Hyper Light Drifter assaults the senses with bright strikes of purple, blue and pink set to thumping tones riddled with electronic crackling. It’s an elegant game with a comprehensive tone. Nothing feels out of place as you gently guide your sword and gun wielding protagonist through a world overrun by biology and technology succumbing to full decay. You tap a button to swing a sword, pull a trigger to fire your gun, and constantly monitor your field of vision to know when to slam the dodge button so that it might save your life.
This is the story of playing Hyper Light Drifter: you traverse an unfamiliar world with familiar controls while being bludgeoned by sights and sounds that cascade toward you without pause. You fight for your life. You will die many times.
The game almost demands that you draw comparisons between it and another game that extracts infinite death and infinite effort from the player. From Software’s Souls series (and its goodtime buddy Bloodborne) has built its reputation on both its difficulty and its oblique, indirect worldbuilding. The fan community around that game has collectively spent an impossible-seeming amount of time figuring out what the hell is actually happening in those games, and all it takes is a mention of their lore on social media to start a firestorm of speculation and disagreement. From an outsider’s perspective, it is almost religious, with various interpretations surfacing and submerging as if enlightened disciples could get us somehow closer to the depths of truth.
Hyper Light Drifter clings close to the Souls model of delivering this world. As far as I could tell during my seven-hour playthrough, there is no text in the game to ever explain anything to you. Characters speak in pictograms that show what happened, and the moments in-between those pictograms are left up to the imagination of the player. Nothing is explicit, and most of the game’s story is told through an understanding that this world has somehow gone wrong, although it is unclear what the mechanism of that going wrong might been to the player who is unwilling to delve through the translation of hieroglyphics and Reddit theorycrafting posts.
This isn’t a weakness, and I find Drifter’s gestural, evocative work to be profoundly more engaging than the “build it from the scraps” model of the Souls series. Those games provide a deluge of details in the form of item descriptions, scraps of dialogue, and environmental cues that an industrious adherent can weave together into a coherent form, and while I am certain that Drifter allows for the same thing, it does seem profoundly unnecessary. In the tradition of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Hyper Light Drifter seems like it would get less interesting the more certainty you have about it.
The world of Hyper Light Drifter is a rotting corpse, and the lizard people or bear people or bird people of that world continue to dwell in the ruins of some kind of technologically advanced civilization. You, embodying the player character, are haunted by your own death, and you’re haunted by some kind of force that keeps this world in its state of decay. It is unclear whether progress in the game means finally killing the world or setting it free, and that ambivalence sticks with me even now.
That progress comes at a price. Hyper Light Drifter, like Dark Souls, valorizes its difficulty. The catacombs, laboratories, forests and caves of the game are tightly-designed encounters that would be right at home in a tactical role-playing game or a Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition campaign. Sometimes I was able to “read” a room and roll with the punches, swording and shooting my way out of whatever situation the designers planned for me. Other times I found myself playing a room over and over again while making little progress, hoping that this time my reflexes would allow me to jam on the dodge button at the correct time.
It’s easy to focus on the difficulty of Hyper Light Drifter as “the point.” It’s a punishing game that requires an immense amount of memorization. You have to know your character’s dash range, sword swipe range, and exactly how the various guns of the game interact. Added to that is an ever-growing array of enemies and their behaviors, and by the end of the game you’ve experienced a wide cavalcade of creatures attacking you in different ways with different maneuvers. It’s a game of recall, like playing with a Simon toy, and the red-green-yellow-blue sequence becomes all-consuming.
When that design ethic is firing on all cylinders it is profoundly elegant. There’s a giant frog boss that’s nearly Mega Man-ish in its design, and a simple system of skillful recall and response drives that fight from beginning to end. When it is clunky, even a little, it is head-smashingly frustrating, unproductive, and feels like a real failure against the backdrop of what is such excellent execution 90% of the time. The boss of the northern quadrant of the map feels particularly egregious in that regard (most bosses, including the final one, took me 10 tries to complete, while this weird northern Birdlord took me maybe 75).
I’ll end with some speculation. While I adored Hyper Light Drifter in its current form. I spent quite a bit of time wishing that I could be playing a different game within this world. What would an adventure game or a mystery-solving game look with this kind of clear creative impulse behind it? I completely understand the reasons why this game is not that kind of game, but the hints toward that kind of design (like a lizard matron telling me a story about her group exploring a tomb and being surprised by what they found) make me wish for something more than the game that we have here. I sincerely hope that the next game from this team goes so far beyond what something like Dark Souls can accomplish that reducing it to a comparative will look goofy at best.
Hyper Light Drifter was developed by Heart Machine. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for Mac and Linux.
Cameron Kunzelman tweets at @ckunzelman and writes about games at thiscageisworms.com. His latest game, Epanalepsis, was released on May 21. It’s available on Steam.