Game Reviews

Polyganic

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Polyganic
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| Polyganic

Polyganic is a fever dream of a twitch game. Pulsing, flashing, like a headache spewing out from a Spectrum, it snarls with nervous energy.

But at its core there's a simple, reasonably elegant idea. What if, instead of controlling the bird in Flappy Bird, you had to control the pipes.

A shape bobbles along a seemingly random path, and you need to slide chunks of blocky scenery so that it slips through the gaps between them.

Slide away

But while you're doing that the world around you is going slightly bonkers. Shapes soar past, colours burst and refract, hues change in the blink of an eye. It's like trying to thread a needle on a sewing machine while having an ocular migraine.

And it's tough. Painfully tough sometimes. The game is broken up into levels based on shapes. You start as a triangle, but if you get far enough you'll become a square, then a circle, and so on.

Things get incrementally tougher with each new shape. Once a shape's unlocked you can start your playthrough from there, which makes things ever-so-slightly easier.

But not that much easier. Expect a good dollop of frustration as you bash into gates, mistime your slides, or the shape you're trying to dodge decides to dart down at the last second.

May contain flashing imagery

If you're looking for a beefy challenge there's a lot to like about Polyganic. It doesn't have the tightest compulsion loop going, and it crashed a few times while I was playing as well.

But that central idea is a solid one, and the distraction techniques it employs to try and put you off are just the right side annoying. Just.

While it doesn't shine quite to brightly as the very best twitch games out there, Polyganic has enough of a fevered rhythm that it's easy to recommend.

Polyganic

A blurry, vaguely insane twitchy dodger, Polyganic has an interesting enough central idea to keep you playing through bouts of frustration
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.