SUPERHYPERCUBE, a spatial reasoning puzzle game for PSVR looks to be soon headed to the Vive through SteamVR. And while SteamVR normally supports the Rift, a developer protest could exclude the headset.

SuperHyperCube is most succinctly described as a ‘Tetris (1984) for VR’. But that alone would betray the game’s unique take on depth-based geometric gameplay—that works uniquely well in virtual reality—and its distinct and superbly directed art and sonic stylings.

In the game, players are tasked with reorienting a 3D shape to fit through a 2D hole. It sounds pretty easy—and it is, until the shapes become increasingly complex, ramping up the engagement of your spatial reasoning centers as your brain attempts to reconcile the rules of two dimensions simultaneously.

Developed by Kokoromi and published by Polytron, SuperHyperCube made its debut as a launch title alongside PlayStation VR back in October. And there it has remained, garnering a 4 out of 5 star rating with its $30 price.

But now it seems the game will be soon coming to the HTC Vive and SteamVR. A tweet from Polytron today portrayed the Vive’s controllers in the unmistakable style of SuperHyperCube.

Rift Support in Question

With support for the HTC Vive, that means the game will almost surely be landing on SteamVR. And while SteamVR technically supports the Rift too, Polytron had proclaimed back in September that they would not pursue support for Oculus’ platform, following revelations that Oculus’ founder, Palmer Luckey, was involved in politically polarizing dealings. A situation that might have been eventually swept under the rug, had the election not turned out as it did.

Interestingly, you can see that the Vive trackpads in the Twitter tease show a d-pad and buttons that are laid out just like those of the PS4’s controllers, except the button mappings use the same XYAB layout as you’d find on an Xbox One controller. An oversight, or a clue? We’re not quite sure. It could be as innocuous as showing that the game (which relies on a gamepad on PSVR) would support Vive players using an Xbox One controller connected to their computer. But, the fact that every Oculus Rift comes with an Xbox One controller included adds an additional wrinkle to the situation.

SEE ALSO
Morpheus Exclusive 'SuperHyperCube' Shares Heritage With One of Indie Gaming's Biggest Hits

It isn’t clear if Polytron’s original intent was to never see the game played on an Oculus Rift headset, or they simply didn’t want to put the game on Oculus’ distribution platform (which would thereby give the company a share of the game’s sales). In the latter, it’s possible that the company will allow Rift users to play the game via SteamVR (as the revenue share would go to Valve instead). We’ve reached out to the company for comment.

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One other major question is whether or not the game will make use of the Vive’s roomscale tracking capability or its motion controllers. On PSVR the game relies on a gamepad for seated play, which really only has the player leaning from side to size to look around the shapes.
superhypercube (1)One could certainly imagine a lot of fun, new gameplay which would employ the Vive’s motion controls and expanded tracking volume, but such an addition would probably mean a major reworking of the game. More likely, we’ll see a simple port to start, though we’d be happy to see SuperHyperCube take on a life of its own on the Vive.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Get Schwifty!

    Let’s see… being devils advocate….the guy’s worth 700 million dollars give or take… he contributes a measly 10K (about like giving a half a penny for one of us) to a group he barely knows and clearly is making an absurdly low financial commitment too, with some folks who use tactics their opponents have for decades… and we are going to cry foul and deny ourselves full access to a segment that represents anywhere from 1/3 to 45% of the market. Smart. I am certain Luckey will learn his lesson to not oppose the political elites and Oculus will fail due to no support for what amounts to Virtual Tetris game play LOL.

    • Rogue_Transfer

      That would be missing the point made though by their stance:

      “You may have seen the news yesterday that ties Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey to Nimble America, a Trump-endorsing organization Luckey started to defame Clinton via “the power of Internet memes”.

      In a political climate as fragile and horrifying as this one, we cannot tacitly endorse these actions by supporting Luckey or his platform.”

      • Get Schwifty!

        I think I see the point entirely…. so its just fine and dandy if one side engages in countless uses of the power of Internet memes, but if the other side does it…. OMG its a travesty…. sorry, there is no high road here… what they are really afraid of is that a tool they feel they have power with is not to be shared but held in their exclusive (and I am sure they feel) more responsible hands.

        • Rogue_Transfer

          No, it’s much more likely just a case of personal principles. People don’t always do things for business or real power, but for what feels right to them.

          Even when that sense of self-power doesn’t have great(or significant) weight, it’s the point that they likely feel that if they stand up against something, then others may follow. Or, just so they can feel they are acting in good conscience in accordance with their personal views & morals.

          • Get Schwifty!

            So – in other words they are self-defined white hats? Okay, there’s no way I can argue with that philosophy…

          • Paulo Martel

            Given the present situation, I think it’s perfectly understandable not wanting to support a company whose founder and CEO is a DT endorser. I don’t really need to read more into it.

          • Get Schwifty!

            So… you punish an entire group of employees and consumers in the process because one person made a decision to support a group you don’t like? How thoughtful and tolerant…

          • Michael Jones

            I think you just hit the nail on the head. As a CEO, ONE PERSON becomes responsible for much more than themselves. This is case in point. Every action has consequences. For most of us, the consequences only directly effect us. For someone who takes on such a large responsibility and active role, their consequences effect far more than just themselves. That’s the point.

          • RocketRoach

            Yeah, because “Oculus employees and consumers” are truly the downtrodden demographic everyone should be concerned with right now.

            I’m sure someone will eventually release a VR violin simulator so that we can fittingly soothe their tortured souls.

          • CPB

            He voted Gary Johnson.

    • mrtexasfreedom

      Dude was corrupting the political dialogue by financing organized shitposting campaigns. Haven’t seen the Democrats guilty of waging similar campaigns as you claim. Palmer Luckey is a literal piece of human garbage, and I say that as someone who owns an Oculus Rift.

  • Steve Dennis

    I understand them not wanting to distribute via Oculus Home, but it’s straight up petty to punish Rift customers, especially those who bought *well* before the controversy started.

    • care package

      Not sure I was call losing another lame steam indie as punishment.

  • Raphael

    The other issue here is oculus constantly bribing devs for exclusivity. The latest being 4a Games (metro 2033) who are only releasing their first vr title on octopus.

    I like the look of this superhypercube and I’m a Vive owner. In general I think it’s great when a game releases on octopus and Vive but I can’t help feeling oculus deserve this with their exclusivity bollocks. And of course there seems to be a number of issues with the company. You know. Aledged stolen code, Palmer funding trolls, his girlfriend friend ranting about immigrants.

    • Greet

      It’s really hard for devs to make money in VR, so timed exclusive deals are a great way to guarantee a thriving marketplace for content. Not every decision is made with evil intent ;)

      • Get Schwifty!

        Yes, but by god if we can spin it that way to make our selves feel good about it and less of the other folks, then we shall! And “bribing devs” is putting a spin on a practice that’s pretty common in the industry… and constantly being childish and referring to Oculus as “octopus” kind of shows you the mentality at work… “we are the good people who do no wrong, they are the bad people who do no right…”. Gross tribalism at its finest…

        You can be sure everyone at HTC only promotes VR for humanities sake and promoting the common weal, and never once leeched an idea or reused someone else’s IP…. *rolls eyes*…. it’s like arguing with children who are convinced eating candy for dinner makes perfect sense….

        What’s interesting is that its only the entitled Vive owners who constantly harp on this issue, but if a title doesn’t support Oculus you rarely hear any concern of righteous indignation from that camp, they made their bed and the pretty much accept it. The Vive sheep bleat in unison the minute they can’t have some shiny object handed to them…

        • Raphael

          Yawn plus 1
          I have octopus friends and I’m pleased when a Vive game is expanded to include octopus. I notify said friends they can buy the game. Detached and onward being two examples.

          You really sound like a numpty.

      • Raphael

        If I hear that “it’s really hard for devs to make money in vr” one more time I’m gonna punch someone.

        • Fredrik Sjöborg

          It’s really hard for devs to make money in vr

          • Raphael

            That does it, I’m gonna go punch someone’s head.

          • mamoru

            do you often get irrationally angry at true statements?
            Because right now it’s really hard to make money on VR software.

          • Raphael

            Well I haven’t made any money at all on VR software so I guess that’s true.

            I always get insanely angry at true statements.

      • Jack Liddon

        Seems like there’s more money to be made by releasing on all platforms rather than one.More is more, right? Unless of course Oculus is forking out money up front, then it kinda makes sense.

  • wowgivemeabreak

    That’s fine with me. I wouldn’t want to support a company that tries to punish customers just because they are brainwashed liberal cultists who need to bring their politics into their business of making computer games.

    This must be the inclusion and tolerance that many liberals love to preach about but never follow since they’re the biggest hypocrites alive. Liberal inclusion to those people goes like this “accept what we say and follow our beliefs or you are not welcome and we will even try and ruin you” which is exactly what I would expect from an ideology that has an ever increasing part of it that has sadly morphed into a cult.

    Juts look at that women’s march and how pro life supporting women and Trump supporting women were told they weren’t welcome or women who have gone on TV and indicated all Trump supporting women should be killed or aren’t women. Inclusion and tolerance!

    Note that I don’t think all liberals are cultists as I am sure many are normal and don’t spew forth that garbage.

    • Raphael

      What are u ranting about you mental mint cake?

    • Mitroll

      Your argument is “since liberals preach inclusion and tolerance, they should welcome literally everyone’s ideas”?

      lol

    • This coming from someone who is perhaps one of those trump dudes that berate Mexicans and Muslims harassing them constantly even going as far as to leave severed pig heads.

      And preach anti black crap.

    • Carl

      All liberals are cultists. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.

  • Raphael

    It’s funny seeing all the octopus kiddies ranting at the dev for excluding them. Given that oculus is paying one dev after another not to release on Vive. It feels like karma. I’m sure you’ll all live through this nightmare somehow.

    • Bryan Ischo

      Ah the old fallacy of “because a few people do something I don’t like I am going to slander the entire community”. It’s awesome how it leads to everyone constantly bitching at each other. Thanks for participating!

      • Raphael

        Now do you see why the world is in turmoil?

    • MasterElwood

      Has nothing to do with that. Most of us don´t want to buy games on steamVR because its buggy as shit.

      Thats all.

      • Raphael

        Most of us? You mean oculus users? I see quite a few oculus users state they prefer steam but I also read lots of comments of steam issues with oculus. Issues I don’t have with Vive (except for a few weeks last year).

      • Bryan Ischo

        Huh? I haven’t experienced that, nor seen it discussed as a common experience. Not sure what you’re talking about exactly.

      • Paulo Martel

        Buggy as shit, SteamVR ? Interesting, in 4 months playing with the Vive I experienced maybe 2-3 SteamVR crashes (and I have played 30+ VR games).

      • JustNiz

        Obviously just another fact-free mouth-breathing Oculus fanboi.
        SteamVR has always worked smoothly on my PC at least.

    • Get Schwifty!

      You live in your own world Raphael… that’s all I can say. Most people aren’t commenting on the fact they don’t have access the way Vive fans do, they are objecting to the reasoning behind it…. but spin away….

      • Raphael

        You live in my world too Schwifty, you’re a very important part of my life. I get the overall outrage is that the little people are being punished because companies bring politics into their decision making. On the one hand I get the view that politics shouldn’t matter, but on the other hand – the real world (which may itself be nothing more than another virtual one), people do get upset and pick sides.

        I’ve heard some use the argument that anything you do outside of your job should not affect your employment at that company. I believe that’s a misuse of the concept of freedom of speech. One incident in particular I’m thinking of where some redneck made racially abusive slurs to the father of a black girl. He kept calling and leaving hate messages on the voicemail. He was fired from his job subsequently. Now there are those who believe he shouldn’t have been fired because he did nothing wrong while at work.

        I believe that kind of view is insanity.

        I believe a company should be allowed to choose who they employ or who they work with.

    • care package

      where are they? why would the octopus kiddies even care? about another steam indie? ok….

  • Sam Illingworth

    I’ve no information regarding them releasing on Rift, but the fact they showed xbox buttons on the Vive controllers simply suggested to me that they intend to release on Vive supporting standard controllers and Vive controllers by emulating standard controllers.

  • Ombra Alberto

    Simple. I not will buy the products of this developer.

  • Jack Liddon

    A developer doesn’t want to contribute cash to a guy that helped elect the Cheetoh King…I don’t see a problem with that. You right-wingers want to bask in the glow of a burning America, knock yourself out. Doesn’t mean the rest of us want to contribute to the cause.

    • Bryan Ischo

      Calling selling a video game to end-users of a hardware platform “contributing to the cause of basking in the glow of burning America” is an example of hyperbole to an almost repulsive degree.

      I don’t care what legal action Palmer Luckey took with his own money. Caring about that would be intensely hypocritical when I don’t apply the same standards to every person involved in every product I have ever bought or will buy.

      Do you mind being so hypocritical?

    • Mike

      “a guy that helped elect the Cheetoh King”
      I really doubt he had a significant impact. Rather than trying to find small targets to blame, what the left SHOULD be doing right now is reflecting on if there’s anything different they’ve been doing since the last election that’s been driving moderates away from them.

    • Carl

      Listen to yourself. You aren’t rational.

      • Get Schwifty!

        Yeah, it kind of blows the mind sometimes the irrational apprehension and fear-mongering… “burning America”… that made me smile… the use of a clear pejorative like “Cheetoh King” just shows you the depth of thought. I guess he is happier basking the glow of a ever-militant rising Islamic state by the failed Arab Spring orchestrated by the previous administration…

        • care package

          well that was well said.

  • If they choose without compensation to leave out part of a market i’m fine with it, but they won’t see my dime.

    • matnojje

      But Oculus users will possibly still be able to play it though steam.

      • True, but it has to be a work of art or super compelling for me to leave the comfort of Oculus Home and turn on Steam VR and play. Don’t get me wrong, I have 534 steam games and leave it running constantly, but home is just nicer when I just put on the headset and i’m there.

        Also it really helps to have true Oculus SDK integration, like “Serious Sam VR: The first encounter” so the common Oculus hands and guardian are present instead of that Steam stuff.

  • FelipeBudinich

    who wants to buy buggy stuff from polytron anyway?

    • Raphael

      You?

  • Carl

    It’s time to teach SJWs a lesson, and stop caving in to their terrorist threats. I’m not going to buy this game.

    • JustNiz

      Me neither. It looks like a shit game anyway so I don’t exactly feel like I’m missing out on much.

  • 1i7

    As an international observer of U.S. politics, I find it interesting to see the extent to which most people just repeat the narrative present in the mainstream media. There is such an intense reaction to Trump, calls for his impeachment left right and center, people saying “I will leave the country if he is elected” prior to it happening, now even in the video game world, developers snubbing release platforms out of protest.

    Where was your political outrage at the outright illegal activities of past presidents? At the foreign policy which has consistently escalated global instability and indeed the direct threat to your own country? Which game developers chose release platforms based on who did or didn’t support Obama? Folks are so afraid of Trump had no fear about how dangerous the agendas are of the interest groups being serviced by the previous administrations? The people on TV told you it was OK, right?

    Now that you have a president who doesn’t represent the interest groups who pull the strings of the mainstream media, and the entire MSM therefore predictably rails against him as much as possible, everyone who laps up the mainstream narrative for their political understanding suddenly feels awfully vulnerable, and probably without much of an original thought or an understanding of why the narrative is what it is, beyond the contents of the narrative itself.

    Don’t get me wrong, Trump has ideas that deserve criticism and social action. So did all the past presidents and so will all the future ones. It’s just interesting to see such a shift in how so many people relate with politics without any realization of the meta level and whose fears and interests they are really espousing.

    Everyone is being played, all day every day. Pushed to accept some stupid black vs white ‘pick a team’ mentality so that we are all divided and compartmentalized and regurgitating the culturally prescribed limited worldviews. Meanwhile the polarization grows, the intensity of the pendulum swing just increases and friction and chaos intensifies, so we’re all nice and scared and will lap up whatever savior is offered to us, whether that’s the patriot act, or the second coming of christ, or your fav new presidential candidate, or martial law, or seatbelts for your toilet, or whatever other crap, without taking responsibility for yourself and healing your mindbodysoulliferelationshipscommunity by finding BALANCE.

  • blueredgreenyellow

    Why oh why did I read the comments. Now I just feel all dirty inside.

  • OgreTactics

    Fez is without a doubt a video game masterpiece, one of the best of this decade.

    How could it be made by some crybaby wimp who’s as fucking politically stupid as Phil Fish?