ULTRAHYPER is a hardcore retro reaction-based game for normal people.
If you've ever played a critically lauded, torturously difficult iOS game that's made you question your own gaming tastes or abilities, here's a game that might just make you 'get it.'
It's not amazingly brilliant and it sure as heck isn't original, but ULTRAHYPER is both fun and accessible.
Same old pathsAs with so many games of this type, ULTRAHYPER has you dodging incoming obstacles in an abstract retro-futuristic landscape, all to a pounding electronic soundtrack.
This time you're dodging left and right across three lanes of a vertically scrolling virtual highway, narrowly avoiding outcrops and flashing barriers.
Every now and then the landscape will suddenly change to a new colour and pattern, like some game designer overlord is impatiently flicking through the channels.
As your score slowly creeps up, new characters are unlocked - new coloured avatars that subtly tweak the gameplay. It's a challenge to see how many of these actually change anything, but so far on my run the purple one seems extremely useful due to its ability to pass through non-fixed barriers.
No obstacle to successWhere ULTRAHYPER differs from something like Super Hexagon or Wave Wave is that there's virtually no learning curve.
Where those games demand that you learn the quirks of a tricky control system or decipher the rhythms and tells of an esoteric landscape, ULTRAHYPER makes everything extremely obvious from the outset.
You tap left to dodge left. You tap right to dodge right. That's it. The landscapes are so clear that you understand intrinsically what you need to do, so success feels like a matter of pure instinctive skill.
ULTRAHYPER strays dangerously close to being a barely jazzed up reaction test as a result of this, and it's certainly not the most nuanced or compelling game of its type.
But the simple fact that it can be played and appreciated by all with relatively little friction will count for a lot with a certain type of adversity-averse gamer.