There hasn’t been a game I’ve played in recent memory that sets the stage so quickly. From the opening minutes of Hyper Light Drifter, I’ve witnessed a series of stylish, moody and cryptic sequences that had me absolutely hooked even before I had control. After the intro sequence it becomes fairly apparent that Hyper Light Drifter is heavily inspired by games like Dark Souls, Super Metroid and Zelda: A Link to the Past. The tight controls, numerous secrets to discover and tough battle encounters makes the game compelling enough to play through. Unfortunately Hyper Light Drifter suffers from being too evocative without explaining the gameplay mechanics nor the story very well. The game demands players to intuit everything and ultimately your experience will be determined by how much you enjoy the combat and exploration.
HLD’s story is hard to explain because there is no dialog. You play as a Drifter who needs to kill 4 bosses each guarding a giant stone that locks a great evil in the center of the world. Then there is something with 4 titans that have been vanquished in the game’s intro, a mysterious ailment that causes the Drifter to cough blood and an Anubis figure that shows up from time to time to guide the Drifter. There is more explanation available, but that requires players to reach all the secret monoliths, manually translate them and enter one specific room in the game (or you can just search everything online). I abhor this kind of story telling because only the “true hard-core” players will get the more complete story. I play games to have fun and to enjoy a good narrative, not to go decipher the Da Vinci code.
Fortunately, even if you aren’t grasped by the narrative, the combat is solid. At first glance, the controls for the Drifter will not feel responsive. There is animation priority when attacking and dodging, not dissimilar to the Dark Souls series. It’s a very start and stop combat system, and it is all about dodging the enemies’ blows then quickly getting in a three hit combo before bailing out again. There is an immensely satisfying feeling methodically fighting off monsters one by one without taking a hit. Unfortunately, once you do take a hit, things go downhill very quickly. The low recovery time makes it easy to get stun locked by a horde of baddies. In fact, I found fighting large groups of enemies in a small room the hardest encounters in the game compared to the boss fights.
Outside of combat, the other main draw of HLD is exploration. Each of the dungeons you visit is filled with secret corridors, hidden platforms and locked doors. Often completing these side tasks grants you gear bits that you can use to learn new abilities or increase the capacity of your current arsenal. While it might seem that these secret areas are placed randomly on the map, the game smartly gives you hints in the environment to help indicate areas that are perhaps worth exploring a bit more. One of my major issues is with how the game doesn’t explain the abilities. Probably one of the most common problems new players will face is understanding how to do a chain dash. The in-game video tutorial makes it look like the way to execute a chain dash is to change directions with every dash but that is not the case. The chain dash technique is based on rhythmically pressing the dash button at the right time which takes practice. Fortunately, chain dashing is not required to complete the game but is necessary to learn if you want to dig through the game’s secrets.
HLD’s other noticeable defect is its strict adherence to the flaws of the games that inspired it. The map design in HLD is almost a 1:1 design from A Link to the Past, where it is a drawing of a map with vague areas on where the objectives are. The map is poorly laid out and difficult to navigate. There is no way to keep track of unexplored areas and locked doorways. Another nitpick would be the elevator rides up and down the world. They are evocative of the elevator rides in Super Metroid. The thing is, in Super Metroid, the elevator rides were implemented to mask loading times within the game, while in HLD they only seem to be present for aesthetic purposes. To be clear HLD does carve its own niche and identity, but there are other times where it includes relics of old game design out of pure nostalgia.
Hyper Light Drifter taken solely from a gameplay perspective is wildly successful. The combat and traversal controls are nuanced enough that high level players can really take advantage of it and achieve fantastic results, like doing infinite chain dashes. It’s the other elements of Hyper Light Drifter that I’m not as big a fan of. The exploration in the game is neat and discovering all the secret passages is fun, but there is a lot of backtracking involved especially since the map is not very informative. The lack of dialogue and text really hurts the story. The dark mood and environmental storytelling can only do so much. It is hard for me to be invested in a narrative that’s left so open for interpretation. Hyper Light Drifter is not necessarily style over substance, it is more all show, no tell.