Halcyon Hexagons & Hot Hot Hexagons

Halcyon Hexagons & Hot Hot Hexagons are a pair of minigames made by Team Strawberry Byte for the N64, Released on 13 Dec 2024. I’m putting them both on the same page because they are both made by the same team, they are based on the same engine and have very similar gameplay.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password minigamemadness and the source can be found here and here. Note that this is the same ROM that includes all the other minigames released for the 2024 N64brew Game Jam competition.

About Hot Hot Hexagons and Halcyon Hexagons

Both games follow a very similar structure in that you have the same intro, character selection screen and then a very similar gameplay. They both have you jumping on a series of hexagons set on a pattern of three concentric hexagonal grids.

Hot Hot Hexagons is the simpler of the two, set in a hellish environment. Each player starts in the central platform and they have to jump around avoiding falling in the lava below. Platforms will dip down into the lava and rise up after a little while after landing on them, forcing players to stay on the move. You can recover from a falling platform, but making your mark gets harder the lower it goes. Last man standing wins.

Halcyon Hexagons on the other hand has a few quirks of its own. You’re still jumping around platforms in the same pattern but this time you’re put in a much more heavenly setting. Each player starts in one corner of the hexagon and is tasked with colouring in as many of the hexagons as possible by jumping on them, and this time they don’t fall down into the void. The game ends when there is only one player left, but the winner this time is whoever got the most points.

This is the only minigame in the game jam which allows you to pick a character. You can choose from:

• S4ys: frog with N64brew shirt
• Wolfie: wolf with Libdragon shirt
• Mewde: cat with the jam logo shirt
• Olli: Dog with Fast64 logo shirt

Credits

These two minigames were made by the Strawberry Bytes team, which consists of:

• Zoncabe: Programming, models
• S4ys: Programming, models
• Mewde: Models
• Sonika Rud: Logo
• Kenney: UI Sprites
• Kaelin Stemmler: Music

Review and conclusion

The opposing natures of Halcyon Hexagons and Hot Hot Hexagons brings to mind the contrast between the celestial HH and infernal HHH. Really, they could have been called Heavenly Hexagons and Hellish Hexagons to feed into the duality between the two games.

Most of the other games in this game jam had each player play as the same character model but with a different colour to differentiate them. These two games however bring in four completely different characters to choose from which is quite novel in its own right. The only issue is that you have to go through the hassle of choosing one each time, and they don’t have anything that colour-coordinates with the player’s colour (red, green, blue or yellow).

The jumping controls are these games biggest drawback. The jump is very floaty, which in and of itself isn’t particularly damning. The issue is that if you let go of the joystick in the air, you stop dead in your tracks but moving it again while you’re in the air doesn’t nudge you over at all. It makes it so that you have to overshoot your jumps and then brake once you’re above your target hexagon.

The graphics in both games are beautiful, with a brief intro that has the camera moving around the environment and some pretty good character animations. The wolf’s tail does get strangely long while jumping though.

I’d have to say that out f the two, I prefer Hot Hot Hexagons over Halcyon Hexagons. The gameplay is more to the point since you don’t have to worry about coloured tiles and instead just on hopping around for survival. These two games show that you can reuse assets from one game in another one to either breathe new life into it or to bring alternative ideas into reality. The controls do take some time to get used to, but once you do the game really does shine through.