INTRO:
Pixel artwork is a labour of love that can be difficult for others to appreciate if they do not realize how much effort has to go into it. Nevertheless, there are people who will undertake such a project, and there are people who would support them. One such example is Hyper Light Drifter, a Kickstarted project that took many years to come to fruition.
Yet, it has been a few years past the giddy days of the renaissance of the indie scene. Hindsight would give anyone who is willing to have it the ability to look underneath the game’s impressive exterior, and notice its problems.
PREMISE:
The story is told mainly through imageries and animated visuals. What legible text is there is placed behind a substitution cipher (and even then most of it is cryptic) and there are no understandable voice-overs. Most of the game’s story is speculation, and this review will not be doing much to establish any further theories, much less canon.
What is there that is established is from “Word of God”, i.e. the creator. Even so, the details are sparse, and the creators of the game are content to just let speculation run rife.
The titular “Drifter” appears to be a martially skilled vagrant. He (his gender has been established) is stricken from a disease that has him coughing up vital fluids. All he has to guide him in his remaining days are nightmares about a glowing artefact, and an inhumanly amorphous enemy that seeks to smother him.
He is not the only one to be suffering in such a manner. Through the advice of other characters, he goes on a quest to collect what the creator has termed “power modules”, in order to open the way to his final destination. This is easier said than done, because the world that he is travelling in is full of danger and civilization is in decline.
(That said, there is some text that can be read in the game, but these are mainly for tutorial purposes.)
THE DRIFTER’S SWORD SKILLS:
The Drifter is skilled in the sword, which is a necessity because there are many enemies that are best met with the blade. His slashes are wide, allowing him to hit multiple enemies that happen to be surrounding him. They also cause slight knock-back, which in turn create gaps among incoming enemies that the player can use to have him slip through.
His skills can still be improved though. Indeed, there is an individual that is strongly implied to be a teacher of swordsmanship, and who can grant new skills to the Drifter provided that he can meet his/her price. There will be more elaboration on this later.
THE DRIFTER’S SHOOTING SKILLS:
The Drifter can handle guns with a single arm, no matter how big the gun is. As for the player, shooting and aiming is as simple as using an analog stick or a mouse to shuffle the targeting cursor around. (The latter is much more convenient.) However, the Drifter cannot move when shooting or aiming, so the player will want to find opportune moments to fire his gun.
GUNS:
Speaking of guns, there are official names for the obviously sci-fi weapons that the Drifter can use. Nevertheless, most people would refer to half of them with names that are associated with typical video game gun archetypes, because half of them exactly work like these archetypes.
The Drifter does not start with any gun, but eventually finds a semi-auto handgun. It has the highest capacity of shots. The other guns are not as easy to find, though their level of utility is generally not as good as the handgun’s.
For example, there is a big gun that can only be found after a lot of effort has been invested into searching the nooks and crannies of the game world. The big gun might not be worth the effort though: it gobbles a lot of ammunition and it requires the player character to stand still for a couple of seconds before it fires. Neither setback is desirable and manageable.
The railgun is the only other weapon that has reliable utility. The railgun is a hit-scan weapon, and the beam that it fires goes through all enemies until it hits something solid in the environment.
It is just as well that there are two reliable guns; the Drifter can only equip two guns at any time. However, the player can also switch out his two guns for others by going into the inventory, though this is a cumbersome thing to do.
GUN ENERGY RESERVES:
Being able to harm enemies at range typically comes with a balancing drawback; in the case of this game, the guns share the same pool of ammunition – or energy, depending on your sci-fi mileage.
To refill the pool of energy, the player character has to kill or break things with his sword; the narrative reason for this is not entirely clear. Gameplay-wise, this is of course in place to have the player character swinging his sword around for a while instead of shooting enemies most of the time. (He should, though; enemies are best handled at range because most of them use melee attacks.)
The actual counter for the pool of energy is not shown to the player. Nonetheless, the user interface does show whether there is enough energy to fire the currently wielded gun or not.
Hyper Light Drifter is not the first game to use such a mechanism. However, the previous games that did so were not remarkable for having implemented this in a convenient and manageable manner. This indie game did, thanks to its generously huge hitboxes for things, considerable returns of energy from each hit with a sword and that hitting breakable objects that are not enemies also counts.
HEALTH:
The Drifter is obviously neither immortal nor invincible. In fact, he can die rather easily, if the player is not deft enough in controlling him.
He has only 5 hitpoints, on the default game mode. There are enemies that inflict damage as little as one hitpoint, but there are enemies that can inflict 2 hit points worth of damage, or more, in the case of the attacks of some bosses. There is just one way to have more than 5 hit points; even so, this method comes with opportunity costs and it only provides one additional hit point.
(Furthermore, the New Game Plus mode diminishes the player character’s hit points to a measly two, and the Alternate Drifter has only 3 hit points. There will be more elaboration on these later.)
Fortunately, the Drifter does have some means of healing his injuries (albeit nothing can be done about the disease that is killing him). He carries around an injector of sorts, which he can use at any time to completely restore all hit points. However, this process takes a couple of seconds, during which he is vulnerable.
More importantly, the injector’s reservoir of medical substances is limited in capacity. Initially, it has up to three doses, which have to be replenished by collecting health kits that are lying around for narratively inexplicable reasons. There does not appear to be any other way to replenish the doses.
The injector can be upgraded to hold up to five doses. Skilled players likely will not need so many, even when fighting against bosses, but having more doses is always a good idea.
DASHING:
As mentioned already, the player character is quite fragile. Fortunately, if the player is keeping an eye on the attacks of enemies and any hazards in the immediate surroundings, the player character can dash out of the way of these; there is a few frames of invulnerability in the dash animation. However, there is a very brief moment after a dash, during which the player character cannot do anything and is vulnerable to attack, so the player will want to be careful about where his dash ends.
CHAIN DASHING:
The player can purchase the chain dashing ability, which allows the player character to do multiple dashes in quick succession. To prevent the player character from dashing indefinitely, there is a stamina meter that depletes as one dash is made after another. (The stamina meter is also used for other abilities that can be purchased.)
Unfortunately, chain dashing has another limitation: there is a limited window of time to do the next dash. Make the input to dash too early, and there would be no response. Make it too late, and there is certainly no response. There are not many visual indicators for when the window occurs either. (There is purportedly gear that makes chain-dashing easier, but this is just speculation.)
Furthermore, if the player is not careful about where the player character is heading (likely because he/she is concentrating on the timing of the inputs), the player character can collide with something in the environment and get knocked down.
This makes chain dashing frustratingly difficult. Fortunately, it is not needed to progress towards the conclusion of a playthrough. However, it is needed for many optional challenges.
Perhaps the developer intended chain dashing to be an expression of the player’s skill at rhythmic input. Yet if this is so, the timing window should have been the only limitation. Stacking it with the stamina meter and collision with objects in the environment is too much.
WARP PLATFORMS:
There are daises and pedestals with arcane etchings. The Drifter can teleport to any of these edifices from anywhere. There are not many of these things though. The most convenience that the player could get out of them is to have the Drifter return to town, or go to the ‘hub’ of each region. There will be much travelling about on foot, whether the player likes it or not.
The platforms also have another function: restoring the health and ammunition of the player character. This is not told to the player, but it is easily observable if the player character happens to have less than maximum health or ammo.
“GEARBITS”:
Civilization may be crumbling all around, but currency is an aspect of civilization that is very difficult to diminish.
“Gearbits” – to quote the creators’ own term – seem to be the accepted currency among tradespersons in the world of Hyper Light Drifter. It is not entirely clear what they are, but there is no further exposition beyond them being golden and considered valuable.
For whatever reason, there are gearbits scattered around the world, often in boxes that are hidden away in nooks and crannies, and sometimes from sight. Furthermore, they do not come complete; each bit that the player finds go into some kind of mould. Having four of them in the mould changes into a complete “pack”, which is the currency that is handed over to those who want them in return for their services.
Finding each and every bit is challenging. It requires keen observation, e.g. searching for signs that there are things out of the ordinary. At first, this can be quite gratifying, especially when the player’s hunch turns out to be true.
Ultimately though, there are not many things that are worth purchasing with gearbits. This will be elaborated shortly.
TRADESPERSONS:
“Tradespersons” is perhaps the best word to describe the characters who accept completed gearbits as payment for their services. Besides, according to the developer’s concept art documents, there are characters with names as generic as “Merchant”, and some of them are not exactly keeping care of shops so they cannot be reliably called “shopkeepers”.
Anyway, these characters – most of whom are anthropomorphic animals – have something that is of use to the Drifter. For example, the mole-person (that is officially called the “Techie”) sells a device that is practically an explosive bowling ball. The Drifter has next to no means of dealing with swathes of enemies in one stroke, other than using big guns (which as mentioned earlier, are not very practical), so this device is worth buying.
Whatever things that a tradesperson can sell are shown to the player; they do not have anything else. Different things have different prices, of course, so the player will need to prioritize what he/she wants to buy with the first several completed gearbits.
Yet, not all things that are sold are worth buying. Even those that seem worth buying may have drawbacks that are not well communicated to the player. There is the aforementioned chain dashing, for example.
Those with properties that are visually shown to the player may not always be practical either. For example, there is a wide slash with the sword that can be quite powerful against many enemies and it does more damage than other sword attacks. However, the slash requires the Drifter to stand still and charge up before it can be used; this is indicated to the player. Considering that survival requires the Drifter to be constantly moving to avoid attacks, this ability has a very situational use.
MAGAZINE UPGRADES:
Perhaps the most underwhelming purchase options are the magazine upgrades for the guns. These are useful, of course, but these are the only upgrades that the player can have. There is nothing that adds additional properties to the guns.
Considering that there had been other indie games that let the player customize their weapons with mods and upgrades, this is a very noticeable deficiency in gameplay content.
SWORDS, CLOAKS AND DRONES:
The Drifter is clearly wearing a cloak, wielding a sword and has a drone companion floating close by. All three components of his gear can be swapped out for similar things.
His default gear pieces convey no benefits whatsoever. The other sets of gear that the player may find throughout the course of the game are substantially better. Finding them is not easy though, but a couple of sets are difficult to miss.
Interestingly, according to players who have tested the gear pieces, having only one piece from a set of gear is enough to impart their properties. This means that the player may want to mix gear pieces from different sets to gain all of their benefits.
Yet, in spite of the above, the documentation of the properties of the gear pieces remains officially obtuse. Some of their effects are obvious, such as gear pieces that increase the player character’s hitpoints by one, but some others have effects that are just too subtle to observe – assuming that they have any at all.
MONOLITHS:
There are edifices with bizarre symbols all over the game world. Fans have speculated that these may be clues to the substitution cypher that obfuscates text about the lore of the game. The cypher has long since been figured out, which then led to the translation of the statements on a specific type of edifice known as the Monolith. When a Monolith is activated, it reveals text in the form of the cypher.
In the years since the debut of the game, fans have translated the statements of the Monolith and have suggested that they are lamentations about the sad state of the world in the fiction of the game. These Monoliths are tucked away in hidden nooks and crannies, perhaps due to the shame of their creators.
The text on the Monoliths are also recreated in a hidden sanctum, which is actually not very far from where the Drifter was at the start of a playthrough. After the sanctum has been found, the player can visit at any time to review the number of Monoliths that had been found. (The sanctum was, of course, of much use to the fans who were figuring out the cypher.)
Finding all of the Monoliths also reveals a set of gear at the sanctum, so there is a gameplay-related incentive for the search.
REGIONS:
The game world is separated into five regions. There are the North, East, West and South regions, and the hub region that is the only evidence of civilization in the lands.
There is something early on in a playthrough that attempts to inform the player of the overarching objective of the game. The player is to search for artifacts (officially called “power modules”) that will open the way forward to which the Drifter seeks. The power modules can only be found in the cardinal regions.
The North, East and West regions can be explored in any order (though some fans would suggest either the North or East first, for ease of exploring the West). However, the South region is out-of-bounds until the other regions have been cleared.
POWER MODULES:
Many of the power modules are well hidden. The player might find some that are difficult to miss, and these so happen to be just enough to make progress towards the overarching goal. There are more, of course, and these happen to open the way to optional challenges, some of which can be infuriating because of their requirement of chain dashing.
Incidentally, after collecting a handful of modules in each region, the player will be shown the player character’s nightmares again. This can eventually seem tedious, but this is the game’s way to remind the player of the overarching goal of the gameplay and narrative.
Anyway, these power modules are needed in order to unlock doors that are marked with the triangular symbols of the modules. That said, the modules that have been collected in a region are only applicable to such doors in that region. One of these doors in any region always leads to the main threat in any region and one of the pylon-like pillars (more on these later).
KEYS:
The power modules are essentially video game keys, but there are also doors that are unlocked with things that are actually represented as keys (or at least icons with the shape of a key). These are even more difficult to find than power modules, and the doors that keys unlock are much more secluded than those that are unlocked with the latter.
However, unlike the doors that are unlocked with power modules, doors that are unlocked with keys usually lead the player to the goodies that they hide, immediately. This is just as well, because finding these doors is already of sufficient challenge.
UBIQUITOUS HAZARDS:
Civilization is crumbling, so there are plenty of fall hazards around. The player character can fall, but reappears close by with one hit point diminished. Enemies that fall simply die, no matter how tough they are, so it is in the player’s interest to force them off edges and cliffs. (Any attacks that land on enemies happen to knock them back a bit.)
There are also plenty of traps that are still operational. Some of these are obviously dangerous, such as huge moving stone blocks that can crunch just about anything against any solid surface. (If there are no solid surfaces that the blocks would come into contact with, they push things instead of crushing them.)
There are some traps that are more subtle. Coincidentally, only the player character can trigger them. For example, there are disappearing floors (which happened to be a staple in video games of yore) and turrets that emerge if they can draw a clear line of sight to the player character.
Some of the traps are endemic to specific regions. For example, there are flame traps in the Eastern region, and crystal spikes that can instantaneously emerge in the Western region.
KNOCKBACK:
Unfortunately, hazards, especially the aforementioned crystal spikes, also highlight one of the most egregious problems in the game.
Anything that inflicts damage, whether on enemies or the player character, will knock them back. This also includes damage from hazards. The knockback would not be a problem in most places, but it is a major source of frustration in some optional challenges.
Chief of these are the ones that require the player character to chain dash through fields of crystal spikes. Failing a dash at any point in these fields is likely to cause the player character to be bounced from one spike to another; there is little that the player can do when this happens.
LEVEL BOUNDARY GLITCH:
It is in these optional challenges that a very frustrated but observant player might discover that there are exploits involving level boundaries. In particular, any level boundary that obscures anything to the north of it may have missing floor tiles, but have collision scripts for the purpose of walking around. This can be used to skirt around fields of hazards in some optional challenges.
(ALMOST USELESS) MAP VIEW:
Early in the playthrough, the player character gains a map of the continent that the game takes place on. The map shows the places that the player character can go to, as well as the warp platforms on the continent.
Unfortunately, the map view in this game lacks one basic functionality that is present in other games with competently designed map views; it does not reliably track the player character’s current location, even though there is an icon for the player character. Furthermore, many locations are not exactly well-represented on the map. For example, there may be a clearing in the forests of the Western region and it is not one of the hidden areas, but it does not appear on the map.
The map view also does a poor job of showing the physical links between one area to another, especially for the underground segments. For example, one area in the underground may seem to be connected to another area to its west, but the map view may show that the other area is anywhere but to the west.
These deficiencies make the map view next to useless at locating any objects.
ENEMIES – FOREWORD:
There are many enemies that will try to kill the Drifter. The reasons for their hostile intentions are not immediately clear, but observation of the environs of the places that the player character would go to will eventually reveal these. What is not so clear though is that they seem to be quite united in murdering the player character, despite their disparate natures.
UBIQUITOUS ENEMIES:
The first enemies that the player would come across are small out-of-control robots. They are quite easy to deal with, but as the game progresses (especially when the player character has gone to the South region), they come in huge packs.
The most ubiquitous enemies are the dullards that are officially called the “Dirks”. These are wimpy enemies whose only strength lies in their numbers. They are also frequently spawned in visually obscured places. Like the robots, the Dirks appear in all regions.
Next, there are riflemen, who appear to be what the Dirks would be if the latter are not dullards. Their ranged attacks are easy to evade, and they are quite pathetic after the player character has obtained the ability to reflect projectiles. Like the Dirks, they can appear anywhere, though the later ones almost always appear where the player character cannot easily attack them in melee.
REGION-ENDEMIC ENEMIES:
There are enemies that only appear in specific regions. They are either the denizens of those regions who do not like trespassers or they are actually invaders that have overrun the regions.
Usually, the first area of any region has the player character encountering one example of each type of enemy; this is the player’s opportunity to observe its attack pattern, learn how to dodge it and determine when to attack them. Such encounters are also used to introduce other types of enemies, wherever they first appear in a region.
BRUTES:
There are scant few combat-oriented action games that do not have hulking huge enemies that are damage sponges. Hyper Light Drifter is not one of these.
In this game, these enemies look typically intimidating. All of them hit hard in melee too, so the player will have to be quick with his/her fingers on the dash button. Of course, they can take a lot of damage.
There are four types of brutes, though only two of them appear in substantial numbers. One of these can be found in any region, and it is the only enemy that is not stymied by obstacles in the environment. The second brute is endemic to the crystal-infested Western region; incidentally, it is a golem that is made of crystals. The third brute is endemic to the Eastern region; it hides in the ground and waits for the player character to approach.
The fourth brute is found in optional challenges; it happens to be the most difficult, because it is armed with a big gun.
It is usually in the player’s interest to find ways to quickly eliminate them. For example, in the case of the brute that jumps over obstacles, it can be tricked into falling to its death, if there are chasms around.
BARRIERS:
There are many places where the player character would be locked into combat with enemies by barriers that raise behind the player character. It is an ages-old video-game trope, but it is otherwise a serviceable challenge. Besides, there are many enemies that can be much more easily defeated by drawing them away from the others and defeating them piece-meal.
These barriers usually lower after the player has slain all enemies in the immediate area, but there are some that have to be lowered by activating switches. Some of these switches also disable turrets.
BOSSES:
With perhaps the exception of the Southern region, the denizens of each region are led by a powerful individual. As for the Southern region, there are actually a group of bosses, though this is not immediately clear to the player.
Each region has an NPC that informs the player of the locations of these bosses, who happen to be close to an edifice that the player character needs to activate in order to progress towards his goal. (In the case of the Southern region, the boss that is closest to the pillar in that region has its location shown; the others’ are not.)
Unfortunately, the information of these locations is quite useless, because there is rarely any immediately open path to the boss in any region. The player character often has to go underground, up to the surface and sometimes back to the underground again just to reach the boss. The bosses might be underground too, because their icons appear on both the surface and underground overlays of the map view with no clear indication of where they actually are.
As befitting video-game bosses, these individuals are tougher than the more common of enemies. Again, like other video-game bosses of the present day, they have attack patterns that they repeat in semi-predictable cycles. Wise players who have yet to do their homework on these bosses might want to spend some time observe these patterns; besides, their hitpoints are on a one-way trip to zero anyway.
Veterans of the King’s Field successors would do quite well here. The bosses are the kind that will punish players who overreach when they should have the player character backing off to have some room for the sake of evasion. Nevertheless, there are moments when their attack patterns chain together such that there are considerable windows of opportunity to hurt them.
(A tip from me: it is wise to shoot the bosses whenever the opportunity arises, build up gun energy with riskier melee attacks afterwards and then shoot them some more.)
ALTERNATE DRIFTER:
Completing the game for the first time unlocks the “Alternate” mode, which lets the player control a different player character, who is simply called the “Alternate Drifter”. She (her gender is established) has a melee attack that has a much longer reach than the Drifter’s sword-slash, but since she is using some kind of beam weapon, her attacks do not have an arc to them.
That would have been an okay trade-off, but “Alternate” mode is apparently intended to be more difficult. She has only 3 hit points, even though it is implied that she does not have the same disease as the default Drifter does. (Of course, there is the argument that with her longer reach, she can keep most enemies at bay as long as she is not surrounded.)
NEW GAME PLUS:
There are games that have “New Game Plus” modes, in which the player replays the game with already powered-up player characters. Hyper Light Drifter has a “New Game Plus” mode too, but it is also simultaneously the “Hard” mode. The only warning that the player gets about its difficulty is the “Beware” text under the mode’s label in the “New Game” menu.
The (default) Drifter does have every upgrade unlocked, but he only ever has two hit points, meaning that enemies that hit hard would just kill him outright if their attacks land.
This mode is seemingly mainly there for those with something to prove. There does not seem to be any further in-game rewards from playing it.
VISUAL DESIGNS:
Hyper Light Drifter is an arduous but ultimately fruitful work of pixel art. Although the game does use layers for the purpose of perspective, shadowing and of course having characters move around, there are very few other techniques involved. Many other indie games that purportedly use pixel art actually make use of masks and shaders. However, the pixel art of Hyper Light Drifter is convincingly hand-made, with pixel-by-pixel effort.
This can be seen in the animations for sprites, especially those of the protagonist. There are no particle effects, no layering and nothing else that indicate anything other than frame-by-frame animations were used.
Since the game lacks active story-telling, much of the backstory and lore about the game world have to be inferred through its visual designs. Fortunately, Hyper Light Drifter does quite well in this regard, and this achievement is all the more notable because of its use of pixel art.
The nature of enemies is implied through their appearance, specifically the similarity between some of their features and the environment. For example, the Western region has a lot of hard-light crystal growths. It so happens that many of its dangerous denizens happen to have such growths too.
There is readable English text that appears in-game, though it seems to appear where visual context is not possible. For example, text appears whenever the player activates a warp platform; if the player has come across one for the first time, he/she might not recognize it as a means of instantaneous travel if he/she is not already well-versed in sci-fi/fantasy works.
SOUND DESIGNS:
There are no legible voice-overs, and the player character appears to be silent (except when he coughs). However, the sentient creatures in the world of this game do happen to make vocalizations. Their utterances do sound like they have been strained through electronic filters though, for whatever artistic reason.
The monsters that the player character fights also have their own utterances. If they are not robotic, they typically sound guttural, unless they are of a nature in which sounding guttural would be off-putting. For example, the avian enemies in the Northern region sound suitably avian, what with their cawing.
The music is the most pervasive aural presence in the game. Most of the tracks that play while the player character is on the surface are melancholic, as befitting the setting of a post-apocalypse brought about by tragically bad decisions. Some other tracks elicit wonderment, such as the track that plays when the player character finds a hidden glade full of glittering flora and mineral formations.
The sound effects in the game are mainly there for combat and exploration. The sword swings and hits are satisfying to hear, especially the killing blows (which sound harsher). Hits on the player characters also sound harsh; incidentally, the sound clips for these are unique, which help the player know when the player character is taking damage. (The game also momentarily hitches whenever hits are landed on him, further emphasizing the blows that the player character is taking.)
Speaking of distinctively unique sound clips, there are a considerable number of these and they are used for momentous occasions. For example, there is the peculiar but very much sci-fi sound that is made whenever the player character extracts a power module.
SUMMARY:
Hyper Light Drifter’s greatest assets are its great, convincingly genuine pixel artwork (though this may have costed it many years of development). This shows throughout the game, much to the gratification of anyone who had backed this game just for its pixel artwork.
Although many elements of its story are still up for speculation, Hyper Light Drifter is a good example of where story-telling can be done without more overt methods. Till today, there had been solid but not entirely tight theorizing of the lore behind the game, and very little input on the part of the game’s creators (which is just as well, considering that their choices of names for their concept designs are just as sketchy as their sketches).
Unfortunately, gameplay-wise, the game is rather simplistic. It has challenging combat, but nothing beyond what the Souls titles, early-2000s Ninja Gaiden and other games with sophisticated combat have done already. Its progression system is bare-bones, especially the gun upgrades. Worst of all, its optional content is infuriatingly difficult, no thanks to poor design decisions for chain dashes.
The game’s debut on Kickstarter may have been giddying, as was typical of that era when crowdfunding was a beacon of hope for the games industry in one of its stalest moments. Yet, the reality was that not every crowdfunded game can be a jewel without flaws. That said, Hyper Light Drifter is a shiny gem, but with few facets and one of which is very rough.