#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW REDDIT FOR MAC#
#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW REDDIT FULL#
#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW REDDIT SERIES#

#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW REDDIT FOR MAC#

It is also available for Mac and Linux.Д¬ameron Kunzelman tweets at and writes about games at. Hyper Light Drifter was developed by Heart Machine. 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. 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 spent quite a bit of time wishing that I could be playing a different game within this world. While I adored Hyper Light Drifter in its current form. 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). 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.

ThereвЂ™s a giant frog boss thatвЂ™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 that design ethic is firing on all cylinders it is profoundly elegant. ItвЂ™s a game of recall, like playing with a Simon toy, and the red-green-yellow-blue sequence becomes all-consuming. Added to that is an ever-growing array of enemies and their behaviors, and by the end of the game youвЂ™ve experienced a wide cavalcade of creatures attacking you in different ways with different maneuvers. You have to know your characterвЂ™s dash range, sword swipe range, and exactly how the various guns of the game interact. ItвЂ™s easy to focus on the difficulty of Hyper Light Drifter as вЂњthe point.вЂќ ItвЂ™s a punishing game that requires an immense amount of memorization. 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. You, embodying the player character, are haunted by your own death, and youвЂ™re haunted by some kind of force that keeps this world in its state of decay. 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.

#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW REDDIT SERIES#

In the tradition of Stephen KingвЂ™s Dark Tower series or Gene WolfeвЂ™s Book of the New Sun, Hyper Light Drifter seems like it would get less interesting the more certainty you have about it. 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. This isnвЂ™t a weakness, and I find DrifterвЂ™s gestural, evocative work to be profoundly more engaging than the вЂњbuild it from the scrapsвЂќ model of the Souls series. From an outsiderвЂ™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. 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 SoftwareвЂ™s Souls series (and its goodtime buddy Bloodborne) has built its reputation on both its difficulty and its oblique, indirect worldbuilding. The game almost demands that you draw comparisons between it and another game that extracts infinite death and infinite effort from the player. 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 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.

#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW REDDIT FULL#

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. ItвЂ™s an elegant game with a comprehensive tone. Hyper Light Drifter assaults the senses with bright strikes of purple, blue and pink set to thumping tones riddled with electronic crackling.

Hyper light drifter review reddit