A Brick-Breaker That Plays Itself
I have a fond memory of a game called Sneezies, going back to the start of the Smartphone/iPod Touch era. In it, little balls of fluff would float on the breeze, waiting for a single touch of the screen. That one press would cause an explosion, and all the sneezies in its radius would pop. All the sneezies in the radius of those explosions would pop too, making it a game of chain reactions.
At the time, I thought a game built around one button-press was fascinating. There was something about the sheer efficiency of that one input; somehow, even though we’d only touched the screen once, Sneezies still managed to be strategic, demanding thought. That one interaction multiplied to dozens of reactions.
Fifteen-or-so years later, we have Hextreme Void. The pitch is a Sneezies-beater: what if there was a game that required no input at all? How would that work?
Ooh, My Arkanoids Are Flaring Up
Hextreme Void’s biggest influence is brick-breakers. In the centre of the screen is a wall of blocks, and a ball ricochets around, nibbling blocks off that wall. But there’s no paddle and no gaps in the wall. The ball keeps going and going and going.
Hextreme Void cheats to achieve its no-button goal, but only a little. An XP-bar runs across the top of the screen, filling up with each hit of a block. Once filled, there’s a choice of four temporary boosts. You might be offered damage increases, extra time or additional balls. Any sane person would pick extra balls from that line-up, and suddenly there are two or three balls ricocheting around. The XP meter fills up slightly quicker.
With the last brick gone, Hextreme Void moves to the next level. Towards the bottom of the screen, a timer ticks down. These are the two conflict-points of Hextreme Void: you have to complete as many levels as you can before that timer ticks to zero. Suddenly the extra-time power-up makes more sense.
The Roguelike Brickbreaker
With a couple of achievements under your belt, you head to the main menu where the permanent upgrades reside. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. The coins you gained from the run get converted into persistent boosts to XP, time, damage and more. We headed straight for the XP. You’ve always got to be anticipating future earnings.
Reach Level 50 in any given ‘Void’ (a collection of levels) and a new Void opens up. This will have hardier bricks than before, so damage becomes more of a factor. Choices might shift to these upgrades. But hardier bricks have no defence against power-ups which bounce around the screen, so you’re also hoping to snag a couple of these.
Get To The Point, Lad
So, to the question that we entered with: can a no-button game be stimulating enough to part with a few quid?
My answer is a complicated ‘mostly not’. I think a good no-button game is possible, but I don’t think Hextreme Void quite manages it. There are hints of what that game might look like – Hextreme Void 2, anyone? – but a few missteps make the game more throwaway than we’d have liked.
What scuppers Hextreme Void most is its balancing and pacing. For the first two runthroughs, Hextreme Void makes a perverse kind of sense. You’re trying to snag enough ball upgrades to chew through the levels. Extra balls and speed increases are disproportionally valuable. We got to level 10 in the first run, level 20 in the second. The improvements were incremental.
But soon – far too quickly, in our view – the improvements became exponential. In run three and four (only ten minutes into the game, we might add) we had maxed out our XP-earning upgrades, and upped the number of balls to fifty. Levels passed by in a blink of an eye. We earned so much from these levels that we began maxing out all of our other permanent benefits.
After the fifth run, we were completing each Void without needing a single temporary upgrade. The choices had become useless: the temp upgrades were nudging up our stats when we’d taken giant leaps through the permanent upgrade system. We were completing Voids in a minute or two. All six were done in twenty minutes. Hextreme Void was basically over.
The Joy Of Hex
Don’t get us wrong, there was a simple joy in watching that ramp-to-infinity. We were grinding out results at the start, getting some traction in the middle section, and then spamming the screen with balls at the end. But that journey took no time at all.
Most tellingly, the exponential increases killed any form of strategy. There weren’t any meaningful choices to make any more. We’d outpaced the game, and it could no longer offer anything that was worthwhile to us. This was when Hextreme Void truly became a one-button game, because the moments where it asked for choices were utterly irrelevant.
There are a few sunbeams through the chaos. It’s possible to imagine a version of Hextreme Void where moving through the ‘Voids’ causes more friction than it does here. We imagine a reset, or a prestige system (stolen from idle clicker games) to force a player to restart the ramp. We can’t help thinking about more expensive upgrades and the later Voids needing them to make progress. If Hextreme Void was more of a bastard to us, making us work for our gains, it might have lasted for longer.
Hextreme Void comes across as a self-inflicted dare: to make a game with the least amount of player involvement possible. Hextreme Void is the result, and while it manages to complete the dare, we were a bit nonplussed about why it bothered. So, we scooped up our balls and headed off to play BALL x PIT.
Important Links
Optimise Or Be Left Behind – Hextreme Void Arrives With A New Spin On Brick Breakers – https://www.thexboxhub.com/optimise-or-be-left-behind-hextreme-void-arrives-with-a-new-spin-on-brick-breakers/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/hextreme-void/9mvrt2pc7mhb
