Nintendo has been talking a lot about the original Legend of Zelda in regards to the upcoming Breath of the Wild. In case you needed any convincing that Nintendo is on to something with that plan, here's Hyper Light Drifter, a game that feels like a natural evolution of the original Zelda formula, while still being clearly it's own thing. And good lord what a beautiful thing it is.
Hyper Light Drifter is arresting from the get-go. The soundtrack is uniquely unnerving and fascinating, pairing with an introductory sequence that wordlessly sets up the world and your character effortlessly. Details are obscure. You don't know what certain things are, but you know you should be afraid of them. You know your character is very ill, but you don't know how, or what that means for them. You were saved by someone who reminds you of yourself, but you don't know why. This is obscurity done right, with lessons learned from Dark Souls rather than Limbo. You are given enough tangible information, enough footholds of familiarity, to get your bearings, and the mystery is built around that. While Limbo just presented you with familiar things, without any significance or connection to each other, to give the illusion of telling a story without actually meaning anything.
Dark Souls and Hyper Light Drifter provide you pieces of a puzzle with holes in it. Piecing it together will get you the whole picture, but that picture will be missing key elements, and it will be all the better for it. Limbo just gives you a few pieces from far too many different puzzles and tells you they're all from the same puzzle.
Drifter does take at least one aspect from Limbo worth praise however, it's wordless communication. There are NPCs who will talk to you and sell you things, but though pictures and diagrams, not letters and numbers. Heart Machine understand what made the mystery and obscurity of Dark Souls and it's ilk work on a fundamental level, well enough to replicate it in an entirely different way.
To go back to that Zelda comparison, Light Drifter is excellently structured to evoke that open nature of the Nintendo classic, while still offering a clear path forward in each of it's 4 areas. Your similarly-clad friend will give you the location of 4 of the 8 power sources in an area, enough to reach the boss. But more than half of what can be found in an area is hidden away in secret areas, behind locked doors and though intense challenges of mobility and combat. Light Drifter is a tough game if you just do the main story areas, but look outside the beaten path and you'll find fiendish dash-based challenges, deadly ambushes and a cute football mini-game that will test you like none of the main bosses will.
And even when it comes to secrets Light Drifter doesn't slack off, these aren't the "Guess what I'm thinking" kind of secrets you get in so many games these days. Drifter takes advantage of it's perspective and denotes secrets with subtlety. A small square marking on the floor will usually be your giveaway, but there are a whole host of other, less obvious clues. And you can't let yourself slip after you've found a secret room either, there are secrets within secrets in this game, ambushes within ambushes. Looking for secrets feels like studying a painting for details, a feeling certainly enhanced by the fact that Light Drifter is absolutely breath-taking.
Heart Machine has made one of those games where you'd be hard pressed to take a screenshot that wasn't absolutely gorgeous. Even the interior corridors are full of details, the game makes excellent use of the game's unique pixel-art style, full of sharp corners and contrasts in a distinctive set of colour palettes. And that's saying nothing of the game in motion. Your character and the game's many enemies all move incredibly fluidly, and the environments all feel both alive and dilapidated at once, with trees swaying in the breeze, animals roaming grassy fields, making the stillness of the ruins, of the corpses you find and leave behind all the more impactful and sombre.
Look, my Wank Hat is very firmly on my head for this one. You may have noticed.
Light Drifter holds it's retro sensitivities close however, and has more than enough challenges for those of you mad enough to take them on. A NG+ mode which drops your life to 2 and ups the difficulty, plus a host of achievements with appropriate rewards. Some of which are a little TOO insane, I feel. One asks you to perform 800 chain dashes in a row. 800, people. Mental. But you don't have to go that far. A skill you learn pretty early on when deciding to try and enjoy things more is knowing when to stop.
So yeah, Hyper Light Drifter is a spectacular experience. Definitely one of my favourite games of all time. Gorgeous, evocative, challenging (but fair), and with an eye for detail and subtlety that so many games forget.
Next week, I'll be posting on Friday, as Thursday I'll be working in the traditional human sense, as opposed to working in the "I'm playing videogames and thinking hard about them" sense. I'm going to try and polish of Toukiden Kiwami before I enter into Monster Hunter, and Earth Defence Force is coming to PC soon, so those are possibilities. We'll have to see.
Hyper Light Drifter is arresting from the get-go. The soundtrack is uniquely unnerving and fascinating, pairing with an introductory sequence that wordlessly sets up the world and your character effortlessly. Details are obscure. You don't know what certain things are, but you know you should be afraid of them. You know your character is very ill, but you don't know how, or what that means for them. You were saved by someone who reminds you of yourself, but you don't know why. This is obscurity done right, with lessons learned from Dark Souls rather than Limbo. You are given enough tangible information, enough footholds of familiarity, to get your bearings, and the mystery is built around that. While Limbo just presented you with familiar things, without any significance or connection to each other, to give the illusion of telling a story without actually meaning anything.
Dark Souls and Hyper Light Drifter provide you pieces of a puzzle with holes in it. Piecing it together will get you the whole picture, but that picture will be missing key elements, and it will be all the better for it. Limbo just gives you a few pieces from far too many different puzzles and tells you they're all from the same puzzle.
Drifter does take at least one aspect from Limbo worth praise however, it's wordless communication. There are NPCs who will talk to you and sell you things, but though pictures and diagrams, not letters and numbers. Heart Machine understand what made the mystery and obscurity of Dark Souls and it's ilk work on a fundamental level, well enough to replicate it in an entirely different way.
To go back to that Zelda comparison, Light Drifter is excellently structured to evoke that open nature of the Nintendo classic, while still offering a clear path forward in each of it's 4 areas. Your similarly-clad friend will give you the location of 4 of the 8 power sources in an area, enough to reach the boss. But more than half of what can be found in an area is hidden away in secret areas, behind locked doors and though intense challenges of mobility and combat. Light Drifter is a tough game if you just do the main story areas, but look outside the beaten path and you'll find fiendish dash-based challenges, deadly ambushes and a cute football mini-game that will test you like none of the main bosses will.
And even when it comes to secrets Light Drifter doesn't slack off, these aren't the "Guess what I'm thinking" kind of secrets you get in so many games these days. Drifter takes advantage of it's perspective and denotes secrets with subtlety. A small square marking on the floor will usually be your giveaway, but there are a whole host of other, less obvious clues. And you can't let yourself slip after you've found a secret room either, there are secrets within secrets in this game, ambushes within ambushes. Looking for secrets feels like studying a painting for details, a feeling certainly enhanced by the fact that Light Drifter is absolutely breath-taking.
Heart Machine has made one of those games where you'd be hard pressed to take a screenshot that wasn't absolutely gorgeous. Even the interior corridors are full of details, the game makes excellent use of the game's unique pixel-art style, full of sharp corners and contrasts in a distinctive set of colour palettes. And that's saying nothing of the game in motion. Your character and the game's many enemies all move incredibly fluidly, and the environments all feel both alive and dilapidated at once, with trees swaying in the breeze, animals roaming grassy fields, making the stillness of the ruins, of the corpses you find and leave behind all the more impactful and sombre.
Look, my Wank Hat is very firmly on my head for this one. You may have noticed.
Light Drifter holds it's retro sensitivities close however, and has more than enough challenges for those of you mad enough to take them on. A NG+ mode which drops your life to 2 and ups the difficulty, plus a host of achievements with appropriate rewards. Some of which are a little TOO insane, I feel. One asks you to perform 800 chain dashes in a row. 800, people. Mental. But you don't have to go that far. A skill you learn pretty early on when deciding to try and enjoy things more is knowing when to stop.
So yeah, Hyper Light Drifter is a spectacular experience. Definitely one of my favourite games of all time. Gorgeous, evocative, challenging (but fair), and with an eye for detail and subtlety that so many games forget.
Next week, I'll be posting on Friday, as Thursday I'll be working in the traditional human sense, as opposed to working in the "I'm playing videogames and thinking hard about them" sense. I'm going to try and polish of Toukiden Kiwami before I enter into Monster Hunter, and Earth Defence Force is coming to PC soon, so those are possibilities. We'll have to see.
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