Hyper Light Drifter is a game that seemed built for me. I'm a sucker for unique art styles. I adore the Dark Souls series. Games like Metroid and Zelda putting an emphasis on exploration are among my favorites. Unfortunately, I found this game to be a victim of a disjointed design ethos. Hyper Light Drifter attempts to take elements of a number of different games while still trying to be its own game, yet it doesn't seem to at any point fully understand what makes each of these elements work.
Hyper Light Drifter's gameplay is made up of two core elements: combat, and exploration. Let's start with combat. You start off with your sword, pistol, and ability to drift. Drifting is sort of like dodging in Bloodborne, only in 2D and at a higher speed. However, you will collide with physical objects if you drift into them, including enemies. Combat doesn't really flow in and out of drifting in the way you might expect. Rather, it's like slash, wait a moment, drift, wait a moment, and so on. Overall, every action feels more deliberate than fluid. You can slash and shoot in quick succession, and there are some other ways of combining attacks, some of which come through upgrades.
The thing is, by the time you've unlocked enough of these upgrades to start making the combat feel proper, you're about halfway through the game. In the meantime, early combat just feels off and uninteresting. Healing for instance feels a hair too slow, especially when you're fighting more than three enemies at a time. Any time you're fighting in an area with lots of environmental objects you can collide with, it makes drifting a bit of a pain. The majority of the game controls better on a controller, but aiming your pistol accurately with one is a bit rough at times.
The upgrades are a mixed bag. Besides purchasing the ability to carry more health packs, you can get up to two bombs. Bombs operate on a cooldown timer and do damage over a significant area. There are also upgrades such as the ability to dash through projectiles, reflect projectiles with your sword, and chain dash. You purchase upgrades by finding Gear Bits. It takes four of them to get one unit of currency, and upgrades cost two to three of these units. You'll probably want to buy those health pack upgrades and at least one bomb fairly early into the game, as well as pick up the chain dash. Even though I suggest buying them, I wasn't the biggest fan of bombs. They feel somewhat out of place and perhaps a sign enemy encounters could have been designed better. This could be an element of personal preference of course, but I would have preferred more moves or abilities that fit into the actual flow of combat than a magical screen clearing ability.
Let me touch on the chain dash for a bit. Chain dashing allows you to combine more than three dashes together so long as you can hit the proper timing between dashes, which starts a bit slow and increases in pace with each dash before steadying out after the first half dozen or so. This controls far better on the keyboard than on a controller, as the timing is fairly tight. I never could consistently get the timing down on chain dashes to be able to reliably pull them off. From reading message forums, it seems to be a common enough complaint. It's not ultimately a deal breaker in terms of combat, but there are a number of complicated chain dashing sections, though these were all optional, throughout the game where you'll need to successfully pull off potentially over a dozen successive chain dashes. As cool as it looks at times when you pull off a decent series of chain dashes, I gladly would have traded this ability in for something that was more reliable.
Much has been made of Hyper Light Drifter's difficulty, and for good reason. This game has less of a difficulty curve and more something that would resemble the scribbling of a hyperactive toddler. The two most difficult encounters I faced were in the Northern Zone, the first one I tackled. The Northern Zone is considered either the first or second zone you should complete. In fairness, one of these was an optional challenge room. It still felt randomly inserted, and the encounter itself was more artificially difficult in feeling than fun in design.
The first three zones can be explored in any order, though the West is a bit harder than the North or East. This lends to each area having a difficulty curve that felt like it restarted after each area, which is not a design I particularly enjoyed. One area I enjoy about the Souls games is how you can tackle paths in different orders, but the game doesn't dial down the difficulty if you pick a more difficult path. Rather, these games communicate to the player that hey, this area might be too tough for you now and maybe you should try another path first. In this game, the Northern zone features perhaps the easiest lead up to the boss, but said boss was the most difficult in the game in at least my opinion. I would hazard a guess I died more to this boss than to every other boss in the game combined.
There are other elements of the combat mechanics that can make the game frustrating at times. You're not invincible after taking a hit. So encounters where multiple enemies can combo you or hit you into pits due to knockback feel more difficult than even most encounters with stronger opponents. Much like with bombs, it felt like one of the solutions to the game's difficulty was the shotgun. You get the shotgun from one of the game’s earlier bosses, and it’s a game changer since it is capable of doing five damage a shot and doesn’t require as much accuracy. None of the game’s other firearms felt nearly as satisfying.
The funny thing about this though is I'm not here to complain that the game is too difficult. It's far too generous with its autosave system to call it that. My favorite two zones were the West and South, which are the game’s harder sections. It isn't that difficult of a game overall, but rather a game that wants to be more difficult than it genuinely earns at times. That Northern challenge room was difficult because it's a fight on small platforms while you're being swarmed by as many as six to eight enemies at a time. The game did not build to this encounter naturally, nor did its mechanics inherently support it in a way that felt satisfying. Rather, it feels like it is just there because they wanted a difficult encounter. The Eastern zone has several rooms which put you against multiple bull-rushing enemies that are invincible while charging. This enemy can constantly keep chasing you, offering little downtime between attacks. When you combine this with the lengthy time it takes to heal, this can be more frustrating than fun.
On the other hand, the Western and Southern zones offer challenge that felt better earned. By this point, I had purchased most of the game's upgrades. Both environments and enemy design allowed for a greater variety of approaches. The Western zone also had more encounters out in the open, which meant less worrying about getting hung up on the environment while drifting. The Southern zone was definitely my favorite overall. I would hazard a guess that it was easier to design this area because you have to tackle it last, thus the developers could tailor it to where the player would be in both upgrades and skill.
Following a bit of a theme here, the bosses were a mixed bag. The early bosses overly rely on additional enemies during the fights. It wasn't until the Southern Zone that the game started offering better boss designs that were more inherently interesting. Other than the Northern zone boss, it never took more than five to eight attempts to beat any of the others, so the difficulty felt proper for the most part. Even the earlier bosses do fall into patterns, thus it's a question of how quickly you can learn each moveset. It can be a bit frustrating at times though, as the way attacks can be chained against you does lead to a number of instant death situations during several bosses.
While the game's combat was mixed, Hyper Light Drifter's exploration elements were purely disappointing. There are well over a hundred secret paths to discover, but the vast majority just lead to Gear Bits. There are also keys, monoliths, and different outfits to find as well, but none of these are terribly exciting. Keys are used to unlock one of less than a dozen locked doors throughout the game. These doors typically house outfits. By and large, outfits have minimal effects on your Drifter. You'll either need to experiment to discover what they do or look it up online though, as the game doesn't tell you what each outfit does.
The thing is, the end result is exploring Hyper Light Drifter's world feels like hunting for hidden items in a phone game. You never really get the satisfaction of both finding a clever secret and then being rewarded for it because it likely just means you've found another Gear Bit. Almost every one of the game's secret paths boils down to carefully checking the edge of the screen, looking for graphical tells, or searching for spots your probe buddy highlights. To me at least, it felt empty.
Hyper Light Drifter's story and lore is neat, but largely forgettable. Other than environmental storytelling techniques, plot is conveyed via pictures bereft of text. While it's a neat trick there isn’t enough substance to the story to keep the player’s attention. The aforementioned monoliths can eventually be used to figure out a bit more lore, but it’s not nearly as interesting as it was in something like Fez. It asks the player to go a long way to discover very little. Instead, it feels like the developers felt minimalistic and enigmatic storytelling inherently was inherently interesting rather than a technique that could be interesting.
There are other little annoyances throughout the game as well. Every so often, your control of the Drifter will be locked while a victory animation plays. If a projectile was fired by a dying enemy, it can still hit you at this point. This happened to me just after finishing a particularly rough encounter, though fortunately it didn't kill me. Then there's the fact that warp points don't refill your health kits. This one I just don't get. It doesn't even make the game more challenging. It's just an added annoyance that requires you to go hunt down health kits in previous areas.
Just to finish on a positive note, this is one gorgeous game. The opening cinematic alone will make this a strong contender for Best Looking Game of 2016. Even outside of that, environments are both beautiful and detailed. Each environment has a unique look and helps convey what story the game has without needing to elaborate as much through text or dialogue. Disasterpeace, responsible for soundtracks such as Fez, once again does an excellent job here. Even if chiptone music feels a bit played out at this point, the eerie minimalistic score helps to evoke the rather bleak state of the world.
If this review is a little longer than average, I apologize, but I felt I owed it to the game to be as detailed as possible in describing my issues with it. I even wanted to score it a little higher than I ended up doing just because of how much I like this game's concept. If I could score it in halves, I would likely score the first half of the game a 2 and the back half maybe even a 4, but it just takes a little too long to get to the good parts. I can see an audience for this game that will enjoy it despite my own misgivings. There is a lot of heart to the game, even if its overall execution leaves a lot to be desired. If nothing else, Hyper Light Drifter is an ambitious game. I just wish they dialed that ambition down a little and put that effort toward making it more enjoyable.