#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW HOW TO#

Your hero's most iconic ability is a dash, which can be used to leap small gaps, avoid enemy fire or weave between waves of enemies. Hyper Light Drifter's protagonist only has a few tricks up their sleeve, able to dispatch enemies with a hard light sword they can swing in short combos and a small armory of guns that they can charge by scoring melee hits. It's a well-trod enough formula for you to pick up on it, even without explicit dialogue relaying your motivation. And it also doesn't take too long for the game's loops to become apparent: You'll explore each of the four branches, diving into the undergrounds of each and taking part in increasingly difficult combat encounters while hunting down keys to unlock the route to each area's boss. In each one, you have to find a handful of key items, defeat the area's boss and activate a beacon, and outside of a single, confusing pictograph, you aren't told any of that from the game's opening.īut there's not a wrong way to start your journey you could conceivably play through the areas in whatever order you wish, although some are certainly harder than others. From the central hub town, you can explore and conquer any of the four unique territories that stretch out from the cardinal directions.

The biggest hurdle comes at the start - not only are you not told what's going on, you're not told where to go, or why you would go there. In terms of playing the game, Hyper Light Drifter's purposefully inscrutable nature can be, occasionally, a bit exasperating. In motion, with all its detailed sprites battling furiously over lovingly crafted battlefields, with Fez composer Disasterpeace's otherworldly, atmospheric score pulsating underneath, Hyper Light Drifter is simply astonishing to see. It's rare for screenshots to do a game justice, but any given still image from the game, taken out of context, just looks remarkable. That world-building is also accomplished thanks to the fact that Hyper Light Drifter is, in no uncertain terms, a massive artistic achievement. Intuiting the lore of this world was rewarding, and got me invested in the game's setting, even though I was certain much of my analysis was probably wildly inaccurate. Every single screen of every area in Hyper Light Drifter has a purpose and a history, from the ancient libraries of the Northern avian scholars to the crystalline weaponry of the Western Forest's bear warriors. And, as a plot development strategy, it absolutely works, thanks in large part to the remarkable amount of environmental storytelling developer Heart Machine has put into the game. That hero is shown to be a capable sword-wielder, but seems to be plagued by some horrible malady that causes them to cough up bright pink blood with troubling frequency.Īny specifics beyond that - where you are, who you are, what happened to this world, what's hunting you - are entirely up to interpretation. Most of the exposition comes from the game's gorgeous opening cutscene, which shows Hyper Light Drifter's caped protagonist surviving some apocalyptic attack on their home world, only to be confronted by towering, dying titans and a shadowy monster that seems to pursue them through the whole game. The UI, map and menus feature arcane symbols and characters of a fictional language. Seriously, none: Dialogue with the NPCs you meet in the game is presented exclusively in pictographs. Here's a fact to set the scene: Other than a handful of tooltips explaining what buttons do what, there are no written words in Hyper Light Drifter.

I'm hesitant to break down the backdrop of Hyper Light Drifter, because its plot, setting, characters, history and world-building are so ethereal. Hyper Light Drifter's specifics are entirely up to interpretation

#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW HOW TO#

Learning how to swing a sword and dodge fatal attacks is easy enough - finding your place in a world that tells you virtually nothing about itself is a far more involving challenge. Its larger, more imposing request is how you have to interpret literally everything else that happens in the game. Progress isn't promised in Hyper Light Drifter it can't be earned by grinding or executing cheap strategies and exploits, only practice, practice, practice.īut the mechanical difficulty, the tense, balletic, close-quarters battles that punctuate your exploration of the game's gorgeous setting, is a relatively small component of what Hyper Light Drifter demands. It tosses roadblock after roadblock at its protagonist with no easy way out. Hyper Light Drifter demands things from its players that few games are even willing to request.

Hyper light drifter review