of your brain uncouple and crash. Consequently, this is also what happens in SuperHyperCube when your shape doesn’t make it through and pounds right into the wall. It sounds a little silly, but the answer, for me, was to look at the shape from different angles and literally gain a new perspective. Viewing it head-on really does present it differently than looking at it from an angle. Maybe I’m not that smart and it’s possible other people can see the same shape at every corner, but I found different points of looking at the same object intrinsic to playing SuperHyperCube effectively.
SuperHyperCube provides a few other tools to help mitigate the onslaught of the villainous wall. If you know your shape is correct you can press a button to quickly blast it through the opening. Doing this feeds into a meter in the top of your field of view, and filling it up allows you to temporarily slow down time. It’s basically a get out of jail free card when the wall is close and a collision is inevitable. Once that meter fills up, another starts getting traction. This one allows you to blow up a wall and remove the problem entirely. This is considerably harder to achieve; if you’re as terrible at SuperHyperCube as I am, you’ll deploy and drain the slowdown mechanic at the slightest moment of panic.
There is a little more give and take inside SuperHyperCube. Boss doors punctuate the end of every series of levels. The doors rotate ninety degrees intermittently, further complicating the process if lining your shape up correctly. You’re actually allowed to make one mistake during a game of SuperHyperCube, assuming you’re compliant with the corresponding penalty. Any cubes that didn’t make it will be shaved off your suddenly deformed shape.
Though SuperHyperCube has ten levels, presumably each with ten walls, I couldn’t make it past the third boss. This is troubling because I have a pretty hard rule about beating games I intend to review, (most recently obeyed by somehow toppling Thumper) but I’m pretty sure I’m never going to crack this barrier in SuperHyperCube. Looking at trophy data, no one has made it past the seventh level. It’s a hard game with a high ceiling, which is usually the intention with a puzzle game.
Scoring will drive long term relationships with SuperHyperCube. The number of cubes that successfully pass through a wall will be added to your score. Bonus points can be earned for speed and successfully making it through with an unintended alignment. My score of 512 is somehow (currently) good for 250th on the global leaderboard, and I am also beating my wife by nearly 500 points. This makes me happy. Ideally, escalating competitions between friends (whom take SuperHyperCube more seriously than my wife) could signal a reason to return.
It doesn’t hurt that, like Rez Infinite and Thumper, SuperHyperCube looks and operates like an emissary from the future. The aesthetic bends harder toward Tron than any of its PlayStation VR peers, though inspiration is also taken from that outrageous sense of the future Hollywood conceived in the 80’s. SuperHyperCube wouldn’t feel out of place as a game Bishop designed in his idle time aboard the Sulaco in Aliens. There’s also a nice and fluctuating alignment of neon colors, providing SuperHyperCube with needed variance between successive runs.
SuperHyperCube may be the most straightforward game of PlayStation VR’s launch. It revels in this simplicity, however, and its intelligible nature makes it no less effective at creating panic. With consumers still largely ignorant of virtual reality, it’s crucial to have an experience available that is able to be understood and played immediately. Down the road we may demand additional levels of complexity from VR puzzle games, but, right now, SuperHyperCube’s sleek performance is difficult to fault.
