Hyper Light Drifter is a more action-oriented zelda-like where you explore a large world, fighting through difficult challenges in order to figure out the secrets of the place you are in. With a really kickass visual style and a good mix of challenges with rewarding exploration, I thought I’d be way more into it than I was in the end. I had some trouble with the controls and the difficulty of some segments of the game that ultimately left me frustrated. It’s a shame because I managed to tough it out for about a quarter of the game.
After a very interesting intro sequence that raises a ton of questions, you’re thrown in a bit of an intro to the game where you control who I suppose is the titular ‘drifter’, armed with a sword and a little drone that can heal you if you have health charges remaining - although this comes after a small delay where you cannot do anything and can still be killed if there are enemies around which can feel a bit frustrating - you soon get a gun that recharges as you hit enemies or break stuff and all of this works in a twin-stick fashion. The default control of dashing where the cursor points versus dashing where you are walking was a bit of a learning curve for me, but it worked out okay.
You get to an hub area from where you can go in four directions, each direction has four main challenges you must complete to access the boss and there are tons of other side challenges that give you upgrade tokens pieces. Get four of them and you get a token, which you then can trade for upgrades that didn’t inspire me at all. Reflecting bullets with the sword was the only one that looked neat, but otherwise I wish I could’ve gotten more shots for the gun, more health, more sword damage, faster heal, things like that. As they were, I got a few upgrades, but I wasn’t super thrilled to work for them.
Most challenges in the game are rooms with enemies and hazards that you have to navigate around to get an upgrade token piece or the very important door opening main challenge objective. Hazards involve crushers, pits, turrets and dark areas while enemies will do a bunch of different things. Some shoot projectiles in strange patterns, others will try to jump on you while others are just there to swarm you. Taken one by one they aren’t that bad, but the game loves to throw a bunch of them to you at once and you’ll probably die over and over. The only boss I fought was pretty tough - but fair - I could learn its patterns after a while and restarting didn’t feel too tiring because I only had the boss to fight.
Which is probably why I ultimately stopped playing Hyper Light Drifter and didn’t get much further; I was trying to do a challenge that involved a really big segment of multiple rooms with tons of enemies, pits and other crushers to dodge; I died about five times in there and each time you had to redo the whole thing, if it was just one room I might’ve been able to push through, but it was just too annoying to retry the whole thing ad nauseatum. Maybe I could’ve skipped this one, maybe it was not an important challenge, but it was right there and no amount of upgrades would’ve changed much how well I would’ve performed. So after failing so much, I stopped. This game has great style and might be more appealing to someone with better reflexes or a bit more time, but it was too rough for me!
