There is a review of this game I could write where I spend the majority of the time rambling furiously about the output of Heart Machine at the present date. I, lightly, did not care for Solar Ash, and am disappointed to see them invoke this game's world for the game Hyper Light Breaker appears to be alongside Gearbox of all publishers.

The flipside of this collection of emotions is that in order to feel let down, something had to build me up. So I'm going to choose to talk about that for a brief moment. If I'd written this review closer to the release of this game, it would have read as glowingly as I could ever choose to praise a game. After years of preaching the kinds of things I'd like to see in a game (eerieness, stories with no dialog, no worldbuilding, friction filled action, using your aesthetic in line with a message instead of as just aesthetic) Hyper Light Drifter had, line item list, all of them. It is in many ways everything I could have wanted in a game. It is one of the best video games I've ever played, to the point that it has justified the rest of the time I've spent with this hobby because without those peaks and valleys, the learning of the history, the time I spent trying to decipher the industry... all of that was justified because it all tucks into and back into this game in a way that I dare not dream to ever see again. It was so miraculous to see it all add up to this the one time. Why be so arrogant to desire a second?

But I couldn't help myself, and so that one empty star there is for my own broken heart. For the time I got my hopes up. Maybe it was just a spark, but it shone so brilliantly I found peace. What could live up to that?

The entire audio-visual presentation is something I don't think I have ever seen before, something truly unique in that regard, or at the very least, very refreshing. It's oppressive, threatening, but also at the same time, calm and reflective. I can see the influences from Naussica, but the colour palette, which is what catches the attention at first, is quite unlike anything on the market.

Gameplay-wise, it's a very competent Zelda-like, and while your melee attack is pretty simple to get a grasp on, the variety lies in your ranged attacks, each weapon accounting for specific situations and play style. Level design, outside of the aesthetic excellence, is filled with hidden paths and routes that are mostly not too ridiculously hidden.

Two gripes I have is how useless the map is (I still don't understand how to read the map in this game, honestly), and how needlessly strict and inconsistent the chain dash timing is. Especially the latter makes it frustrating for some patterns and traps, where chain dashing is borderline required. Its interval gets shorter until a certain number of dashes, and this acceleration really throws me off, making it difficult to pull off in the heat of battle.

But other than that, a great, beautiful experience.

The music and the atmosphere is top notch, no doubt...
In an artistic standpoint this game is genius. The feelings I got through playing the game was phenomenal. I felt so lonely in a dead and empty world. I loved it, the game felt grand and undiscovered in the best way possible. The level design was good also.

So... yeah, why just 3/5. The game for me, sometimes played like dark souls 2 (and that's not a complement xd), sh*t was unfair and cheap at times. Like why does every boss has minions? Its like a cheap difficulty bump, not to talk about the character controller. Clunky, the game is clunky sometimes. Inputs didn't register or I got stuck in an animation when hitting or dashing. Maybe this is the right game, but in the wrong time... :(( (or at least that's what my girlfriend said to me :(( ) I wanted to love this game, 'cuz its somewhat of a classic, but it just didn't aged well tbh. The way the game sometimes wants you to beat the same enemy 20 times in a room and calls it a gameplay piece... yeah. Times it was frustrating.

Hyper Light Drifter é um jogo muito especial, que te marca desde o primeiro minuto de jogo. Seu início pode causar estranheza para quem nunca experimentou um jogo em que não há diálogos e tutoriais com TEXTO, mas à medida em que o jogador vai andando e descobrindo quem ele é neste mundo e o que tem que fazer através dos elementos visuais, junto com uma trilha sonora IMPECÁVEL, vai construindo uma experiência muito única, extremamente imersiva, coisa rara de se encontrar até mesmo em jogos mais recentes.

Eu realmente não tenho medo de afirmar que esse jogo é uma obra prima. Inspirado por Zelda - a Link to the past e Diablo, seus pontos mais fortes definitivamente são as artes (um dos jogos com as melhores pixel-arts que eu já vi), seu combate desafiador e justo, com mecânicas de Dark Souls, e o incentivo constante à exploração, que é na grande maioria das vezes recompensada de maneira satisfatória. Um excelente jogo!

Ambiguous storytelling at its greatest.
My favourite game of all time, had me hooked from start to finish with it's incredible pixel artstyle, fluid movement and impactful combat. The game is challenging but fair, no death feels unjustified and payoff when you succeed is all the more rewarding. In the same way the puzzle aspects as well as hidden secrets feel perfectly crafted and incredibly satisfying to crack. Finally the sound design: Disasterpeace, the artist behind the OST conveys every story beat with perfection and has you on the edge of your seat at all points. All these things bring the world of hyperlight drifter to life and inspire the imaginations of players in ways that stick with you even years down the line.

I must express my absolute adoration for the soundtrack of the game. The electrifying tunes captured me from the first minute and never let go. It reminded me a lot of the music from Boards of Canada, which is one of my favorite bands. Moreover, this kind of music suits the setting of HLD perfectly: a cyberistic, post-apocalyptic world where beauty still exists amidst death and decay.

In terms of gameplay, it flows smoothly, and the fights have a good variety to them. You have many weapons at your disposal, and it feels great to mix things up with slow and heavy attacks, dashes, and gunshots. However, the balancing feels a bit off, as I felt too powerful after some upgrades, particularly in some of the boss fights. I think the developers could have increased the damage of some bosses to make them more challenging, which apperently is a thing in NG+.

HLD also has a fantastic feature where you can chain up dashes by pressing the button at the exact same millisecond. At first, I thought it was impossible to do it more than three times, but with some practice, I mastered it. It's such a rewarding feeling to almost fly through the beautiful world in hyper speed.

While I don't have particularly strong feelings about the pixel aesthetic, it's pleasant to look at and fits the setting. However, I wonder how it would look with the same art style as Hollow Knight.

The story of HLD is cryptic and only shown, not told. I enjoyed it, as NPCs tell their stories through pictures in their heads, and players can fill in the gaps with their imagination.

There's an unspoken trend I've found myself following that I'll call the Pick Up Phone quotient. It's simple - the frequency with which I pick up my phone during a game tends to correlate inversely with how engaging it is.

From its opening scene, Hyper Light Drifter kept me glued to its lightning-fast gameplay and mysterious atmosphere. I can confidently say my phone did not leave my pocket until the credits rolled, only then coming out for more research on the game and to listen to its incredible soundtrack.

See, HLD's developers understand that less context often makes a more interesting game. Nothing here is spelled out for you, but you're given just enough information to speculate on what happened to the world and its residents. Hyper Light Drifter triumphantly exemplifies the value of restraint. Nothing here overstays its welcome, something I find rare among the modern games designed to keep you circling their whirlpools for months on end. And unlike those games - games which, as you might guess, tend to have a high Pick Up Phone quotient - I finished Hyper Light Drifter eagerly wanting more. Absolutely worth your time from start to finish, and I can hardly wait to see what the developers create next.

Hyper Light Drifter is special and has a lot of heart, but it's hard to ignore some of its opaque design decisions and janky combat. When you're feeling the combat, it's really good, but you can definitely tell when you're stretching the limits of how smooth the combat can be. Fortunately, I found the game to be relatively forgiving. From a completionist perspective, some of the combat challenges and secrets make you want to bang your head against the wall, but playing the game casually is an overall wonderful experience. Hyper Light Drifter has my favorite OST and the pixel art environments are breathtaking.

I have a lot to say about this I think.

I think Hyper Light Drifter has some of the best art direction, sound design and gameplay loops in any game I've played (which is a low bar but still it was awesome). Everything is married together in a way that's very dynamic, very impactful, and I'm absolutely in love with the presentation of it.

The gameplay is hard to get right, but when you do get it right, oh my god it cuts like butter and it feels so god damn good. Easy to learn but hard to really master, and while it is punishing, I also think that it really really encourages you to think fast, move fast, and worry about what's right in front of you. It's very good!

Now, for the story. I... I'm conflicted just because I want to give this story praise for telling us everything without a single word being read, but it's also the biggest detractor I have with the game. It's hard to really know what's going on, why everything you do as the Drifter really matters, and what the point of it is in the end. I mean, it's pretty clear that you're trying to save people (no spoilers!) and you get that through the 1 or 3 slide conversations you get with various npc's around the map, but it's really hard to feel the scale because of how ambiguous the opening and closing cutscenes are. There's a large element of time skipping happening, there's a lot of very confusing, if not striking, imagery happening that doesn't make a lot of sense even after finish everything, and there's a lot that feels unanswered at the end.

...but. I also think that all these things are monumental in setting this game a part from everyone else. I know about the main dev's sort of allegorical story he put into the game that mirrors his own struggles with... disease (no spoilers! I'm trying!) and the story really does reflect this: it's bleak, it's hard, and it's not rewarding in the long run. There's a lot of imagery, a lot of emotional moments, that in the end sometimes feels like life, where you just kind of feel like you got over one hill to see the rest of the mountain before you. And I love it! We only see the Drifter's perspective in this world that's already so rich with lore and more to discover, and we play through this world through the Drifter's perspective, in which we're learning things with them! That aura of confusion stays with us throughout the game, broken by reminders of what's at stake at the end anytime we collect 4 modules: a shadowy character stabs us in vicious ways, the 4 main power sources (I think) activate, the gate opens and some unknown power is unleashed that eviscerates what's left of this world.

Do we know what this means? Only because we saw the very vague opening cutscene, but even then our knowledge is limited. All we know is that we have to fix things somehow, and we're running out of time.

It's a great game! I started to go for a completionist run and I'm only missing the three hardest achievements in the game! One day I'll finish those, but until then, I'm excited for what else Heart Machine has in store for us all.