Next Hexagon

Something genuinely exciting landed on the ZX Spectrum Next in May 2026, and this is it. Next Hexagon is a brand new game released this year by developer shrek128, also known as Miroslav Bursa, and it has already been turning heads in the Spectrum Next community for very good reason.

The concept is stripped back and precise. You are inside a rotating hexagonal maze, and wave-rings close in on you. You have one button. That is everything you have. The game is coded entirely in pure Z80 assembler using the sjasmplus assembler toolchain, which means it is running on the ZX Spectrum Next at a level very few homebrew releases manage to reach. The visuals use the Next's Layer 2 hardware to produce a rotating bitmap background that reacts in sync with PT3 chiptune music. This is not a visual gimmick. It is deliberate and it makes the experience noticeably harder to read as the speed climbs.

And it does climb. The speed ramps up sharply around the one-minute mark, which is where the leaderboard separations begin to happen. There is a built-in scoring system, and for those playing on real Spectrum Next hardware with Wi-Fi, high scores can be pushed online directly from the machine without any third-party software.

The game is described by its creator as strongly inspired by Micro Hexagon on the Commodore 64, re-imagined from the ground up for the Next with hardware-native features the original platform could never have supported.
In this video we play through Next Hexagon with full commentary, talking through what we are seeing as it happens. This channel covers retro and homebrew gaming with genuine enthusiasm and real-time reactions, and a game this sharp deserves exactly that treatment.

If you are new to the channel, welcome. This is the place for games that most people have never heard of but absolutely should have. Subscribe and stick around, because there is a lot more where this came from.

Available from https://shrek128.itch.io/next-hexagon.