Review of Hyper Light Drifter

Hello all! Well, it’s certainly been a while since my last entry, but here are some quick personal updates: LAST SEMESTER SENIOR YEAR WOO, joined a creative writing seminar which has absolutely changed my life, and overall doing my best to incorporate healthy habits! I haven’t had as much time lately to consume media and write reviews, so I’ll make this more of a priority since consistency is really important to me!

Anyways: I just finished a playthrough of Hyper Light Drifter (“just finished” as in: I defeated the final boss, basked through the credits and OST, and got right into this). This was also going to be a reflection of the game’s story, but I’ll have to put that in a separate post so this one isn’t super bloated. I’ve been itching for an 8-bit style action-adventure RPG that I could finish in one weekend, and Hyper Light Drifter definitely delivered. Gloriously rendered pixel art, haunting landscapes, with a sublime and somber OST by Disasterpeace. I wouldn’t say I’m style over substance, but the clean, neon style was a major draw for me.

I played Hyper Light Drifter on the Switch, and it’s hard to talk about the pros and cons separately. That isn’t to say there is a balanced mix of both—this game was overwhelmingly positive for me—but that there are some things that didn’t work as well for me that may work great for others. I wouldn’t chalk that up as the game’s mistakes so much so that it was personal preference.

Let’s start with gameplay. The combat system, even to my untrained eye, was designed exceptionally well. I liked that you needed to strike enemies/objects with your sword in order to charge your blasters, and as someone who usually prefers melee combat, I found that this really worked to my advantage. However, certain mechanisms just never clicked for me, namely the chain-dash feature, which I knew would have made my life a lot easier for boss battles. I’m not sure if it was just the way that the timing of the dash-chain was coded, but by the time I had implemented a good flow, I had already taken too much damage for it to have been worth it.

By no means am I an expert on game design or ludology, but I can appreciate how this game rewards you for smart timing, clever movement, and approaching enemy filled rooms with on-your-feet strategy. The level designs were really fun to explore; I especially liked this one room where defeating one round of enemies would shift pillars around, so you needed to figure out how to (1) use the setting to your advantage as defense and (2) keep an eye out for what new enemy might have spawned near you. Even getting upgrades to your skills/weapons was based on how you explored the terrain or took the time to wipe out a room of enemies. and I found this process rewarding and balanced. At no point did I feel like I was too OP because there really aren’t that many upgrade pieces to collect, but the ones I did find left me feeling as though the effort was worthwhile. I’ll get into environmental storytelling later in this reflection, but the structure and design of levels were really well done.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find the majority of the game as difficult as many reviews were making it out to be (that it was a Soulslike game when I’ve definitely gotten stuck on Legend of Zelda bosses for longer). But I think I can chalk that up to my playstyle—the game rewards reaction time and aggressive maneuvering which is about all I’m good at. That being said, the West boss was an absolute nightmare to defeat, especially as it ended up feeling more like a war of attrition than anything else. I don’t think I’ve died so many times trying to defeat one boss before. You don’t have to approach any section of the game linearly, but I do think that the game should prod players East just because that boss and section is by far the easiest.

The map itself isn’t ridiculously large, but I found navigating through the levels to be extremely tedious. There are a few icons that indicate where certain shards or “Modules” are, but they really only serve as a general direction because there are also so many elevators up/down the terrain as well. I do wish that there was a feature to make navigation just a little more intuitive, especially because I found myself having to re-defeat rooms of enemies just trying to find how to get to the boss again.

Here is where some of the positives and negatives begin to blur together; text would have made direction a lot clearer. However, a great stylistic choice on the game developers behalf was having no text at all after the tutorial sequence. You’re meant to gather information from diagrams, pictographs, and wordless cutscenes, which gave the game an overall ambience that I really enjoyed. Is that worth the minor confusion when finding something? Yes. But it still was a minor inconvenience that sucked some of the joy out of exploration for me.

The worldbuilding overall was incredible. There is so much environmental storytelling in the enemy and level designs that left me speechless at times. You can tell that some terrible sci-fi horror has happened in these regions, and there were times I didn’t even notice I was walking through a depiction of corpses until I was already halfway through the imagery. At the same time, there is a grand, sublime beauty to it all; I was left awe-struck by titans in the distance, their bodies wrapped around mountains, hands reaching out from the water. The feeling of scale and scope is visceral in these moments, and the art style manages to imbue detail, modernity, and tradition through its use of color, beauty, and horror. I think this is why I enjoy post-apocalyptic settings so much: the damage is done, the worse has come to pass, and here are the remnants of a surviving world. It’s this overall somber ambience that is nonetheless filled with a sort of hope.

The lore itself is something I was especially intrigued by. A lot of the storytelling comes from this sort of soft-worldbuilding that occurs; nothing is told to you explicitly. You piece everything together from the levels you defeat, characters you “talk” to, and the environment itself. It’s a puzzle that is left to your interpretation, and it creates an atmospheric experience that goes hand in hand with the soft-synth ambient OST. I am absolutely floored by how well everything comes together, and you know from the level of detail that there is an explicit vision and story behind it all. This is not the product of haphazard iconography; everything is intentional. On the flip side, this meant there was more to be desired when it came to character. I’m no stranger to the silent RPG protagonist, but I really wish we could have gotten more interaction from the NPCs that weren’t directly story related. Maybe it’s because there aren’t really things like side-quests in this game, but I really think it would have added to the feel of the game if personality shown through more. The story is paradoxically subtle yet direct because there is really only one story here that matters: what caused the ending of this world. If there was just a bit more character interactions, I think I would have connected to this game even more.

All in all, Hyper Light Drifter is a well thought out action-adventure RPG that cleverly incorporates its sci-fi horror story. You, the Drifter, operate within the echoes of a dying world, and it is through the aftermath that you discover the story itself. It is an exceptionally tight game, with a core aesthetic and style that elevates an already well-crafted gameplay experience. The game’s emotional landscape and storytelling is atmospheric, partly because the explicit details were sparse. While I would have preferred a sense of character progression or story, I don’t think that was the purpose of the game itself. It was never about the Drifter so much so as it was about what the Drifter could do for the world. This mysterious and beautiful world is the lore itself, and honestly? I can live with that.

At the end of the day, this game was fun, and I can tell I will be ruminating on the game’s themes for weeks to come. I got around 12 hours of gameplay for $14 (retail price $20), and I think I have only scratched the surface of what there is to explore. If you can get this game on sale, I would highly recommend it!

Next up: Either playing another runthrough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, finally finish Hades, or start working through Blasphemous. We’ll see! It’s been a while since I got into a gaming groove, and I’m excited/nervous to learn more about game design and finding out what I like best!