Let’s get back to that part about HLD having next to zero plot. The music is also fantastic, with brooding synths that sound like they came straight out of a Blade Runner film but without all the Asian fetishization. Every setting is distinct in its aesthetic and carried a different variation of the overall melancholic tone that the game provides. The fluidity of the animation as the Drifter cuts through enemies never stopped being engaging as I played through the game. Every pixel is lovingly crafted and purposeful. It’s one of the best looking 2D games I’ve ever played. Sure, you can speculate, but unlike Dark Souls, which has a plot you can piece together with some digging and a Vaati video or two, that’s pretty much impossible with HLD, because there’s not a single line of dialogue in the game outside of tutorials. It feels like it takes bits of everything from traditonal SNES JRPGs to Zelda to - and I’m sorry to say it - Dark Souls. BUT HLD (or Hyper Lightmension Driftunia if ya nasty) has a lot of design decisions that I think are very interesting but that I found myself not agreeing with, enough that I’m making a whole blog-post about it.įor the unitiated HLD is a succesfully kickstarted top-down action-exploration game that is pretty hard to define in terms of its inspirations. Honestly, my standards are so low at this point that as long it’s not filled with gross loli shit or racist under/overtones, then your game is probably fine in my book. I wanna preface the below with the understanding that I don’t think Hyper Light Drifter is a bad game.

Hyper light drifter walkthrough forest