My favorite thing about Hyper Light Drifter is all the new swear words I invented while playing it.
To be fair, swearing is one of my favorite things in general. Hyper Light Drifter generated those oaths of fury and joyful frustration that are unique to hard games. Itâs an action RPG where enemies move quickly, combat is brutally fast and punishing, and death is always just a heartbeat away. If you play, youâre going to die. A lot.
Iâll be honestâIâm not really a fan of games like this. I donât relish dying over and over, or making my level-headed dedication override my wall-kicking rage. I donât love games where the slightest slip-up is punished by repeating an area again and again and again until you somehow, against all odds, achieve a brief moment of perfection. Your reward for this try-not-to-spike-your-controller-because-it-cost-you-30-bucks triumph? Getting to face a new, harder enemy, specifically designed to challenge the skills youâve perfected from hours and hours of failure. Oh boy.
I like Hyper Light Drifter a lot, though.
For starters, it looks lovely. Beautiful pixel art and a moody electronic soundtrack complement the epic scope of the narrative, vague though it may be. Your character has to face off against a horde of Attack on Titan-esque monsters who⊠did something bad, I guess. Thereâs no text or dialogue, which can create a lot of confusion, especially in regards to what youâre supposed to be doing and why. The few non-enemy NPCs you encounter give pictorial snippets of story, and I found myself trying to decipher them out loud as I went.
âThere are⊠mouse people?â I mumbled. âAnd that tall guy⊠lasered them? And now there are⊠ninja frogs I guess I have to fight? OK, letâs go fight some ninja frogs.â
The ninja frogs were really fun to fight. So were the purple exploding bears, and the plant things, and the slouchy trolls, and the ghost birds and the shooty guys and the stabby warpy guys⊠Everywhere you go there are new things to fight. Most of the game is taken up by the immensely difficult but painstakingly balanced combat. New enemies are introduced one at a time, and many areas culminate in arenas where you fight them all at once. The difficulty scales in a way that I came to appreciate as I explored each of the gameâs areas; itâs implemented with a lot of care, so things feel fair but also challenging.
Enemy attack patterns might be the only legible thing in the game, and all you have to do is find the precise moment to expertly deploy your perfect parry in order to interrupt their telegraphed attack. Once you understand that, itâs straightforwardâyou just have to do it. You canât button mash. You canât panic. You canât fumble. You just have to be good.
This can get frustrating quickly, especially if youâre stuck. Save points are sometimes unfortunately far apart, and healthkits are few and far between. You can backtrack to restock, but the enemies respawn. Fighting through a horde youâve killed several times just for a healthkit can get tiresome, especially if youâre just trying to regroup for a new challenge or, worse, are lost.
Rather than progressing through levels, the map pushes outward in four cardinal directions. Each direction has a unique designâ east has the frog ninjas in water-kissed patios and underground labs; north has magic buzzards on snow-capped mountains; west has dense forests full of dogs that spit acid. I havenât seen south, which is unlocked by beating the other three bosses at the end of each area, access to whom is gained by locating enough purple shards to open the doors that bar their path.
The nonlinear nature of the levels, plus the maddenly non-specific map, led to a lot of frustration as I wandered in vain searching for shards, facing the same enemies again and again while desperately trying to figure out where the map was telling me to go. Itâs a beautiful world to be lost in, but being lost isnât much fun. At some point I even checked out guides and Letâs Plays, certain I must have been doing something wrong. While finding secret shards and hidden paths can be rewarding, the isometric perspective sometimes made it difficult to tell what I could walk through and what I couldnât. I fell off the edges of the world too many times, often in fights, or got stuck against things earlier areas told me werenât solid. Sometimes, furious as to why the map told me I was standing on a shard I couldnât see, I realized there was a secret entrance that looked just like all the things I couldnât walk through before. The gameâs obtuseness, combined with how harshly it punishes failure, took some of the luster out of its beauty.
Exploration also rewards you with currency that can be used to level up your character. You can get a better dashâ key to avoiding damageâ or a stronger sword attack, a grenade, or the ability to carry more healthkits. These points are hard to find, so deciding what to spend them on is an agonizing process. All of your abilities feel essential, and they all make a huge difference to how you play. You can take on any challenge without these upgrades, given the gameâs horizontal design, but they definitely help. This can create an odd tension between the conflicted way that exploration is both rewarded and punished. You need to explore to level up, but exploration can cost you both in terms of health and time spent repeating fights.
And then, for all your fighting, confusing navigation, and levelling, thereâs those boss fights. When I first faced the boss in the east, after more hours than anyone should spend fighting for that last shard, I was honestly relieved. The intimidating frog boss seemed so easy, its moves so clear and avoidable, that I thought it was some kind of gift. And then I died. Again and again and again, because I made a mistake and only had one healthkit and when I backtracked to get more I ended up using them all against the enemies I had to fight through to get them in the first place because I just wasnât good enough to avoid taking damage.
But when I finally beat that boss, I let out a mighty roar that made my roommates come running and scared my cat away for an hour. It was the best feeling, the moment Hard Games(âą) are designed for, an unspeakably satisfying payoff that made me feel like a fucking elite champ hero. And then I realized I was going to have to do that another three times.
Overcoming difficulty in Hyper Light Drifter rewards you with the chance to overcome more difficulty. There are people who are going to love thisâI loved it, at least for a while. But itâs the kind of joy thatâs best for a very specific subset of people. Some might not have the time, patience, or manual dexterity to sit through these fights again and again. If youâre struggling, as I did, I would definitely recommend taking a breakâIâll always remember that one fight I couldnât beat until I gave up and went to bed, only to wake up to beat it on the first try at 7 AM. Itâs a game in the classic âthis is the only game I have so Iâm going to play it incessantlyâ sense, one that might not jive well with those of us with a massive Steam backlog and only so much hair left to pull out.
Hyper Light Drifter is great. Really great. I have the sinking suspicion Iâm terrible at it, but that doesnât make me love it any less. If itâs right for you, youâre going to love it; if it isnât, youâre going to hate it. I had dreams about it when I quit for the night, my fingers twitching to get back to that latest boss fight. I was relieved to go to work on Monday, freed from the pressure of having to play it any more. Itâs excellent at being what it is, and like many such confident games, what it is is not for everyone. I want to be the kind of person Hyper Light Drifter is right for, but I donât know if I am. Iâve had a lot of fun playing it for the last week, and I still canât stop thinking about it. Maybe that means itâs right for me after all.
