The art is gorgeous with an incredible attention to detail, the storytelling so keenly focused on being told without words, the ambient music that works so well building a quiet moody atmosphere that then kicks into high gear for the big challenging fights that make you keep going, all trapped within a game that I wish I actually liked playing.
The health system genuinely ruins so much of the experience for me, because making your health recharges an item with limited pickups means that risky maneuvers with combat and exploration are thoroughly discouraged because you have zero guarantee of when the next time you'll come across another is. That and combined with the player having zero recovery frames and can be endlessly stunlocked by either long attacks or groups of enemies leads to an experience that rather than being delightfully challenging, felt like it was purposefully trying to waste my time and be purposefully dickish for no good reason. Finding medkits as a reward for exploration also just blows and makes it so much less interesting to look around.
It feels a lot like the developers looked at the Souls games as an inspiration for building a world that you want to explore and push through the challenges, but then thoroughly and utterly misunderstood what made those challenges feel rewarding. Having to pick up every item in a room over and over again with each death is obnoxious and genuinely feels like it was done to pad out the playtime. I don't see how it was done for balancing or trying to make sure the player doesn't cheese through things either, because it's not like the game could have been sequence broken by doing so either when the vast majority of those rooms are required to actually finish the game.
There's an Easy difficulty option that does raise your health bar from 5 points to 6 and changes a small handful of fights to have less enemies compared to Normal, but neither of those were my issues with the game's challenge. Being able to survive one more hit doesn't really help in a game that moves lightning fast and also still doesn't give you recovery frames after getting hit, and does nothing to change the actual core issue of how you even receive your healing charges in the first place. It's also incredibly shitty to lock off achievements that say you finished the game if you play on Easy difficulty; I may have played on Normal, but essentially telling the part of your player base on a singleplayer only game who played on Easy that they "didn't really finish the game" comes across as the most stupidly elitist shit that just didn't need to be there.
Also some bizarre technical design choices and issues with the PC version: the game stutters nonstop unless you switch your monitor to run at 60Hz because the game doesn't do it for you for some reason, and there is no cloud save support on Steam because saves are encrypted to your own PC for some truly asinine reason. You can fix it with an online community tool which I did to continue playing on a Steam Deck, but this is a singleplayer offline only game and I don't buy the developer's excuse of "Game Maker Studio is just like that" when plenty of other indie titles use the same engine and don't have this limitation, there's zero excusable reasons why this should've been done.
I wish I could like playing Hyper Light Drifter more than I did because everything else carries the game so much, enough that I didn't hate it but I just feel indifferent to it. I really hope Hyper Light Breaker next year does something more interesting with the world at least and changes up more by being 3D.
The health system genuinely ruins so much of the experience for me, because making your health recharges an item with limited pickups means that risky maneuvers with combat and exploration are thoroughly discouraged because you have zero guarantee of when the next time you'll come across another is. That and combined with the player having zero recovery frames and can be endlessly stunlocked by either long attacks or groups of enemies leads to an experience that rather than being delightfully challenging, felt like it was purposefully trying to waste my time and be purposefully dickish for no good reason. Finding medkits as a reward for exploration also just blows and makes it so much less interesting to look around.
It feels a lot like the developers looked at the Souls games as an inspiration for building a world that you want to explore and push through the challenges, but then thoroughly and utterly misunderstood what made those challenges feel rewarding. Having to pick up every item in a room over and over again with each death is obnoxious and genuinely feels like it was done to pad out the playtime. I don't see how it was done for balancing or trying to make sure the player doesn't cheese through things either, because it's not like the game could have been sequence broken by doing so either when the vast majority of those rooms are required to actually finish the game.
There's an Easy difficulty option that does raise your health bar from 5 points to 6 and changes a small handful of fights to have less enemies compared to Normal, but neither of those were my issues with the game's challenge. Being able to survive one more hit doesn't really help in a game that moves lightning fast and also still doesn't give you recovery frames after getting hit, and does nothing to change the actual core issue of how you even receive your healing charges in the first place. It's also incredibly shitty to lock off achievements that say you finished the game if you play on Easy difficulty; I may have played on Normal, but essentially telling the part of your player base on a singleplayer only game who played on Easy that they "didn't really finish the game" comes across as the most stupidly elitist shit that just didn't need to be there.
Also some bizarre technical design choices and issues with the PC version: the game stutters nonstop unless you switch your monitor to run at 60Hz because the game doesn't do it for you for some reason, and there is no cloud save support on Steam because saves are encrypted to your own PC for some truly asinine reason. You can fix it with an online community tool which I did to continue playing on a Steam Deck, but this is a singleplayer offline only game and I don't buy the developer's excuse of "Game Maker Studio is just like that" when plenty of other indie titles use the same engine and don't have this limitation, there's zero excusable reasons why this should've been done.
I wish I could like playing Hyper Light Drifter more than I did because everything else carries the game so much, enough that I didn't hate it but I just feel indifferent to it. I really hope Hyper Light Breaker next year does something more interesting with the world at least and changes up more by being 3D.