Made by the same guy who made Pony Island and inscryption, the game follow 6 different video game characters of different genres and a bartender who announces that one of the residents is planning a murder. Being a meta narrative game (the creators specialty) its kinda hard for me to talk about it but the entire thing falls somewhere between a cheesy videogame creepypasta (theres a "creepy" part near the end that had me burst out laughing, i'm still kinda crying thinking about it) and a tongue in cheek look at semi recent videogame trends (twitch streaming, modders and copyright laws, competitive fighting game balancing, etc). The game, despite billing itself as multi-genre, is like 50% puzzle game, which may or may not be your thing.

Still, it has a lot of fun ideas and gimmicks and its literally only a few dollars, and i have a soft spot for meta narratives

An expansion of Pony Island's media study, both in its mechanical broadening and narrative scope, The Hex delivers a near even hodgepodge of gaming genres, horrifying discoveries, and stirring questions as to how the creator should treat their art. Where it at times outlasts the enjoyability of each characters' segments due to the simplicity of their designs, Mullins never fails to provide an onslaught of hilarious and upsetting metanarrative surprises to keep the player's engagement. His second major game may not have received the attention it deserved compared to Pony Island and Inscryption, but The Hex is another stepping stone to the complete masterpiece which Mullins has delivered in 2021.

This is the most meta game since Pony Island.
And this is probably the best meta game i have ever played, because it's not only good at being meta, but it's also great at actual gameplay and content.
It's a unique, one of a kind game that is only comparable to The Beginner's Guide and Pony Island (of course).
It's a game full of actual secrets besides main game content, secrets that lead deep down the rabbit hole.
This game was one helluva wild ride, wilder than any Kojima's wild ride.
The Hex is a game about industry, about games, about developers.
But most importantly, about the vicious cycle of...
No, this is too much of a spoiler.
Go and play it yourself, for the story, for the characters, for the themes.
Daniel Mullins is a genius, support him, and let him take you on his wild ride.

I recently played Pony Island and loved its clever story and meta game mechanics. The Hex is the second game by Daniel Mullins and playing these two games probably made him one of my favorite game developers now.

I was a bit hesitant at first because I really didn't like the art style but I'm glad I gave it a try regardless because I loved everything else about this game.

In The Hex you enter a run-down bar in the middle of a stormy night. It's populated with a bunch of videogame characters lamenting their former days and eventually you learn about their individual stories while playing through bits of their games. It might be a character from a cooking game who was ripped out of his home to be part in a Super Smash Bros type of fighting game or someone from a Fallout-like strategy combat game that never got finished and turned into a mess by modders. The stories are very varied and all of them seem leaned on real-life things in the game developing world so far so that Steam and Twitch become straight up part of the stories.
The stories also have some thematic overlap at points and the developer behind them becomes more and more of a character himself which at points seems a little bit inspired by The Beginner's Guide.

What's so amazing to me is how many ideas the developer is able to cram into his games without feeling disconnected. The Hex is full of fresh ideas and constantly changing gameplay throughout the entire playtime and it all feels very organic. Even though you're essentially playing through a handful of completely different game genres it all comes together really nicely.
I have a soft spot for videogames about game development anyway so seeing The Hex play around with how a videogame is made in a story-driven manner was a lot of fun. Things like having to tactically use a cheat code system like a skill system or going through programming puzzles based on actual game development software was a lot of fun to me.

If you are interested in videogames as a medium, their history, and how their made, I really think you're gonna get a kick out of this. It's in the BLM itch.io bundle, so maybe you already own it.
I for one loved it and I can't wait to see what Daniel Mullins has up his sleeve next.

Policy

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My girlfriend sent me a message before Easter started only saying in bold letters HEX. I didn't know what that meant so knowing she has talked positively on this game in the past I figured I should check this out while shes gone. Miss you!

This game is one where you see the past adventures of various fictionalized characters who have had their IPs warped historically, exploring the different games they were tossed through, using a whodunit style mystery as the main plot conceit. With a motley of small subgames from different genres to play throughout to try and keep an engaging experience. All housed in an dilapidated bar at the end of the earth. Despite its novelty I do not reccomend playing this game unless you are obsessed with the shared universe of Mullin's games, which in my opinion you probably shouldn't be since its as much a marketing gimmick to get you to play them all as much as it is a narrative through point. It's kind of annoying and unfun. If you're really interested you can go watch your favorite youtuber play it or at the very least, have a walk through handy. Now for those interested in a nuanced discussion of the game, read on...

One of the most prominent things that sticks out to me is the culture mashing a generic game and a meta version of it in order to make its point on the thin distinction between meta games and homage (the Legends game being a mix of Final Fantasy & Undertale, or the Shooting game being a mix of Halo/Warhammer/Gears of War & Hotline Miami).

Still, I can't help but think this games strongest moments are nothing in comparison to Travis Strikes again giving cynical homage to Hotline Miami 2 openly in order to make a counterargument to it. In that game, Travis is shown throughout completely addicted to all of these various indie games which you can wear as shirts, all given to the player without commentary besides the origin of the game it came from.

Throughout the game, Suda uses TSA mostly as a vehicle of commentary on some of his older titles, often riffing on them. Only towards the end does it bring Hotline Miami 2 in, it does it with a purpose. Both games hint at an almost unfathomably larger than life apocalypse, one that seems inevitable in the face of life. Why even acknowledge it, why not just cramp up in your shack and ignore it all? By directly using it as intertextuality in the final act, it enhances the whole story about futility and the meaning of fighting in despite it all. It had to use the text of that game as a clear and concise negation point, it also shows Travis sort of waking up from his Walden-esque slumber from a plot position to which makes it doubly effective (interestingly enough, Inscryption here, does obey this open final act negation in its game to).

Compared to that (admittedly niche) example, this game feels a bit trite and hollow. For example, the game will use stuff like streamer spam (which is admittedly the most amusing part of the game and had me laughing a storm in surprise) and shitty mods in order to show how our relationship to games can become warped by the ways we interface with them. This focus on externalities that affect our treatment of a work and their financial trajectory is interesting, but of course the negative feedback needs to seem heart breaking and the mods need to be shitty right? Cheating in the Fallout Tactics clone game needs to be a bit frowned upon.

The problem is all of these micro games felt just awful to play, not just after being warped but right from the beginning to, and whenever they challenged me I just found myself more annoyed than enjoying the experience on any sort of meta level. For example the first game it has you play is a mario clone (which riffs off this little known game Eversion). The base game everyone supposedly likes is ass to play. Why anybody would map their jump to a click is beyond me considering the playerbase and I find it doubtful taken as its own happy go lucky first game people really 'enjoyed' it and that the game was degenerated from steam reviews or that they would express their opinion so simply. In reality I would have probably found this portion both more believable and more amusing had it been on newgrounds, since the flash game community has shorter sentiments as shown there and lower standards. I feel the steam interface was only there instead in order to shock you when your 'friends' leave the negative feedback on the 2nd game, which functions more as gimmick than realistic storytelling. Some of the later sections feel slightly more effective in their cynicism, ie the girl in Legends disliking the game so much she actively seeks its destruction.

While there are certainly amusing moments I can't help but feel a lot of the main messaging of this game (dont sell IPs, dont hoard Gamedevs, dont use money as a power move, don't parade an antagonistic relationship with your fans) kind of comes in conflict with framing those out groups in simplistic ways. The mod community has to be making bad mods that completely undo the actual vision of the Fallout clone. There can't be a fun mod on this abandoned project that increases the games quality it all has to be foolish shit like a texture mod that adds flowers in a wasteland. In reality, the mod community for something like Stardew Valley is so strong they have been able to make expansion packs and stress test it. The mod community of Dark Souls was able to help make the game run on PC when it came out. It kind of makes the point far more murky, regardless of how much you can rationalize it as 'its the main developer who thinks these things' it just feels hollow by conflating targets as way bigger issues than they are. Convenient how the twitch messages grind to a halt so you can actually cheat and bug the game by a person messaging in the chat. The game really only makes clear the artifice of its own gimmicks when it does stuff like this. To be clear here the problem does have a sort of 'both sides' quality to it. Yes corporate capture is going to create buggier messes that don't really capture the charm of the original but using a fattened mole in a wife beater who doesn't care is not only a lazy fat shaming stereotype but also just not what the megacorp would have done. Where you could have had a legitimate point about how not all IP capture is in the main mascot character, and how warping the assets and atmosphere into something still friendly but entirely off, is instead just an easy joke at their expense, there's no punch to any of it!

The game seems to be a fairly concerted meditation on the importance of IP preservation in the face of corporate capture, and how selling out can cause you to become the cycle of hubris in those same corporations you hate. It's certainly interesting as a conversation piece on that and the meaning of meta games as a genre. Whereas I think it only goes to cliches and seems to imply the best IP is the one only held by the original author (something both completely wrong and curiously, effectively overturned in Mullins next game Inscryption what with the technical 'original author' of that one being Hitler and all). The conversation on meta games and their merit as games often being squandered by their own mechanics is actually quite fascinating.

I was able to note the forms of satire and the nods of what meta game was given respect to for almost all of the subgames, Hotline Miami, Eversion, Undertale, ProjectM/Mugen (on the 'making this character overpowered on purpose' stuff). It's interesting because it didn't make the game I was actually playing any better, and now it actually has got me thinking if maybe we are being a little too nice on these other games just because of their 'meta' quality.

It's been mentioned before that metacommentary is probably one of narratively the easiest things a person can do. Compare your text to another text, riff on that text in order to enforce your own. Anybody who sticks around to see it through will by design be an audience in on and amused by the 'injoke'. In that sense not only does meta work as an easy girder for storytelling, but it also works as a filter. We have to assume those people who are not amused by the effect are simply going to leave early. Not much thought is given to them though because they are not 'in' on the joke. They don't get it.

Here's the rub with that sort of dichotomy: While there are obviously people who would leave enjoy due to ignorance with the intertextual jokes at play, it also assumes that the reason somebody would stop playing the game is out of ignorance rather than out of unamusement with the game. Allow me for a moment to try and explain what I mean by this through a comparison point.

Let's use Undertale. Undertale is a game where being in on the 'ingroup' from the outset at least is not at all difficult. If you've played even 1 RPG turnbased game your set. And if your willing to go broad enough, if you played 1 game where you kill monsters at all you're probably fine. As the games purpose is to subvert your expectations on how the game will react to stuff like XP, saving, attacking enemies, tutorialization, etc. So then we can assume that this is a game with a metacommentary so ubiquitous it amuses a broad audience. This is all true but what do we do with the people outside this base audience? Like how in the hell would they have missed the riffing and amusement? That's kind of where our relationship with these games as them being great just because of their meta-referentiality starts to break down.

Almost nobody is going to play this game and get far at all if they don't get the metacommentary. Those people have to be unamused either for how the metacommentary itself plays out as a distracting writing trick or the fundamental game design around it. When we strip back the specific meta elements we find a game that is very boisterous and friendly, with and exceptionally easy difficulty curve, and a lot more distracting spectacle and chatting than actual combat. Personally I found the amount of talking going on in the game vs. the combat actually kind of irritating. I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy Undertale at all, obviously its a very flashy game with a lot of evocative moments, but it should be telling that the only time I or most anybody else I know legitimately felt challenged was locked behind content I wasn't supposed to play (being vague here with respect to spoiler). Also while I personally was not so openly bothered by it at the time, man are a lot of these characters invasive as hell. The idea of friendliness for most of them seemed to be some degree of screaming right in your face and pulling your shirt over to something they want to show you. Papyrus whole gimmick is doing this and obviously he is meant to irritate you, but the gimmick is kept for pretty much every character you meet in the game. Obviously the game is trying to egg you to violence, but in a sort of twisted way I couldn't help but feel sorry for the protagonist, who is by design made mute. I only wish I could have them write on a piece of paper 'personal space please!'. Most of the humor and jokes in the game are milked off of this primary interaction with its world, a world so intent on doing dance numbers in front of you that it's telling the only place I legitimately remember fondly is the waterfall for how hands off it felt.

Yet I was and still am a bit timid to point this out because any sort of ingroup can just clammor this is 'the point' and suddenly the exchange is either folded into either you missing an obscure piece of lore or just generally a stress test of how much of an idiot you are. It feels BAD to be in an outgroup on a metatext, you are passively shamed for having such a bewildering and contrarian stance. This is also true in terms of expressing your experiences on passions in a personal sense to.

But like, what if the combat difficulty is just lackluster, what if the writing just gets on your nerves, what if the level design feels like a bunch of meaningless gimmicks? What about the game experience? Do we just sacrifice our in the moment experience with a game in service of an (arguably false) sense of community around having a comparible experience with a fandom? These quiet reservations I have I just buried because look, there's a lot about Undertale to like and it did a great job, but I think I was betraying myself a bit by playing it and assuming it was just about the best this kind of game can get. I guess I must like it because I've yet to experience anything so 'meta' on rpg games. I feel I should have seen it as a test to push forward rather than accept our Undertale overlord with now further questioning. So why haven't I? Far be it from me to make it sound like a problem, but this ingroup/outgroup dynamic functions equally for insights as well. Short simple insights that reflect general consensus are going to be amplified by general appreciation more than longer ones. Despite it feeling kind of bad to be in this outgroup to, I swallowed my envy and stuck to what I want to do anyway simply because I write with the purpose of self discovery, practice, and game experience memory. If I already choose to take the path less traveled here, I can suck it up and start having a more critical relationship with metagames as well, and if you've read this far you probably can to, I believe in you! For me, keeping the comments turned off is maybe just my personal bandaid against people trying to scare me off from doing it.

But having the gameplay in The Hex be so unambiguously fucking terrible it actually got me thinking about it. Genuinely like do not play this game for the gameplay, this game plays like a freeware meme game at the best of times and a schoolyard flash game at the worst. Not even the rpg or fighting sections are that good because the fighting section is a bunch of obnoxious puzzles and the main character of the RPG portion does not want to be in the game, does not want sequels. And a primary plot point is how a lot of these characters in the bar dont want to be paraded in infinite sequels anyway. I think by having the game actually be bad to play it woke me up to this fact though: Meta commentary can not be an excuse for weak game design or a mask for decent criticism. The fact that the game so openly jabs at those sort of metagames makes me rethink my perception on how to approach this fact and whether I was 'tricked' into liking some of those games more than I actually do. To its credit this game does try to mask each subgame by having so many for its short run, but the novelty of a bunch of small bad games doesn't avoid the issue of it then making the overall game bad. Although granted the point and click portions were well designed and appealing, it was nice being able to walk around the area and consort with the other customers as each character, but in a great twist of irony this point and click portion is also by far its shortest part, only barely cushioning my increasing irritation with each part. Each subgame getting longer as it goes on certainly not helping. You could say the text itself gets more cynical with this interaction except the 2 who most desire to escape their IP hells are bookended by the Fallout Tactics game which has probably the most authentic and genuine relationship and character belief this is their game out of all of them so it doesn't really work on that level either. It might have been more effective that way had they moved his chapter right before the chef one oddly enough but that's ultimately not what happened.

The most petty point though is that Mullins decided to rehash the stupid line connection puzzles from pony island and somehow do them even worse. Nobody played Pony Island and missed those puzzles because they are literally everywhere anyway. If I want to play line logic puzzles I'll go play the Witness of something. Move on bro.

I have actually heard of the hex prior to playing Inscryption. However, I dismissed it at first because it looks like a dorkly style "aren't video games wacky" kind of thing, boy was I wrong. While the gameplay is ok, the story is what makes this game so great, possibly my favorite story from Daniel Mullins. I would even argue I like this game more than Pony Island.

The story is about 6 abandoned video game protagonists in a bar called "the six pint inn", who are trying to find out who is planning a murder. Without spoiling anything too big, the focus is less on the murder and more about the game industry and how it has effected these characters.

While in the inn, the game plays like a point and click, however, once an event happens to a character, a flashback of the game they were from will occur with genre dependent on the character, ranging from Platforrmer, Fighting Game, RPG and more. That may sound like the game is unfocused, but thankfully, the controls make the game feel more cohesive, since you only use WASD and the left mouse button.

The soundtrack by Jonah Senzel is also pretty good songs, such as "Coming in Hot" and "Dustbowl Danny".

Since this is a Daniel Mullins game, there are plenty of
creative fourth wall breaks, secrets, and even an ARG that has a hidden ending in another game.

Overall I highly recommend this game to those who like good stories, hidden secrets or even if you've enjoyed Daniel Mullins other work.