Hyper Light Drifter

Hyper Light Drifter is the only one game that has come out which I regret not pledging my money for it during its crowdfunding stage. Actually, I did not even know about it at that time. But very unexpectedly, what I expected to be a splendid Zelda clone turns out to be one of the most amazing classics I've ever played. Some might say Hyper Light Drifter is too frustrating and hence turns off a lot of Zelda lovers, who would naturally have an attempt on it after hearing all the resemblances between the two. But the difficulty is not such that it will break you down as Dark Souls does, because as the game progresses, you'll be given more powerful weapons and many skill upgrades. So as the game crescendos, so does your character. But still, challenges will arise every time the game reaches its climax, especially during some grand boss battles. Your character is a sword-wielding and gun-blazing blue-skinned man called 'Magician', seemingly heavily sick, in search of something unbeknownst to the player, fighting through four big worlds that are respectively situated in North, West, South and East. Each of them is vast and connected the central hub and has both ground level and dungeons. And each world requires a lot of combat against monsters to get through, and tons of exploration to unlock the final door that leads you to the formidable boss. But, you can explore further to unlock more rooms and secrets, granting you more powerful equipment as well as more fun, and more memorable moments. The combat is extremely precise. Once you've invested in some sword skills and more defensive dodging abilities, fighting an area with respawned enemies whom you've encountered before can feel fresh, and it also changes the tactics entirely. After the main game, there are alternative modes like boss rush and hoarde mode that add a lot of replay value. Due to the limit of text, I can't list all its merits. Anyway, It's a fanstaic masterpiece that any hardcore gamer will adore!

Well, the game is great and it totally worth your time. But it could be better. The good things first: visually the game is amazing. Artist did such a good job. Mountains with stone temples and snow, dark forest with crystals growing on the soil, waterfals... Sometimes it looks so epic you're just standing still a minute and staring. And then you're going deep down to seek secrets buried underground. Such a contrast. Technologies and nature fused together. Gameplay is fast and satisfying. You have a bunch of sword techniques and various guns plus granades. Use them as you please. Firstly it would be challenging to see anything in this flashy nightmare, but you'll get used to it eventually. It's impossible to wipe out everything just with agressive tapping, so fast thinking may be crucial to actually clear the game. Fast gameplay is also the biggest problem of HLD. If you are not skilled enough, you'll be dead in a seconds. If you know what you're doing, it won't take long to kill every single enemy and keep going. So you can die, like, ten times in one minute. There are many secret paths here and there, much more than you can imagine, and it may be really hard to find them. Who wanted some challenging platforming? We have it. In my personal opinion another big problem is story and characters. If you'll try to dig little bit deeper, you'll find nothing. It's all empty. NPCs are just moving sprites. All the plot fits in a two cut-scenes. The game has its unique atmosphire, not a story. Kind of sad.

That game is : Awesome. I mean, few games are that great. The game manage to tell a story and teach you how to play without ever displaying any text. This is master art at game design. I love it. For sure, localisation must have been cheap! The game revisit mechanics elaborated in several games of the 16bit era and add a lot of modernity to it. A clumsy comparison could be a mix between Zelda, Alien Soldier and Dark Soul : prepare to die. Alien Soldier seems odd here, but the gameplay is centered on the dash, just like that game. This is great because few games revisited this style, its hard to master and from a top view game it's very interresting. (AS was side scroller). Combat get stylish when you get used to it. On the controls side, it's sometime quite frustrating. The game doesn't alias anything and require you to have perfect timings. By example, I did felt that until the dash animation is done, I couldn't stack an attack in advance. In a modern game I would expect that kind of design. Given the battle are sometime quite hard to master, I would expected to concentrate on the tactic instead of focussing on timing my hit perfectly. It's not a fighting game. Also, my joystick isn't quite good, it would have helped a bit. The music has been done by Disasterpeace, an artist I'm listening to since his first albums. God, the ambiance in the game goes 50% to the music and 50% to the graphics. You feel so much alone, it's great and terrible at once. The problem is, I have hard time finishing this game, it freezes all the time and I'm not alone to experience this problem. The worse is, on Linux, it freezes at interval of 30 minutes... this is very frustrating and breaks the immersion big time. Usually after two crashes, I'm off doing something else. The developpers seem to have ambandonned fixing it... that's quite sad.

Hyper Light Drifter (that I will refer to as HLD for short) is a game that I didn't really know what to expect. I've heard about this game a while and I bought it without even looking at some gameplay for one particular reason: the music. The first time I listened to that music, it was too good to be real. That dark electronic music with a nice Debussy vibe made me want to buy this game blindly. And I absolutely don't regret that. Let's talk about the graphics first, I love those kind of minimalist pixel art that still manage to be as beautiful as less retro-styled games. Those graphics combined with the music create an amazing dark, dystopic and yet beautiful atmosphere. As for the gameplay, it's amazing as well. A mix of action based combat, RPG, exploration and a bit of platformer. The whole is pretty hard but really fun. An amazing and beautiful game overall. The OST is my favourite part of this game.

HLD is a fantastic game and is a great buy for $20. It's probably the clear contender for indie game of the year for 2016 and I'll be surprised if there are many other products that can even challenge it for that title. It's a beautiful game with smooth gameplay and superb sound design. But it isn't perfect. HLD has almost no text anywhere - this is allegedly a call back to the SNES era of games, where there was little to no spoke dialogue, but A Link to the Past is cited as a direct influence on the game's design yet had NPC dialogue and explanations of what's going on. So take their claims with a grain of salt. The game doesn't really have any sort of real narrative, and while this doesn't necessarily hurt the game, neither does it help it. For me, though, the biggest issue I found was the combat itself. Many attacks, especially from bosses, can knock the player down, but you aren't invulnerable while knocked down. So you can be knocked off your feet, unable to take any action, and then take MORE damage while still unable to do anything about it! With the player's very low health pool, this can very frequently result in "unavoidable" deaths. Instead of making a mistake and then taking a bit of damage for it, you make a mistake and then take a bit of damage for it, then a few bits more damage, and suddenly you're dead and have to spend 20 seconds waiting for the game to reload and let you try again. If they planned on making death so frequent and outright CHEAP, they could've at least gone the Hotline Miami route and made respawning almost literally instant. The game's final boss is the worst offender and was frustrating more than fun. I felt like the player and boss both desperately needed mercy invincibility... something that was a core mechanic in the 8-bit and 16-bit games Heart Machine cites as influences for HLD, yet is conspicuously absent here. Still, overall an excellent game.