There were several years where this was my favourite game of all time. The beautiful pixel-art, the ease with which I find myself lost in exploration and tight, punishing combat.

I remember first beating the final boss at 2am, on my beat up old laptop, sitting on a swing on my friends front lawn as the two of us looked out at the lights of the city and wondered what life would be like now that we'd left high school.

How Alx Preston was able to turn his heart condition into an incredibly effective surreal metaphorical video game concept still blows my mind. Heart Machine is a developer that I will follow with any game they make. Solar Ash is just as good, and Hyper Light Breaker is up there with Silksong and Earthblade in my top three most anticipated games of 2024.

One of the best games I've ever played. I try to tell people about this game as much as I can, and have played through and beaten it at least three times now.

Everything about this game is top-notch. The visuals are stunning. Absolutely beautiful pixel art and extremely smooth animations make this game a joy to look at. The combat feels very satisfying, and gets progressively better and better as you unlock more and more upgrades. The difficulty is perfect, challenging but not too punishing. The story is subtle and mysterious, but intriguing. The world is beautifully realized. The core gameplay loop is super fun. Enemies and bosses are varied and interesting. There's lots of collectibles to find that provide you with great benefits. I could go on and on, its unbelievably polished in every single aspect you could think of.

This is just a fantastic game that has stuck with me for many years. The only thing I have left to do is to beat it without dying once, which I hope one day I'll be able to do. I love this game, and I'll be coming back to it for years to come.

A nice little experience. Obviously inspired in design by Zelda and the like, however it wears its simplicity close to its heart.

Combat and enemy design is very straightforward, most enemies have one attack and maybe two for advanced enemies. Your abilities and upgrades are also without frills, Yet they're intuitive despite the game not using text at all except for the non-diegetic tutorial popups.

HLD's world has an interesting depiction. For the most part it seems foreign as a setting, with you only understanding the ques of who's an enemy or what you're remotely planning to do. I liked the idea that the game never uses text to convey anything about itself. The few NPCs that you can talk to use little moody illustrations as dialogue.

Boss designs are nice as well, their moves and attacks are simple to understand and normally fights are done in a few minutes max.

This solidifies my interpretation of it. HLD is a short game that plays like a fleeting dream. It's visuals, premise, audio, and continuation all go along with this. Completed in single digit hours, Hyper Light Drifter settles well as a familiar little pit stop along the road.

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.

Ever-present, always watching, inevitable.

Atmospheric is an understatement. This game thrives off of its art style and perfectly compatible score against a plain hard combat system. Eerie synths constantly underlay a pixelated, decaying overworld. Massive mechanical humanoid beings cling lifelessly to the mountainous terrain, shown off as breathtaking views for the Drifter to sit and watch from a cliffside. The bosses in Hyper Light are just unnerving, especially toward the end of the game when you realize you know what’s coming and how unavoidable it seems.