You’ll face one or two of a specific enemy type, learn how to fight it and then more and more follow. Hyper Light Drifter’s progression of difficulty is subtle and masterful. Once you’ve got a handle on how to fight, it becomes a matter of learning how to fight the enemies you encounter.Įach enemy has its own attack pattern, and the key is to learn it, so you know when to dodge and when to unleash a torrent of sword slashes/gun fire. Hyper Light Drifter’s combat is all about learning, which ties neatly into the lack of hand-holding found throughout the experience. Within a couple of hours I was a master of brawling with the weird and wonderful inhabitants of the game. At first any enemies I encountered would give me trouble. Unlike the story, the combat in Hyper Light Drifter does begin to make sense as you keep playing. By pushing buttons on the controller I learned that I could swish a sword, shoot a gun and do a short-range teleporting dash (the latter being useful for combat and exploration). Like the narrative, there’s no real explanation of anything when it comes to combat. It’s a really fun game to play (for the most part). The fact that I’ve mentioned twice now that I played the game from start to finish should be a dead giveaway that, yes, the gameplay is worth sticking around for. So, with the story not really able to grab me in any way, it fell to the gameplay to keep me hooked in. Despite not “getting it” I can’t fault the presentation. Combine that with an excellent, moody soundtrack and you’ve got the perfect ingredients for a very atmospheric world. It makes good use of bold colours and is very easy on the eye. The game is generally presented extremely well, with a bold art style that isn’t quite the pixel art you might be used to in other indie games. Some of the imagery I found in Hyper Light Drifter was memorably striking. My total lack of comprehension doesn’t even mean it was necessarily bad. I explored, I found the purple triangles that I was meant to find, I killed some bosses, spoiler, spoiler, spoiler. I gleaned a bit of information from these illustrations, and from some light environmental storytelling, but by and large I just soldiered on without paying the story too much mind. Characters who are willing to open up “talk” in what can best be described as comic book panels. There are characters you can talk to, although “talk” is a bit of a stretch. I powered through the game without any real idea why I was doing what I was doing. Knowing my luck this is one of those instances when Wikipedia is wrong. There’s probably something to be said for a game when I can glean more about the story from a Wikipedia plot summary than from the game itself. And the main character stumbles and coughs blood at regular intervals, which I now know, thanks to Wikipedia, is because he has an illness. It had something to do with robots and post-apocalyptica. I guess what I’m trying to say is I didn’t really get it. There’s a story analysis on Reddit that reads like a dissertation (spoiler alert). Or at least not in a straightforward way. I’d say there’s no hand-holding in the game, but that would be an understatement. Obtuse would be a good word to describe it, in every part of the experience. Hyper Light Drifter is not a game that explains itself very well. That plot summary right there? I lifted it from Wikipedia, verbatim (except some minor grammatical tweaks). I’ve played Hyper Light Drifter from intro to credits and I really have no idea what was going on during any of it. The game puts players in control of the Drifter, a character that has access to technology that has long been forgotten by the inhabitants of the game’s world, but is forced to search through the world and the ruins of civilization before to find a cure for an illness he carries. Its DNA is made from games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Diablo, with exploration and challenging combat its main mechanics. Hyper Light Drifter is a 2D action RPG that pays homage to classic 8-bit and 16-bit games.
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