Hyper Light Drifter
It’s Like The Dark Souls of-
(Note: minor-ish spoilers for the ending of the game.)
It always comes back to Dark Souls. Several games on this list are probably gonna come back to Dark Souls, because Dark Souls is an incredible game and I think about it a lot, and as time goes on we’re going to see more and more games that take inspiration from Dark Souls. And that’s a good thing for games, on the whole. But maybe not so good for games criticism. So it goes.
Hyper Light Drifter is not the Dark Souls of anything. It’s difficult, it’s got tantalizing bits of lore that players literally had to decipher in the weeks following the game’s release, and hell, it does basically all of its storytelling heavy-lifting using suggestive level design and fantastic set pieces. But that’s all just game design. Difficulty is a tool that allows you to force your player to engage with and master your systems. Tiny crumbs of story make compelling collectables that keep your players invested in your extra challenges. Your levels should tell a story. Dark Souls didn’t invent any of this; it was just incredibly good at it.
And hell, I’d argue Hyper Light Drifter’s difficulty is completely different from Dark Souls. Combat in the latter is methodical; it’s about understanding your situation and finding the best response, be it to turtle up or roll into an advantageous response. It’s a puzzle that can require quick reflexes but that is ultimately about understanding your enemies and the world around you. Fights aren’t just about themselves, they’re about avoiding enough damage to not waste an Estus, because you know you’re going to need it later
Combat in Hyper Light Drifter is fast and free-form, and most importantly it’s about you. You buy moves for your character in any order and start gravitating towards favorite guns (all of which are viable to use), you dodge in imprecise directions that depend on the pixel-perfect location of your mouse or even worse, a joystick. Sometimes a fight can be entirely about getting yourself out of a corner that you put yourself into, or rushing down the one enemy that’s killed you 4 times in a row now, even when it’s across the room. Combat has a rhythm to it, but your style and weapon loadout determines that rhythm.
Every encounter in Dark Souls is much more than just that fight. You aren’t fighting to win this fight, you’re fighting to conserve Estus for when you need it later. Maybe your bloodstain is 3 rooms over but it’s too risky to try to run through this room, and that’s weighing on you. Fights in Hyper Light Drifter are almost all-in. The only consumable resource is the health packs, and while sometimes you want to save one for the next fight, in general it’s better to stay alive and finish this fight at all costs, because there’s just so little to lose. Combat deaths almost always place you right next to the encounter and let you try it again.
The health system is one of my favorite aspects. While most games like this would create collectable health boosts to increase your measly 5-point health bar, the best you can do in Hyper Light Drifter is increase your capacity for health packs (which provide a full heal) from 3 to 5. That means no matter what, you’re no more than 5 hits from death. In a game with basically no I-frames, every encounter can go from safe to lethal in a matter of seconds. But the whole experience is built around that. Where a lot of people see the optional 2-HP hard mode as shitty “hard for hard’s sake” challenge, it feels to me like it’s the natural completion of the free-flowing combat gameplay. You’ll die to slightly missed dodges and bullshit wolf jump attacks (it’s always dogs, isn’t it), but you’ll be plopped right back at that fight and and you’ll try it again and it’ll go totally differently, even if you fail. But you’ll get closer, and you’ll find new strategies and eventually everything will click perfectly and bam, onto the next zone.
And on the subject of atmosphere and tone, I feel like Hyper Light Drifter manages to explore a different space than Dark Souls. True, both games are dark and brooding, but where Dark Souls is relentless and brutal, Hyper Light Drifter actually evokes more of a sense of melancholy. When the last enemy dies and the drifter plants their sword in the ground, you’re suddenly all alone again in this massive, ruined world. It’s a game with a lot of quiet contemplation, whose clever secret-marking system encourages you to scour every little detail of each disorderly room whenever you have a moment of peace. The frequent, grotesque visions of the drifter’s death by some alien creature and the coughing fits that precede them never let you forget that there’s a sword over your head, a constant reminder of what this quest means that seems absent from a lot of other games like this. Hyper Light Drifter is very much concerned with its character’s mortality, and it forces you to engage with that even if all you want is another fast action game. And by allowing you to become this character through expressive combat, it invites you to consider your own mortality.
I could go on like this forever, but what it comes down to is the world created by Hyper Light Drifter and the world created by Dark Souls feel very different. Hyper Light Drifter is a game about a powerful badass who can save the entire world but can’t prevent their own inevitable demise. But that’s not because Dark Souls said games have to have sad endings now. It’s because the creator, Alx Preston, has a congenital heart condition that could basically kill him at any time. It’s because death is inevitable, and there’s something extremely compelling about seeing your drifter race against time as their health deteriorates. It’s because deep down we all know we can do something of value, even though life is short.
