Super Hexagon and VVVVVV developer working on a puzzle game

This hardened gamer still has literal nightmares about that VVVVVV level where you hop along the undersides of wildly ping-ponging platforms while trying not to fall into a pit of spikes—you know, that level.

level. And let's not even talk about how quickly my fat fingers fail at the psychedelic Super Hexagon. Terry Cavanagh's notorious for laying out challenges of immense difficulty—what will happen when he sinks his hands into the puzzle genre? We'll be finding out soon.

Over on his Distractionware blog, Cavanagh has posted a screenshot of his next work-in-progress, a puzzle game with the oh-so-appropriate working title Halting Problem. Something tells me that the simple level layout and the happy little dude are not indicative of the near-frustrating challenges we will be posed.

Puzzling is something I actually quizzed Cavanagh on a couple of years ago, and he has some rather strict opinions on what actually constitutes a puzzle game; he feels that the term has been misapplied with some of his previous work.

"I don't really consider the challenges in VVVVVV 'puzzles,'" Cavanagh told me in an email. "I think the term 'puzzle' gets thrown around in games all the time for things that aren't really puzzles, like Tetris or whatever."

Despite his own work having shied away from puzzling territory, he's long been a proponent of games such as DROD, who he cites as an influence on Halting Problem; it'll be exciting, and possibly a little terrifying, to see what Cavanagh can accomplish in the puzzle genre.