The Hex (PC)

A space marine. A sorceress. A wastelander. A fighter. An animal mascot. And a faceless mystery. Six has-been heroes from different video game genres all find themselves at the Six Pint Inn when the bartender receives an anonymous phone call. Someone there is planning a murder. To better understand the suspects and their potential motivations, you’ll need to play through their pasts, but doing so reveals even deeper mysteries, The Hex beginning as a murder mystery before it evolves into an examination of people’s relationships with the games we make and play.

 

Since every one of its six main characters is from a different video game genre, The Hex is technically a multi-genre experience, although if a single idea could be said to unify them, it’s a focus on figuring out the game world you’re in, essentially making it a puzzle game that utilizes mechanics from other game types. When you’re playing through the flashbacks that help you learn about the individual characters, you won’t need to be a pro at the genre being represented. The fighting game portion for example does let you punch and kick with a focus on wearing down life bars, but the fights are actually more about identifying the simple patterns in the other combatants’ attacks. You don’t need quick reflexes to engage with this side of the experience, deduction the stronger tool to bring and even portions like the platforming are made generally easier than if they were meant to carry an entire experience. The top-down shooting of the space marine’s section is perhaps the only one that feels more involved, other modes like the role-playing game turn-based so you can consider actions while you do need to point and fire at targets properly as the space marine Lazarus. Fortunately, respawns are very forgiving during that segment, so The Hex remains foremost a more cerebral experience while finding ways to introduce logic puzzles even into genres better known for quick action.

While there will be some time spent at the Six Pint Inn essentially doing some point-and-click exploration to add another genre to the pile, it’s inside the other game types where The Hex starts to show its greater depths. When you play the fictional games these characters originate from, you’ll see reality bleed in through some unexpected ways. These start off simple, like Super Weasel Kid actually using Steam reviews for platforming in his early section, but getting to read the Steam reviews also starts telling you a deeper tale than what the short adventure would otherwise provide. The Hex is primarily about our relationship with video games, not so much the actual playing but the wide world of discussion around them. Players get emotionally attached to the franchises and characters of the games they play, but actually having a character respond to their outside perception makes you more deeply consider their real world counterparts.

 

One particularly interesting example is the game’s fighting game hero Chef Bryce, a character caught between balance patches as he’ll either be disliked for being too weak to be interesting or so strong that players loath him. It’s easy to dismiss such reactions when you consider them as lines of code to be tweaked with, but people do have emotional investments in game worlds and playing as the actual characters impacted by this shift in public opinion helps add some context to online discussions that often dismiss such sentiments. At the same time, turning the spotlight back on some discussions and reactions can also make certain behaviors seem quite funny, isolating those actions for consideration making you reflect on the stranger ways we look at games as well. It’s not all heady and introspective, it often just as amusing as it is meaningful to see where the game will head next with how it integrates elements of the gaming community.

The outside impact on the game worlds isn’t only thematic and emotional though. Almost every one of the games features some disruption outside of what you would consider normal game design, although it is certainly more pronounced in the earlier games. These disruptions can have interesting impacts on how the game is played though, particularly when exploits and similar factors become a part of how you’re actually intended to play The Hex. The wastelander’s portion, for example, is a Fallout inspired tactical game, but it’s also one you experience not through its original design but how the game’s been warped by mods and external cheats. What makes this more interesting though is how The Hex builds this portion around smart use of the cheats you’ve been granted. You can only have two cheats active at once, and while you could try to fight some battles fairly, they’d be slow and monotonous. The cheats ask you to think of which ones benefit you at the moment, fights still packing a punch because of the frailty of the wastelander but the cheats actually add strategy to what would have been barebones drawn out conflicts otherwise. You aren’t taking the straightforward paths through these games and that also leads to you learning more deeply about the way these game worlds connect, especially since they all tie back to the same creator. Even game creation gets examined in interesting ways here though, with The Hex perhaps being a bit unintentionally prescient with some commentary adjacent to generative AI before it was able to truly have a large impact on game development.

 

The Hex ends up working as a narrative with richer depths for those familiar with gaming and the industry but still working in a self-contained way since its similarities to real world situations are not relying on direct references to work. However, The Hex also has much greater secrets to find for those who truly wish to scour every corner and even alter the game files a bit. The Hex has elements that will not likely come up in your first playthrough and has messages that require some decoding if you want to even begin to understand them, but thankfully this extra layer for people interested in digging deep is not necessary. You get the big important beats of the broader tale regardless, but The Hex allows you to have a more intimate understanding of certain aspects and further explore specific parts of it if you do invest the time to unravel this third mysterious layer to a game with some already compelling story-telling at its top layers.

THE VERDICT: The Hex lures you in with its mystery about a potential murder between video game characters, a suspenseful throughline that keeps you paying close attention as it starts to reveal the even deeper forces at play. The Hex is a game about our tumultuous relationships with video games, be it as fans or creators, and it comes up with many creative angles to examine it. It can dabble in different genres while uniting them with a focus on logical reasoning, not likely to lose a player interested in the premise because it doesn’t demand broad knowledge or a wide range of skills. Instead, your ability to deduce the underlying messages while essentially solving puzzles makes The Hex a thinking man’s game, especially if you’re the type who wants to dig well beyond the surface of what the game presents.

 

And so, I give The Hex for PC…

A GREAT rating. The Hex is very cleverly designed, telling its tale about a murder mystery and not tossing it away just to pursue its more fascinating observations about how people form relationships with the games they play. Be they developer or fan, there are undoubtedly many ways we experience video game and discuss them outside of their original context. The Hex wants to examine these and unite them, avoiding the clinical nature of a documentary or essay by having it tie to characters you come to know and the fictional narrative involving both the Six Pint Inn’s mystery and the person who worked on all of the game worlds featured. It is certainly a game with some big metatextual elements but also it doesn’t necessarily have “required reading” so to speak, the player able to see on screen relevant elements that get them to consider the way people react to games, brands, and developers. All of this work well because it’s also propped up on some interesting game experiences as well. The wastelander’s portion is about fans more directly impacting a game than mere reactions, but it also concocts an interesting form of play that makes use of the mods and cheats in ways that make you consider their value compared to the creator’s vision. The Hex has a lot to consider thematically, it has mysteries deep in its code to uncover, but it also has some entertaining twists on genre play, the game never as difficult as a top-down shooter or fighting game but its emphasis on thinking through problems can shine in most situations. There are moments where that isn’t as true admittedly, sometimes it feels like the game knows it should at least put forward some more typical shooting or platforming for a bit to avoid it breaking from convention too much, but The Hex isn’t trying to be an amazing platformer or shooter. It’s going for the rich narrative and interesting puzzles, and it executes those wonderfully.

 

The Hex is a game where seeing the many secrets is part of the excitement and I’ve made sure to leave out many of them to avoid completely ruining the fun. Even my references to certain parts may require some interpretive legwork to reach rather than the game presenting it openly, but that is, in essence, another layer I’ve placed over an already layered experience. The Hex can get quite complex if you want to consider all it is presenting but also isn’t too difficult to clear if you focus purely on solving the gameplay puzzles, the game still engaging even if you care most for the surface level. By being more contemplative about how a game can form a relationship with a player though, The Hex in turn improves your own estimation of it, the game having many interesting ideas to share and twists to present that the murder mystery feels only like the tip of a very large and robust iceberg.