![]() If health packs were an automatic use thing hidden in the world, and your default health was twenty, then I would be fine with this, but it isn’t, and this is my second least favorite aspect of the game because of this. What I’m getting at is that you are discouraged from using health packs, and always want to maintain a full stock, which means intentionally dying in troublesome encounters only to try again, which isn’t very fun. You are also trying to save up every health pack you receive for the boss at the end of an area, which you would need to backtrack to if you were to teleport away and tediously restock on health packs, as you need to physically find them at designated locations in the game world. ![]() The health system incorporates holdable health packs that are used to restore your five pip health bar when in combat, and you can find these packs scattered throughout every room in this game, often hidden in a corner of a secret alcove. This is a very minor and petulant little complaint, but something I thought about every single instance when I was hit throughout the game. Not due to my skill level– well, partially due to my skill level– but also due to the health system. I don’t think the game is explicitly hard, at least aside from the few moving blocks and vanishing platform challenges, those can be obnoxious, but I probably died a couple hundred times within fifteen hours. ![]() However, due to the minimalistic art pixel style, one with a very deliberate color palette, detailed animations, and no outlines separating the characters in the background, combined with the layout of certain areas, the game can get more than a little hectic, and with it, difficult. As it stands, the gameplay is decently fun, and there is just enough diversity in your expandable movepool, gun variations, and enemy types to keep things interesting. You maneuver around enemies, foretell their simple attack patterns, get a few hits in, dash, and then possibly hit them from afar with a shoddily aimed gunshot, as you often lack the time for precision. Thankfully, the core gameplay, that of a simplified overhead, character action game with an emphasis on mobility and exploration, is enough to hold a game on its own. Yet it is so cryptic and vague that I simply lost interest in whatever story Hyper Light Drifter had to tell as time went on. It clearly has a deeper story hidden inside it, one made from very subtle hints, its own alphabet, and plenty of inferences for the player to make. What’s there does paint a desolate image of a cruel and unforgiving world, one filled with magic, mysticism, and splendor to some degree, but one I honestly didn’t care about. There is no dialog, no exposition, and everything is explained to you using visuals, including occasional snapshots of characters’ lives. I think save the world or some such thing. You play as a swordsman with a nifty cape who has some sort of premonition about his own death and an apocalypse before he is sent on a journey to recover sixteen triangles scattered around the outskirts of a small town in order to do… something. Normally I begin these things with a general plot and concept summary, but I barely have a clue what Hyper Light Drifter is actually about. Yeah, after going through this game, trying to find everything without a guide, I never want to play it again. While I would love to do the same, I genuinely cannot say I like Hyper Light Drifter. Then, with a week’s notice, the game came out, and everybody proceeded to announce their adoration of it. I’m one of those few thousand people who threw a few bucks at Hyper Light Drifter during its Kickstarter, as the project looked interesting, and I would surely check it out after release.
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