Game of the Month #75 (April 2021) - Hyper Light Drifter

Explore a beautiful, vast and ruined world riddled with unknown dangers and lost technologies. Inspired by nightmares and dreams alike.

Guess I'll be drifting through Hyper Light this month! I actually started in a while back, so this will be a nice push to finish it. I did play around an hour of it months ago when deciding what to play next, so I'll give some thoughts before I continue:

- This game is A E S T H E T I C, I feel like this game plus Hotline Miami probably were big responsibilities to the rise of the neon noir visual style I'm seeing represented in a good number of indie games. Character designs are on point, the colors are delightfully garish, I like the look of the hexagon stylings for attacks or the like.

- Controls are for the most part fluid as fuck, it's pretty snappy, but I did find myself sometimes having issues aiming the gun weaponry. This is probably more on me or just the fact I hadn't played much, but it definitely wasn't always the easiest to hit with. Felt real fluid to use, at least.

- Went North for my first choice.

Just had my first play session. About one hour and a half into the game, and I'm enjoying it way more than I thought I would so far! Combate pace is dynamic enough to be very engaging, but not frantic enough to not understand what is going on. Took a couple of minutes to get used to the control scheme, but I was grooving through encounters soon enough.

Playing on standard difficulty, and it's pretty ok in challenge so far. Had a couple of rooms in which I had to try a couple of times before I could get through (mainly because I was rushing head first into a hoard of enemies), and the first boss I encountered took three tries. Went to the left first, and defeated the boss and got 5 triangles on that path. Got reflect boolets on my sword and double dash as upgrades. Double dash is more timing based than I thought it'd be, but I'm assuming I'm going to get used to it.

Probably going to go down next, just 'cause. Really having a good time!

Yay exciting! I am glad this game won as it's a game I would never have heard of, let alone touched had it not been nominated and won.

Just had my first play session:

Went north and beat the first boss. Got 3 of the 4 crystals and working on the 4th atm

So first impressions is good. The combat is fluid but slow and methodical (which i bit of problem for me as I keep thinking I need to button mash which is not the point and I do better when I don't) and very responsive when it needs to be. The story is told wordlessly and the visuals actually quickly sets up the back story for your character and the objectives (it even points you to go north if you check the holograms). I don't have many issues yet but this may change the longer I play

Finished my second session of about one moure hour. Decided to go down as I said last time, but immediately got blocked off since aparently I need to do the three other sides first? So I had to cut my loses and decided to go right. Really I was going to go up, but since everybody else here had gone up first, I wanted to put it off for as long as posible just to see if opinions about that zone are different.

So I went to the right, ended up killing the boss and getting 6 out of the 8 triangles on that area of the map, so I'd say it went pretty good. I died once to a fire puzzle that required way more finesse with the dash mechanic than I have, so I left a bit of money that I saw behind...I had enough anyways, so I bought the bombs, an upgrade to one of my guns (the prize from the left path), and the ability to carry more health refills.

I also stopped in the dash shop that has the counter, and trained my dashes for a bit. Got to 10 on the counter, so I think that makes me feel confident enough...? Next path is up!

Wow this game was much harder than I'd thought. My first 30ish minutes were spent dying repeatedly and I considered switching to easy. I stuck with normal and ended up powering through the initial learning curve and now 90 minutes in I am finally starting to get the hang of it.

Still super stressful though, my eyes are sore from forgetting to blink.

Went east side first.

Right completed this tonight. It was a rather difficult game and the final boss annoyed me times as a i kept getting stuck on him when fighting him. Still it gave a good challenge and was fair in most places. The story lacked dialogue and in this case it felt like alot of things happening was lost in context and certain mechanics weren't communicated well. Still I enjoyed the game and I'll write up a full review at some point

I really liked this game, I played it just when it came out, I NEEDED to try it out, based on its look, controls and theme. I just did a single blind playthrough though, but I feel I was missing a lot of "keys" and rooms to open in NG+.
Does it have more bosses, secret levels or anything worth finding after fnishing it? I have the impression that it does.

I really liked this game, I played it just when it came out, I NEEDED to try it out, based on its look, controls and theme. I just did a single blind playthrough though, but I feel I was missing a lot of "keys" and rooms to open in NG+.
Does it have more bosses, secret levels or anything worth finding after fnishing it? I have the impression that it does.

I don't think it has any secret bosses.

KEYS unlock new areas with yellow gearbits and outfits (I suppose you could classify this as 'secret levels').
TRIANGLE MODULES unlock new areas with gearbits and weapons (I think the impact railgun is one such item).
MONOLITH SLABS unlock an outfit and more background information to the game.

Hyper Light Drifter
Completion April 07, 2021
Main+Extras 7h 17m 25s
Notes 20 gems overall

+Simple gameplay with some challenging fights in it
+Checkpoints are abundant especially in harder sections
+A great mesh of graphics, background detail and music deals a view of what the world is like
-Lack of dialogue in the game makes it hard to get context of some gameplay and story elements
-Difficulty has a tendency to spike in certain areas
-Little variety in the objectives you must take
Overview: Hyper light Drifter is a great isometric action game with some challenging bosses and fights which doesn’t punish you severly for failing a difficult encounter with a great visual and audio style which builds it’s world through it’s background instead of dialogue. Unfortunately the lack of dialogue loses a lot of context in the game so a few things are lost to you when you play the game.

8/10

Just finished the main game myself. About what I collected in collectibles and stuff: I got about 20 triangles/gems, 7 keys, a little over half the monoliths with texts (I think), and without counting gun upgrades, all but one of the other upgrades.

I really enjoyed the game, and I complete agree with Knalb 8/10 score. I actualy did like the final boss, though (overwhelming the first time which gave him more of an oomph, but definitely learnable). In general, I'd say that while the game does get repetitive in combat and it gets somewhat monotone visually on the "below" areas, the game controls feel excellent and the art direction and general presentation was amazing.

Really glad I got to play this one, and looking forward to what other people think about the game.

PS: I tried the little Football / Soccer mini-game a couple of times and there was no way I was going to win consistently enough. Damn invincible little bugger.

Just finished the main game myself. About what I collected in collectibles and stuff: I got about 20 triangles/gems, 7 keys, a little over half the monoliths with texts (I think), and without counting gun upgrades, all but one of the other upgrades.

I really enjoyed the game, and I complete agree with Knalb 8/10 score. I actualy did like the final boss, though (overwhelming the first time which gave him more of an oomph, but definitely learnable). In general, I'd say that while the game does get repetitive in combat and it gets somewhat monotone visually on the "below" areas, the game controls feel excellent and the art direction and general presentation was amazing.

Really glad I got to play this one, and looking forward to what other people think about the game.

PS: I tried the little Football / Soccer mini-game a couple of times and there was no way I was going to win consistently enough. Damn invincible little bugger.

I actualy did like the final boss, though (overwhelming the first time which gave him more of an oomph, but definitely learnable)

His movesets weren't bad and he was def easy to learn. My issue though was I kept getting stuck on him

I actualy did like the final boss, though (overwhelming the first time which gave him more of an oomph, but definitely learnable)

His movesets weren't bad and he was def easy to learn. My issue though was I kept getting stuck on him

Ohhhh! Not like "stuck in the fight". Actually stuck on him. Like literally. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I run into that same issue and got a couple of combo deaths because of it. Got much better when I realized that the legs were far easier to hit with the sword without getting stuck. But I definitely can see that complaint. For sure.

Ohhhh! Not like "stuck in the fight". Actually stuck on him. Like literally. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I run into that same issue and got a couple of combo deaths because of it. Got much better when I realized that the legs were far easier to hit with the sword without getting stuck. But I definitely can see that complaint. For sure.

I did beat in the end basically I noticed the patterns and basically zerged him until the lights went out in the area and repeated this pattern until I beat him

I've given it a shot though not for very long. I think it looks great and plays well and may not be for me. I'm going to give it a another shot because it really hasn't been long and it could simply be that today wasn't the day for it; that happens sometimes, but I have a feeling. Which is too bad but right now I'm feeling there's not going to be enough to grab me to give me the patience to push through the many deaths I've already had.

Also, as cool as the aesthetic is, I'm finding it's making it hard to see some things. I've already had some stupid confused deaths from simply not seeing a switch.

But we'll see! If I retire it it may be one that eventually comes back out of retirement.

I too went north. It just seemed the most natural direction to go.

I've tried for half an hour. I really hate this game.

Is that a platform? A wall? A hole? Yeah, the neon mysterious vibe is cool and all until I had to actually explore it. And the worst part is that the game punishes me for trying (you lose health when falling). I also don't like the 'borderless' pixel artstyle, but that's personal taste.

I hate the sudden half a second fullstop after dashing, and there's no visual cue for that. It almost feels like input lag. Also, why can't I aim with the right thumbstick? Why can't I aim while moving? I'm fighting against the controls more than against the enemies.

Holding a button to do meaningful decisions can be quite nice in games (buy an expensive item, delete a save file, enter a boss room, etc), but it's ridiculous how this game overuses it. Hold a button to pick up health from the floor?

At least the game is easy to pick up and play, simple controls and no textboxes/cutscenes. While the hypnotic melodies feels pretty generic, it got me a little sleepy and that was the best thing about my experience.

I agree with some of the comments above, the game is definitely good, but not great. Some gripes I had were at time it felt more style and form over function.

Like churros and Siver mentioned, the aesthetics is cool to look at but makes playing it quite frustrating. Hard to tell what is accessible and what isn't.

The other issue I had was lack of text, so the first 60ish minutes were a frustrating trial and error test of my patience, and I pretty much didn't understand any of the NPCs 'speech' bubbles so the story was completely lost to me.

I've tried for half an hour. I really hate this game.

Is that a platform? A wall? A hole? Yeah, the neon mysterious vibe is cool and all until I had to actually explore it. And the worst part is that the game punishes me for trying (you lose health when falling). I also don't like the 'borderless' pixel artstyle, but that's personal taste.

I hate the sudden half a second fullstop after dashing, and there's no visual cue for that. It almost feels like input lag. Also, why can't I aim with the right thumbstick? Why can't I aim while moving? I'm fighting against the controls more than against the enemies.

Holding a button to do meaningful decisions can be quite nice in games (buy an expensive item, delete a save file, enter a boss room, etc), but it's ridiculous how this game overuses it. Hold a button to pick up health from the floor?

At least the game is easy to pick up and play, simple controls and no textboxes/cutscenes. While the hypnotic melodies feels pretty generic, it got me a little sleepy and that was the best thing about my experience.

Hmm...I do get some of the criticisms. I didn't have much problem personally with knowing what was a wall, a hole or anything else, but I can see how that can be a problem. And I completely agree that the dash is something that you need to get used to before it feels good. Particularly before you get the dash upgrade and learn how to use it.

The picking up thing taking time I also get. It was stupid, but after I knew about it it didn't bother me much. It also made some encounters a bit more stressful since I knew there was a health pick up right there, but couldn't just grab it if I was about to get shot or rushed down. But these little moments probably don't deserve the cumulative wasted time of actually holding the button down for health / money / talking / whatevs.

What I find most interesting is what you say about not being able to aim while moving. I played with Keyboard + Mouse, and there I used WASD to move, and the mouste to aim. It's true you can't DASH while aiming your gun somewhere else, but you can certainly keep moving one direction and aim the other. I wonder if it has some sort of screwed up mapping with the controller you are using...? If anyone played with controller (in PC or console) and didn't have this issue, I'd very much like to know...

Well, I played for an hour and I don't like it. The graphics are nice but I have no idea what I'm doing. maybe if people communicated through words instead of pictures I'd have a better understanding. Also this game SUCKS with keyboard and mouse controls.

I'm gonna get in on this late, but I think I'll enjoy playing it through by the end of the month. Had it installed on my PS5 anyways because I've been wanting to play it again in preparation for their next game. I actually played this a loooong(ish?) time ago when it first released on PS4. I'm excited to see how it holds up, or rather, I'm excited to see how much of a disservice I did playing it back then. It wasn't well optimized for PS4 at the time, only running at 30fps, and I have a feeling I just rushed through it without really appreciating it (I say that and now I'm going to be trying to finish it in 8 days, but I swear I'll savor it more). I think everything I've heard about it since, especially more than just "pretty zelda-like indie game" will help it out. Hopefully there aren't any weird back-compat issues.

First impressions after having wandered North are pretty great. I forgot how stunning that initial opening cutscene was, I wonder if any of it was rotoscoped? I expected to be disappointed by the visuals after that, but the actual gameplay looks nearly as good, especially those set piece moments where you walk up and see something huge in the background.

As for the gameplay, I completely forgot how overrun with collectibles this game is (overrun in a good way!). It took me a bit to notice those little squares on the ground, but as soon as I did, it was off to the races. I wasn't able to put the game down until I had collected everything in the North (as far as I can tell, got the 4 monoliths at least.

The combat is really good! At first I felt like it was "new enemy type, now here's a bunch of that enemy type together", but as I progressed it was clear a lot of thought was being put into the arena themselves and the layout of enemy variety. That northern boss, too, felt like the perfect difficulty for me at that point. It was like we were both one hit point away, and only one would prevail...

The sound design I find to be a bit drab at least personally. Not the music, but the sound effects specifically. A lot of it is this bitcrushed sounding retro arcade fare, and I feel like it just doesn't fit the rest of the aesthetic all that well. Maybe if they were higher quality samples? I'm not sure.

Story wise, I don't know really at all what I'm actually doing. Should I even be slaughtering these hostile creatures? I'm one of many Hyper Light Drifters I get that much, so am I just roaming the lands, killing cultists or something? (There is that one burly bird dude with his kids on one of the peaks, so that seems right at least for the north.) Even beyond defeating evil, I wish I knew what these pink diamond towers would accomplish beyond opening the thing in the center of the town. Maybe I'll be able to figure more of the story as I find more npcs.

I'm excited to open up these key doors, but not so excited to have to find my way back to all of them. I took screenshots, so hopefully that will be enough. I'm also a bit bummed that you have to finish NG+ in order to get the platinum trophy on PlayStation. I might still go for it, but it'll probably suck the overall enjoyment out of me a tiny bit. A (non NG+) replay is definitely something I needed though. This is exceeding my expectations (maybe just a bit but still exceeding), and while I'm remembering the flow of it I've definitely forgotten most of the detail. Anyways, to the east (and probably the rest of the game too)!

Finished the game! I didn't end up collecting everything because some of those gear bits and keys are a little too well hidden, and the trophies for the game are crazy unreasonable anyways. No way in hell am I going for 800 consecutive dashes! (My high score was a little over 300). I realized that must be the reason I don't remember my first playthrough of the game, as back in 2016 I was much less forgiving when completion wasn't fun for a game. If I saw that trophy list, then yeah there's no doubt I would have just decided to rush it through, because I wouldn't want to follow a guide to make sure I hadn't missed any collectibles. And is there really a navy blue costume on Switch that pings collectibles for you, but not on other platforms? Yeesh, that should have been patched in everywhere if it's not. Thankfully now I was able to still really enjoy playing it and collecting what I could. I ended up at least finding all of the power nodes and tablets, and was only missing two keys towards the end. Had a lot of fun with it, but my enjoyment waned a bit after the first couple areas due to the slight repetition.

Wrote a full review here: https://howlongtobeat.com/forum?thread=2354&page=1&jump=to#post81469

Also I couldn't find a neat place to slot these into the review, but first, I kind of wish the music weren't so sparse, or at least was a bit more memorable when it did kick in. I understand that it is meant to be atmospheric, but I dunno, it just didn't hit for me as much as it seemed like it could have. Second, they really need a tutorial message about the gear giving you different buffs. Thankfully I heard about it while I was following a guide to find a pesky power node, and yeah, in case you didn't know, each piece of gear you find has a different buff, and you can wear three pieces from three different sets and get all three bonuses. That became essential for the horde mode area in the town, because, man, screw the eastern horde mode arena. There can be way too many of those huge charging plant enemies and they could all come at you with different invincibility windows, they can nearly stunlock you, and they deal way too much damage. Hated that. Great game.

I'll definitely come back to this, but I gotta say my mood wasn't jiving well with the game towards the end of the month, so I decided to put it on the backburner for now instead of forcing myself to do it in April.

I feel like this game has some definite high points! It is VERY pretty and the vibrant coloring gives it a unique feel, combat is mostly smooth save for one problem I'll get to, and the sound at parts is pretty solid, particularly the musical track for whenever something is revealed with it's swelling sound. I will say I wasn't blown away by it though, so far falling much more into the "Good" camp, and I'd say there's a few reasons for that.

One, the dungeon design feels very basic, at least so far. There isn't really much in the way of puzzles and so dungeons are almost entirely combat, and so far there isn't a ton of variety to it, with most of the challenge coming from just upping the number of enemies in a room. There were times it got tricky, like any time it combined shifting rooms and ranged + melee enemies, and those were the highlights of the combo so far, but there were a lot of situations where it wasn't much. There were also one or two times I wasn't sure if I looped around to the start of a dungeon or had totally finished it, but I feel like that's a bit more on me.

The other is the double dash! Now, I don't have any trouble with the normal dash. The delay is consistent, it doesn't feel like an awkward forced stop like Transistor, it smoothly flows into your attacks so it is mostly seemless in combat, but for some reason I swear the double dash ability just doesn't WORK right. I got into the practice room and would get like 5-6 in a row, then use the same rhythm and not get a single double dash like 4-5 times in a row. Maybe I just need to get the timing down more, but I swear it feels like I am doing the exact same thing each time and if it succeeds or fails depends on if the game is feeling kind. After a while I stopped even trying to do it anywhere dangerous because it felt so unreliable, which given it would be a VERY useful ability (and is what I spent my first upgrade points on) bugs me. I'll see if I can get it to work better in future playthroughs, but it really wasn't working out for me this time.

I'll definitely come back to this, but I gotta say my mood wasn't jiving well with the game towards the end of the month, so I decided to put it on the backburner for now instead of forcing myself to do it in April.

I feel like this game has some definite high points! It is VERY pretty and the vibrant coloring gives it a unique feel, combat is mostly smooth save for one problem I'll get to, and the sound at parts is pretty solid, particularly the musical track for whenever something is revealed with it's swelling sound. I will say I wasn't blown away by it though, so far falling much more into the "Good" camp, and I'd say there's a few reasons for that.

One, the dungeon design feels very basic, at least so far. There isn't really much in the way of puzzles and so dungeons are almost entirely combat, and so far there isn't a ton of variety to it, with most of the challenge coming from just upping the number of enemies in a room. There were times it got tricky, like any time it combined shifting rooms and ranged + melee enemies, and those were the highlights of the combo so far, but there were a lot of situations where it wasn't much. There were also one or two times I wasn't sure if I looped around to the start of a dungeon or had totally finished it, but I feel like that's a bit more on me.

The other is the double dash! Now, I don't have any trouble with the normal dash. The delay is consistent, it doesn't feel like an awkward forced stop like Transistor, it smoothly flows into your attacks so it is mostly seemless in combat, but for some reason I swear the double dash ability just doesn't WORK right. I got into the practice room and would get like 5-6 in a row, then use the same rhythm and not get a single double dash like 4-5 times in a row. Maybe I just need to get the timing down more, but I swear it feels like I am doing the exact same thing each time and if it succeeds or fails depends on if the game is feeling kind. After a while I stopped even trying to do it anywhere dangerous because it felt so unreliable, which given it would be a VERY useful ability (and is what I spent my first upgrade points on) bugs me. I'll see if I can get it to work better in future playthroughs, but it really wasn't working out for me this time.

Now do the quick dash 800 times consecutively for the achievement! It's not insane, really! (I actually did end up getting around 500 I think, after I booted up a 240bpm timer video and muted the game's music, but I would never recommend attempting 800)