I've been curious about this game for years and I finally bit the bullet this year. Turns out I was missing out on a lot. Anyone will point out that the visuals, sound design, and mystique of this game is pretty top notch. It all serves to ground its world of enemies, town folks, and mysterious forces lurking underneath. I can't say the story is comprehensible as the game revels in being abstract, but it's not entirely needed to know that you just have to defeat some force of darkness that endangers the characters world. On normal difficulty I would say this game is fairly straightforward with how to attack and recognize patterns. It's the dashing mechanic that honestly takes a while to familiarize. If you like collect-a-thons this game will please those urges in spades. The game has been out for a while, so take a shot if you like what you see from the game footage.

An addictive and visually striking game with a pleasingly low rez art style. The combat is challenging and in some areas feels unfair, but death is not incredibly punishing and with extensive exploration you find more and more tools to upgrade your player and your weapons.

The game gives you very little direction on where to go or what to do when you get there, so the early hours are spent muddling around and getting a feel for the world. This lack of direction paired with a difficult-to-understand overworld map can be frustrating, especially paired with the ease that you can be killed by enemies. It's very easy to get lost in this game if you have a poor sense of direction.

The music is a great complement to a magitech apocalyptic world being overgrown with natural plantlife and monsters. The lack of any dialogue really underlines the contemplative and in some places bleak atmosphere of this richly colored world. Exploring is often rewarded with secret paths and new areas, and taking the time to poke around every corner feels very rewarding as you learn the visual language of the game and how to read hints in the environment.

Hyper Light Drifter's original release was notable as taking place at the beginning of a huge indie boom characterized by artistically stylish and difficult games. You can trace it's influence and see it's shared roots with other exploration-heavy games like Tunic.

This game does feel a bit unpolished with an uneven difficultly and in some places clunky and frustrating combat mechanics. Given it's the studio's first showing, this is expected, and what is here is great. Ultimately, I'd recommend it for players who like a challenge and are comfortable taking full reign in exploring an open world.

all of the content from the original game is as perfect as always but i was disappointed to find out the special edition content was not made by heart machine but instead a completely different studio (abylight studios) and mostly only consisted of one 5-10 minute area with a boss fight at the end of it which was way harder than literally everything else in the base game. they did add a couple new guns which were cool (even though you can't upgrade them for some reason) but the fact that it was all stuff made by a different team of developers made it feel like i was playing fan-made modded pieces of content as opposed to experiencing new officially added components of the game. regardless though hyper light drifter still is a fantastic game at its core, with tight, fast gameplay and rewarding exploration set against an absolutely beautiful backdrop, and despite the lackluster new additions of this edition itself, i would still recommend any version of the game to anyone any day.


unless it was like a evil version of the game or something that'd be a different set of circumstances

Looked stunning in handheld, but even more so when docked.

The music, the atmosphere, the art style and the gameplay. Everything is perfect.

Final boss fight slaps