Hexahedra is a carefully designed logic puzzle about creating precisely prepared crates

In the future when you need to ship something intergalactically you’ll do so using appropriately labelled, painted, stamped and marked cubes. In Hexahedra you’re the person who codes the machines to create those crates, although there’s a bit more at play than just that.

If you’re a fan of production-line games or logic puzzlers, then Hexahedra is one for you. You have to create factories which process crates to meet an order, and you do that by placing devices around various factory zones, then creating a series of instructions which can output the required design in perpetuity. At first, this is a simple case of repainting each of the sides of a crate, however, as it goes on you’ll need to stamp them and even assemble them.

It’s intuitive and clever though. In fact, as it gets more complicated you’re deliberately given more space to figure out yourself. As the trailer shows, you can end up with quite a large grid of spaces, and with each of those having multiple gadgets in them, you’ve got loads of ways to finish each puzzle. You can even expand the programming bar from the initial ten (in fact, you’ll need to after a few levels) if you want to plan out a slower, more methodical approach to the puzzle.

I played through the first handful of stages while at i68 earlier in the year, where developer Sidequest Ninja was on hand to talk to me about it. Terms were thrown around like Factorio and those from Zachtronics, and for good reason, there’s a calm, logical process required in order to progress and sometimes its important to remember to take a step back and evaluate the situation. Thankfully, Hexahedra is designed with the evaluation element in mind.

In most puzzlers you can run a solution and see where things start falling apart, however, in Hexahedra you can specifically pause and rewind your programming through each individual point of your plan so far. This is great for identifying where issues are introduced, but it’s also incredibly useful when it comes to optimising your design… great, because leaderboards are not just present, they’re paraded. There are quite a few quality of life design choices in there, perhaps the standout for me was that you could open up the pattern you have to replicate into a net version, rather than having to rotate the example box to find out each side. It’s very clear that a lot of care has gone into the design.

I had a lot of fun with the levels that I played through, and got to tinker with a fair few of the different pieces and commands of the early game. It’s certainly one to watch out for if you enjoy your programming/logic puzzle games, and handy for you, it’s due to launch this year.

Hexahedra is about to start playtesting (you can sign up for it on Steam), and will be available on PC & Linux when it launches.