![]() ![]() Unless you’ve cleared everything else then, you’re never stuck. While I’m sure many won’t have quite as much trouble as I did, those that do will be happy to know that once you hit a roadblock, you can go somewhere else and start chipping away there. You can complete them in whichever order you like, and warp between certain checkpoints. Each locale has four minor bosses and one area boss. The whole world is open to you from the start, and there are check points that connect each of the game’s four main areas - corresponding to the four cardinal directions. Hyper Light Drifter does let you upgrade your character whenever you’d like, though. Again, more skilled players than I will find a way to win, I’m sure, but during my run, but I couldn’t cut it. I thought the boss was impossible until I picked up chain-dashing (an upgrade that allows you to evade several times in quick succession). One boss in particular, a magic-wielding samurai covered in crystal shards, can unleash a furious volley of attacks that are tough to evade. And while I’m sure it’s possible to press through without them, on a first run many are essential. I didn’t learn, for example, that I could upgrade my character’s abilities until more than halfway through the game. While Hyper Light Drifter opts for a minimalist approach to its narrative, something I fell in love with from its opening moments, it’s easy to overlook some critical pieces of play. That said, some of combat’s finer points are… obtuse. There’s an expressiveness to your own movements that’s intoxicating. When it comes, though, success is both exhilarating and artful. It’s easy to dodge one attack and fall into another, so it pays to be careful. Most areas load you down with foes that are always on the assault. Chaining these together well, while maintaining an awareness of everything else that’s on screen - other enemies, projectiles and hazards - is essential. You can swing a sword, shoot a gun and teleport a few feet to dodge or move in for an attack. The majority of the time you’ll juggle between three main abilities. What’s more, battles are just as lethal for your foes as they are for you. As in Dark Souls, it adds another layer of timing and planning to play, but means that skilled players won’t have to bother with the system at all. When you’re on death’s door, you’ve got to find some extra time in the bustle of combat to heal up and keep up the fight. Your health bar is small, but you can carry several health packs that you can use at any time. But that difficulty belies quite a bit of cleverness. That, combined with the fact that they can often knock you off a ledge or into a geyser of flames, mean that death comes quick and often. Your health is limited and most enemies can kill you in 2-3 hits. Not Dark Souls hard, but it does set lofty goals of its players. Hyper Light Drifter is unapologetically hard. Odd as it sounds, that theme makes its way into the gameplay as well. Like a parent trying to shield a child from a reality too callous for a young mind to understand, there’s an eerie twist here. The blend of pixel-art charm and festering wounds of the past are a sweet tragedy. These people and these spaces wear their stories. Beneath that lies the pain of loss and the scars of some forgotten war. Decay and rot has given way to lush greenery and naturalistic beauty, but that’s a veneer. It’d be wrong to say that everything is open to interpretation, as some bits are more open than others, but Hyper Light Drifter builds and wields a powerful visual language.Ĭharacters shift and sulk, breathe and move with wistful texture. That interpretation then, is just what I’ve been able to intuit from its liberal use of affecting visuals. Hyper Light Drifter eschews exposition outside of tutorial snippets. But you muster the vigor to press on anyway. Doubled over coughing and vomiting blood, you too are on your last legs. Centuries, perhaps millennia, after the apocalypse, you find that the earth clutches its secrets and its history with the last of its fading strength. You are a drifter in a broken land, laden with an unknown illness and searching for a cure. Set against a fluorescent palette of pinks, blues and reds, these winding paths, like you, are on the edge of the living world. Winding pathways hint and guide, texturing the remnants of some long-dead people. Circuits are etched into the skin and soul of this world.
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