Hyper Light Drifter
Beautiful, challenging, but missing its spark…
Hyper Light Drifter, kickstarted to the tune of $645,158 & absolutely SONIC BOOM-ing the bejesus out of its initial funding goal, has finally released this April. It’s been greatly anticipated by many, but also (according to the earliest reactions) misunderstood by some. What many expected to be a Zelda-like exploration dungeon-crawler is actually…well, still an exploration dungeon-crawler, but with some controversial difficulty spikes, & far less depth.
Let’s get it out of the way now: Hyper Light Drifter is mother-flipping gorgeous. It sports some of the most captivating pixel-art I’ve ever seen, simultaneously managing to convey intricate emotion & grand post-apocalyptic landscapes. Indeed, so impressive is the aesthetic that the game’s frugal plot is told entirely without words, relying on beautiful, distorted, opaque pictures & cinematics.
Unfortunately, this casts the story on the wrong side of obtuse. Gloriously pretty it may be to look at, but I felt rather apathetic about the whole scenario. Subtlety can be a powerful tool if used correctly, but HLD applies too little motive to your actions. There are hints here & there of a war, & of a terminal illness, with the environments doing most of the work as you skirt around piles of bones, huge vats containing…things, & the skyscraper-sized remains of an invading (?) robot force. But I wanted more. I wanted the occasional NPC to give me more than three (often indiscernible) static panels of backstory & a little “Chiiiiiiiirp!”. I wanted more than an identical cutscene when unlocking a boss area, revealing precisely nothing as I progressed. There’s just so much potential, but with very little pay-off. It’s frustrating.
Also of apparent frustration (according to early reviews, at least) is the game’s combat. Comprised entirely of sword strikes & an armoury of discoverable boomsticks (plus an optional grenade), this is a system designed less around an ever-increasing library of combos & techniques, & more with honing your skills over the course of your playthrough. It’s lightning-fast, with even early enemies requiring you to make liberal use of your dash move, weaving your slight warrior in & out of the fray in a ballet of hit & run tactics. It’s beautiful to watch, & feels beautiful to play, particularly as you take on rooms of increasingly powerful & varied enemies. The most difficult encounters (usually contained within dungeons) play out as puzzles, often giving you the time to peruse the battlefield before engaging the enemy, & to theorise the best angle of attack. You’re relatively weak, with even a health boost requiring a moment of immobility, but with regular checkpointing & a lack of cheap deaths, the systems in place feel fair & rarely punishing.
As you progress, you’ll face-off against mini-bosses & boss-bosses, all of whom are significantly more challenging than even the most difficult enemy dungeon (those spikes mentioned earlier). Believe me when I say that, sooner or later, you’ll be cursing that stupid, ugly, minion-summoning, death-hurling piece-of-shit bird priest who awaits you in the northern area. It’s here that the aforementioned frustration is likely to creep in, as you’ll likely die numerous times before fully experiencing (read: watching yourself die, horribly) the bosses' full arsenal of attacks, & then a few more while you choreograph your way around them. Whether or not you’ll enjoy this is entirely down to your tolerance for mastery-through-repetition, as well as your twitch-skills & dextrous finger-waggling. For my part, as someone who enjoys chipping away at these encounters (though I’m by no means a demon when it comes to defeating them), I took no more than 10–20 attempts to take down the most difficult of the boss line-up. That, coupled with only a slight delay to throwing yourself back into the fight (no Souls-style trudging through the preceding level here), meant that the battles took minutes rather than hours, a timescale I can certainly get on board with. However, for those who expected that jolly jaunt around a battered and broken analogue of Hyrule, this’ll likely grate.
Outside of stabbing things & causing property damage, you’ll be wandering the overworld, seeking out hidden nooks for switches (opening the way to each area-boss), health packs and the yellow glint of the game’s currency. This is a little more trial-&-error than I’d like, with the deliberate perspective forcing you to simply bump into every single wall in the hope that there might be a secret path to traverse. I prefer to pick out clues in the environment, not have my avatar rub his little blue face against every rock and tree in the land in search of loot. A far more intelligent use of the perspective is the platforms that initially look just out of reach of your dash move, & therefore could be overlooked, but that often lead to a reward of some kind.
Unsurprisingly, given the generous checkpointing mentioned earlier, HLD is actually quite accessible for those who can only play in short bursts. You’ll almost always make meaningful progress, whether you‘re grabbing a quick 10 minutes before the wean wakes up, or you have hours to waste as you please. Yet despite this, the game occasionally seems to go to great lengths to contradict that logic, as evidenced by the utterly useless map. Some areas are more labyrinthine than others, disorientating you to the point where you’re treading old ground without even realising it, & having a functioning map-screen would’ve went some way towards mitigating this. As it stands, it suffers from a minimalist aesthetic which renders it worthless to the point I’d rather it wasn’t included at all. However, these areas aren’t particularly frequent, so a sense of achievement is still present in almost every play session.
Despite what might sound like miserable rambling, I actually quite enjoyed HLD. I was certainly compelled to finish the campaign, even if I was never truly tempted to root out every single upgrade coin or venture into New Game + (though to be fair, this is true for any game which offers similar ways to keep you playing after completion, even those I enjoy). I’d recommend it, though only as a fast-paced, challenging & incredibly pretty hack ’n’ slash adventure. Those seeking an engaging story to enjoy alongside their pixelated slash-fest will be sorely disappointed.
