Well it's certainly different? I'm not sure what I was expecting going into this one, but it certainly wasn't this.

I have perhaps never seen a game with less polish; at times this feels more like an early alpha than a finished game. The graphics are crazy basic, the music is simplistic and the game has a tendency to generate softlocks around you every now and again. Most runs for me have ended by being pursued by an enemy until I hit some obstacle that was offscreen when I first picked the direction to run in, and this gets especially frustrating at the end of a longer run. And the game gates most of its zones behind collecting a certain number of collectables in the current run, meaning that you end up spending a lot of time just farming the same 2 or 3 relatively uninteresting zones.

And yet behind all that, there is a fascinating game at the core of it. Some of the later zones get extremely weird with each adding some new ruleset or geometry or both. It's a shame that these often aren't clear at all. So most of my encounters with a new zone go as follows: find a new zone, "ooh what's this one then?", die immediately, don't see that zone again for another 20 runs. It makes learning what goes on in these outer reaches nigh-on-impossible, which is a shame as these wackier zones are the best the game has to offer. Perhaps there is a zone selector or remixer somewhere in the settings, but the settings are the densest I have ever seen and are mostly written in high-concept geometry jargon.

Despite all of this, there is a certain addictive quality to hyperrogue; it is always interesting to get a glimpse of a new bizarre region, even if only for a second. With a lot more sanding down of the rough edges this could be a truly phenomenal achievement of gaming. For now its better to think of it as a very content-rich tech demo, but a very impressive one at that.