bit Generations: Dialhex

Much like in Techno BB, there’s a certain amount of complexity extracted just from moving many tiles at once. In Dialhex, these tiles are triangles embedded in a giant hexagon, and the player spins these tiles six at a time within a hexagon-shaped cursor.¹ With a gravity system and less-than-intuitive position resolution thanks to the slant of the pieces, any match (made by creating a hexagon with tiles of a single color) shakes up the stack, especially as the field fills up. By hovering the cursor in empty space, gravity ceases, and the player can suspend tiles in air to drop them into the most optimal spot. Between each of these dynamics, there’s quite the foundation here for quick thinking. Matching a full hexagon without accidentally scattering it requires pairing tiles together, as each cursor position is attached to adjacent ones by a two-tile third of the hexagon. Juggling a piece across the stack can’t be done through linear button presses either, as cursor positions are staggered against both the horizontal and vertical axes. There’s quite a lot to consider in the skill floor thanks to an original, dense base idea.

Everything else is an afterthought. There’s no scoring system or combo incentive, so the dynamics around preserving the stack may as well be nil, despite what first appearances suggest. Instead, progress is tracked solely by the amount of hexagons cleared. As an additional layer (and a vital one in the primary game mode), the game will assign a particular color to clear, with six of these hexagons cutting the tile drop rate once matched. This has the unfortunate effect of centralizing matches around a single color, especially in the endgame, when the drop rate gets hellish and tangents waste too much time. To bleed off additional cruft taking up the board, flashing white tiles change all remaining tiles of the same color when cleared, while flashing black tiles open the bottom of the field in the column they reside in, letting gravity take course and drain out pieces around it. There’s some intrigue on where one puts the drain, whether close to the side away from important tiles or in the middle to increase drain load, but like many applications of screen clear techniques, this one ultimately bandages over the drop-rate balance, turning the end-game into frantic drains at every opportunity on reflex rather than forethought.

The choice to have both light green and dark green tiles is striking, if a bit confusing. Playing this on a fussy CRT for a bit gave me insight into what it might be like to be colorblind.

The limited game modes do little to help this. In the Solo mode, the game starts with only two colors. This is about as interesting as you might expect (and it makes a fast-forward key-bind an attractive proposition, given the horrendously slow drop rate). Clearing six hexagons of each of the first two colors adds another color to the proceedings, and clearing six hexagons of each subsequent color adds another up to an eventual total of eight, where the color diversity actually makes producing matches rather difficult.² By comparison, Endless restricts itself to only four colors at any given time, making its early game slightly better (the drop rate still does it no favors) and its late game less interesting. The Versus mode³ has the usual garbage-send mechanic (although in this case it just jacks up drop rate) attached to the gameplay, but this doesn’t change anything about how one goes about matching hexagons. A missed opportunity all around.