Initial impressions are the game does not teach or tell you enough (read: anything) and it is not a very forgiving learning curve. Or difficulty curve.

Ugh. This game is simply too hard.

The combat is too simplistic. All you can do is attack and roll around like a madman. Because of this, the encounters are designed to make it as hard as possible to do either or both things. Dying takes too little time, and healing yourself takes too much time.

Furi was a hard game, and I had hundreds of times where I lost one of my life bars. But it’s harder to die in that game so you get to learn what it wants from you and not have to reload the checkpoint once a minute, which is what I’m dealing with right now on my first boss fight.

Okay, okay, as soon as I paused to vent all of that, I started making headway and eventually beat it. 😂

This game looks pretty dang great. And the music is moody and nice, but nothing stands out. Nothing hummable. But it’s a good mood. Some of the ambient sound effects are surprisingly great? Bugs and birds and animals and stuff??

So of course I went North first and got shellacked, but when I went East next I beat the boss on the first try. The East area is very pretty and has real chill music. Love the art design. The dungeon design is good, with a kind of effortless flow from branch to branch. Once you get the hang of the game, it’s quite nice. I was kinda hard on it before, but I’m grooving with it now.

It’s tricky, too. Combat encounters still aren’t easy, and there’s inaccessible areas in both dungeons I’ve completed so far that I might have to backtrack to later? [Ed. You will.] Time will tell if I get dragged back there by the game or not. But even areas that required keys for entry…? I’ve only gotten one so far. One door needed three; another needed like 15.

Love the many hidden nooks and subtle audio cues that indicate you’re near or in one (if you listen real closely!)

I have now beaten the game after 20 hours. I sank a LOT into HLD. Somewhere along the line, the game clicked with me. The combat stopped being maddening and started being invigorating. Unlocking new guns and moves makes it way more interesting. I got way better at extracting secrets out of the environments, and made multiple trips back to each one to plumb more and more out of them. Secrets often led to gear bits, gear bits led to more money, and money led to new unlocks to make me more lethal and harder to kill. All the while, you get better at fighting, so it’s a pretty good brew by the midpoint and onward.

HLD has a really cool mood to it. The art is awesome and environments all unique. There’s a good amount of visual storytelling going on—characters won’t vomit text at you, but they’ll tell you their story in 3 images. Skeletons litter the game world, some on sacrificial altars in dark dungeons, some on examination tables in seedy laboratories. There’s giants carved into the landscape, lurking underwater, and suspended in tanks of fluid, never explained.

Both the story and world are as unexplained as the game mechanics themselves, but by paying attention to the subtle clues and breadcrumbs left by the artists, you get a vague sense of what’s going on. It’s really creative and special.

Hyper Light Drifter may wear the trappings of an old school Zelda title, but it plays a lot like a Souls game. Call it my first ever. But once the initial shock and confusion runs out, it grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go till you finish. Terrific experience!!

A weird, gorgeous and rewarding action game. The combat is tough but intuitive and a joy to play around with. The world itself is stuffed full of secrets and, while admittedly made easier with upgrades, many are doable with the right amounts of skill and patience.
The atmosphere is probably what will stick, though. Everything is sketched out in melancholy neon and the NPCs all communicate in little visual stories that fill out the details of the world. The music is phenomenal and does much of the heavy lifting at creating 'moments' at various points, where the camera will pan and show you a distant vista while the synths swell.

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.