Hyper Light Drifter
Year: 2016
Rating: T
Time Played: 524 minutes / 8.73 hours
As a gamer who grew up on the pixel art graphics of the 8- and 16- bit eras, I can appreciate when a game comes along to try and replicate that aesthetic. Granted, it can be challenging to pull off correctly while also adapting modern gameplay elements. However, there are definitely games that have successfully created an homage to these earlier times (like Shovel Knight). Then there are games that expand upon their predecessors to create something that the original gaming systems couldn’t possibly handle. Hyper Light Drifter is beautiful in its aesthetic while never sacrificing its vision or its challenge.
Early video games had the flaw of being difficult for the sake of drawing out how long you played them. As a result, some were unfairly hard—to the point where I never wanted to get good enough to beat them. Hyper Light Drifter certainly had a bit of a learning curve for me, but once I got the mechanics down, I had to get to the end credits. Granted, some of this learning curve came from how the visuals often made it difficult to determine if there was a secret path or if I was merely dashing off a cliff into oblivion.
Fortunately, once I got the hang of the game (after about the first full “dungeon”), the forgiving death system always put me close to where I failed and allowed me to continue—having learned from my mistakes. This is likely what kept me playing through some of the most difficult bosses I have ever faced in a video game. Some bosses I probably faced 100 times before finally memorizing the patterns and being able to actually do enough damage to defeat them. After a while, I was slashing through bosses and clearing out the story at a startling pace. It was definitely a well-done story, merely enhanced by its pixelated style.
Visually interesting and addictively difficult, I give Hyper Light Drifter 4.5 stars out of 5.
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