It’s refreshing to see that many upgrades, like the projectile deflecting upgrade for dash and the sword, working on bosses as well. Nearly all of them are multi-phased, meaning that you’re unlikely to one shot any of them. The bosses of Hyper Light Drifter aren’t going to win any awards for originality but they are the most enjoyable aspect of the game. This is then most expertly demonstrated in Hyper Light Drifter’s standout feature: the bosses. Once you get a feel for the enemies, and have a couple upgrades under your belt, the combat becomes both challenging and rewarding.
This will often lead to you making mistakes and, of course, your inevitable demise. However, if you’re like me, you’ll want to try and kill as many as you can as quickly as you can. Indeed none of the regular enemies are that complicated and most have really obvious telegraphs that you can pick up on quickly. I can’t tell you how many times I died just because I wanted to do something fast rather than taking my time with each enemy. In my opinion this is the best way to utilise a player’s nostalgia: use it as a basis to create something new and interesting rather than beating them over the head with it.Ĭombat has an almost Dark Souls kind of feel to it where the real boss of the game is yourself. Honestly it was hard to shake the “Zelda set in a sci-fi landscape” feeling when I was playing it, a feeling that it seems many other fellow reviewers share. Where it differentiates itself is through the combat which is much more twitch focused and relies heavily on precise timing by the player for certain moves to be pulled off perfectly. There are various upgrades scattered around, some of which can only be obtained through defeating certain bosses or completing challenges. There’s a large map with distinct sections that you’re able to walk around at your leisure, although some parts are locked off until you complete certain actions. Hyper Light Drifter takes after classic games like Zelda: A Link to the Past and other top-down adventure games. It’s one of the few games that’s built on GameMaker Studio that doesn’t look like every other title built on it, a testament to the amount of effort put into honing Hyper Light Drifter’s visual aesthetic. There are some elements I’m not quite sure are completely true to the era, like the overlayed glitch effects, but I’m no purist by any stretch of the imagination. Hyper Light Drifter retains much of the other aesthetic elements, such as limited colour palettes and fixed lighting, which were also present in titles from this generation. Numerous new wave pixelart games favour high definition versions of pixelart graphics which, technically, aren’t faithful to what was possible during the period. Hyper Light Drifter takes the traditional approach to its pixelart visuals, favouring a more authentic recreation of the styles of games long past. So I’ll leave the usual plot analysis until the end but I’m more than happy to discuss the various theories about the game in the comments.
Indeed the entirety of the main plot is told through pictures and simple in-game cut scenes, leaving the interpretation of what’s actually going on up to the player. Hyper Light Drifter is very much a game of “show, don’t tell” and to explain the opening scenes would be reveal too much of the story. I’d usually give you a brief summation of the starting plot here but I don’t think I could rightly do that here. I’m glad I did too as it hearkens back to games of yesteryear, and not simply because of its graphics. When I saw it come up again during the Steam Winter sale I figured, with nothing else better to play, it was time to give it a look in. Hyper Light Drifter was one game that I passed on multiple times: first when it found success on Kickstarter and secondly when I saw it released on Steam. Quite often I’ll find something that I regret not playing on its release, the most obvious of which was The Talos Principle. For this humble game reviewer it means looking back at those titles I missed, looking for something to fill the usual holiday lull. This time of year lends itself to catching up on things that may have otherwise passed you by.
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