As a spiritual successor to Dark Souls and older Zelda games, Drifter is full of secret areas and collectibles, including different capes/swords/sprites for your character (each of which grant certain buffs, like increased movement speed or extra health), keys for unlockable doors, bits of currency for weapon and ability upgrades, and the shards (called modules) that are the game’s primary mode of progression. Yet though combat is the core of Hyper Light Drifter, that’s not even close to all it has to offer. Though I beat its final boss a couple of hours ago, I’m still coming down from that fight’s natural high-a feeling I can only compare to that of some of my all-time favorite games. Moreover, once mastered, the game’s combat is amazingly cathartic-from slicing and dicing my way through hordes upon hordes of enemies to timing my shots and swings and dashes to perfectly take down a boss that had just squished me into the ground a million times over, Hyper Light Drifter is an empowering, glorious experience. Deaths almost never feel unfair I could always pinpoint why I’d lost a certain fight, and every enemy in the game has noticeable tells and attack patterns that I quickly learned to predict and manipulate to my advantage.
However, if that is your cup of tea, the combat in Hyper Light Drifter is an utterly sublime experience. It requires the kind of arcade-style, twitchy reflexes and melee-combat skills that, well, Dark Souls requires. That’s not to say it’s unfair-the combat is well-balanced and hugely satisfying, and becomes much more manageable once you begin to accrue the game’s many upgrades-but this is not the type of videogame that everyone in the world would be able to play. And Hyper Light Drifter takes their collective DNA, inserts it into the 16-bit era, and (for good measure) adds in a healthy dose of Dark Souls to make a game so unique and inexplicably wonderful that it grew only more entrancing every time I started it up.īut explaining is what I’m supposed to do, so let me try and put into words exactly what makes Hyper Light Drifter so incredible, and so, so damning for the idea that games must sacrifice the “game” part of their soul to be considered art.Īctually, that’s a good place to start-unlike most “art games,” which are usually made to be as broadly accessible as possible, Hyper Light Drifter is ridiculously hard excluding NES classics like Zelda II, where the controls were designed to be as shoddy and rage-inducing as possible, it is without a doubt the hardest game I’ve ever played. BioShock (a game that once had an exhibition at the SMITHSONIAN) comes closest, as well as some Zelda titles (namely Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask), but that just proves my point-all three of those games are regarded as among the greatest games ever made.
I’ve not only never seen a retro-styled game as visually entrancing as Hyper Light Drifter-I’m having a hard time thinking of any game at all that I can compare to it in terms of its artistic (read: visual, audio, etc.) design. Oh, and it’s beautiful: Hyper Light Drifter Screenshot: Heart Machine It is a vast, expansive, open-world RPG with simple yet hair-pullingly difficult combat and a bevy of secret passageways, weapons, and collectibles that make revisiting and combing over every single area not just irresistible, but incredibly fun. (In that, it shares some of its collective DNA with Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight, another clear standout of this retro movement.) In particular, it seems to draw massive amounts of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, as well as, in its artistic style, Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Hyper Light Drifter, the debut game by Alex Preston and Heart Machine, is part of another recent trend-namely, of games that try to mimic the feel, graphics, and minimalist storytelling of the NES and SNES eras. Because, of course, the worlds of art and popular entertainment must never mix… or else who knows what might happen.īut all I can say is how pathetic that argument must seem in the face of a game like Hyper Light Drifter. There has been a recent spike in interest for what people sometimes refer to as “art games”-a subgenre of gaming that includes legitimately interesting pieces like Campo Santo’s Firewatch, flawed yet thought-provoking experiments like Davey Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide, and walking simulators of questionable intent like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. But more often than not, the implications behind the label “art game” and those who use it is that games, unlike most other artistic media, must try in some contrived way to be, well, art.
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