Although it didn’t invent the genre, Terry Cavanagh’s brilliant Super Hexagon definitely seemed to kick off a trend of brutally difficult and visually assaulting twitchy arcade games following its release on iOS back in 2012. The concept of these games was basically to perform a fairly simple operation but do so with increasing speed and with pulsing, rotating visuals distracting you the entire way. It was absolutely no secret that that was the blueprint developer Thomas Janson was going for with his very Super Hexagon-inspired game Wave Wave which released on iOS in the spring of 2014. The game took simple cave flyer mechanics–press on the screen to rise up, release the screen to drop down–and threw you into a world of pulsating visuals, rotating environments, and dubstep tunes blaring in your ears and asked you to achieve one simple goal: Don’t crash into anything. Well, if Wave Wave had a super chill sibling that wasn’t quite as obnoxious or in your face, it would be Wave Redux, a spiritual successor that’s launching next week.
Wave Redux offers two main endless modes with two difficulty options for each. First is called Chill mode and it’s exactly that: a chill take on the Wave Wave formula. The game moves more slowly, the visuals don’t pulsate, and the screen only rotates when you pick up a certain icon on the screen. That leads into another major difference over the original, which is that you aren’t s...