105. SuperHyperCube (Kokoromi, Playstation VR, 2016)

OK, so I have technically played SuperHyperCube before. It was about 3 years ago at a games festival and I only played for one round, but I never played my own copy until now. SuperHyperCube is a simple puzzle game where you are manipulating a cube in order to fit it through a precisely shaped hole in a slowly approaching wall. It's basically a neon-soaked, minimalist version of that one Japanese game show that they adapted for US audiences.

Every time your shape successfully passes through a wall, more cubes are added on, altering your shape into a new unfamiliar form, soon after, the next hole fades into appearance in the distance. You have about 10 seconds to study the hole and match your shape up before it collides with the wall. You need to look at the front of your shape, but also peek around it to study the wall, and VR feels like the perfect medium for juggling these activities. The simple control scheme fades into the background and I forget that there is even a controller, it's just me manipulating this ever growing shape.

If there's one thing that I'm good at, it's quick spatial awareness challenges, and having played hundreds to thousands of hours of Tetris, I felt so ready for SuperHyperCube. Every time I played the game, I have increased my score, from my first pitiful run of 3, up to my fifth run of over 3500 points. I am now in the 160s on the leaderboard and I really want to break the top 100.

5/5, perfect minimalist puzzle tension, I had a better time here than with Tetris Effect