Its out! What do you all think of it so far?

I kind of don't like much about this game beyond the look and it's bumming me out cause that look is really appealing. Like I've reached a point of this first area I chose where I've explored it and found everything I think I can find with my equipment but still need one piece to enter what I assume is the boss door.

But the map seems kind of bad and I know that wherever I go I gotta fight through combat rooms that I don't feel awesome fighting in and all with no real indication that it's what I've missed along the way.

@efesell said:

I'm pretty sure when you encounter the other drifter guy (pink guy with helmet) in each area, he's almost impossible to miss, and I think he's the one that points out the locations of like 4-5 pink shards in that area on your map. Poke around in those areas, you should find some. I think you generally only need three of the pink shards to open the "boss door" of sorts, which usually leads to one more kinda major section of enemies, then the boss.

If you stay in one area of the map, and don't warp back to town, I think none of the enemies respawn. But yeah, if you quit out of the game, or warp back to town, or warp anywhere but the area you're already in, I think every non-boss enemy respawns.

The rubbing up against walls is so far my main complaint as well. Seems like a perfect opportunity to make use of your little floaty friend. Have it light up, have your controller vibrate, something to at least clue you in that there is a secret in this area. Heck make it an upgrade that you have to buy but give the player something. Ultimately you just end up rubbing up against every nook and cranny in every room you enter which kind of breaks up the flow of the game.

Graphically: really impeccable though I find it's moreso when you're outside and especially if you're in the north or east areas.

Musically: eh, it's nice I suppose. It's ambient but it doesn't call attention to itself, it's a soundtrack that's just sort of....there.

Gameplay: I wish when you revisited areas to get stuff you missed that abilities were more cooler like "oh no I can do this when I couldn't before" whereas most of the time it was purely keys or power sources and that was it. Also yeah the "walk along the walls to find stuff" was dumb and the way health worked in relation to checkpoints was just asinine but overall I liked it but I'm not "in love" with it which sucks cause it's a game that I should feel it is.

Is it just me or does this game look really bad?

Bear with me here...I like games that look like watercolor or painted or whatnot, but this one just looks ugly.

@humanity: They use visual cues for the hidden stuff, but it's not consistent, and sometimes things are just plain obtuse and obscured.

Some of the cues are clever - in the West in the underground section with the enemies in the cells, for instance, you glimpse an area that you then can't access because the gap is too wide. However, up in a cell to the north, there is one lone enemy. When you kill them, a little crystal niblet appears and attacks you. If you are paying attention, you see that the niblet comes out of the wall, and if you go over to the part he emerged from, it's a gap and you can get round to the area you saw before. I thought that was cool. There's a few things like that, where they use little environmental elements to point you at secret areas.

But way too often it's just a hole you'd have no chance of seeing.

@gerrid: Yah there were times when there were clever clues, but as you said mostly it's just "hey hug this wall." Sometimes you can see a few rocks on the ground which is otherwise smooth or stuff like that. In the Eastern zone a majority of the secrets simply require the sniper rifle because it shows more of the screen. There are a lot of awesome things in this game but also a lot of things that didn't really need to be so obscure.

I keep trying to like this game, but something keeps me from really enjoying it. I understand it is trying to be hard and not hold your hand, but I feel like the challenge comes from being lost in the dungeons. Also, I don't understand the map at all. It shows you where the shards are at that you need to unlock the boss doors, but I can't figure out where I'm supposed to go.

I will continue to play it to see if something clicks. I did jump out of the west section and went north, just to see if I can make progress up there.

@humanity said:

Yeah, I generally agree that while some secrets are signposted a little bit with debris, or some other visual irregularity like an enemy coming out of the wall or a really conspicuous dead end, there a ton of times where you just have to randomly walk against a wall and happen to find the hidden path. Also, the invisible walkways that only appear if you activate an invisible switch on a ledge, and the only indication of their existence is your robo-Navi buddy briefly flashing you a question mark. I think I ended up finding most of them throughout the game, but the one or two I didn't find and later looked up in a guide seemed like complete bullshit. There's one invisible switch/walkway in the north zone that I completely walked past on both my first time through the zone, and my second sweep through the zone where I was especially searching for every hidden thing I could.

Just got this today, and......it's cool. But it's really kicking my ass!

Managed to scrape through the East section. But I still don't feel confident at handling a room full of multiple enemies.

Have gone back and upgraded my gun clip, and something else that I forgot already :)

And also...yeah, some of the secret areas are kind of annoying to find. I should imagine I'm missing a great deal of them.

I've completed both east and west sections, and... I think I love this game. East is definitely the best first area to tackle as it sets you up to better handle later challenges (not a requirement, but it helps). I've been getting my ass handed to me regularly, but it's always my fault and I enjoy finally getting good enough to clear a room or boss fight.

Also, the randomly running up against a wall to find a path thing is pretty cheap. Really the only cheap thing I've come across in the game. I almost understand it if it's meant to hide a secret, but I got stuck in one area for an hour, unable to reach a boss, because I didn't randomly run against a wall... Not great.

I just finished it, took me 5 hours 40 minutes..

I like it quite a bit, but I feel it gets a bit samey, the enemy design isn't very inspired, the bosses are all way too easy (they all boil down to very simple pattering understanding), the "story" they have didn't really need to be abstracted so much.

Combat is so much fun, I just wish there was more of it. Which probably will be the case when they release the kickstarter goals? I generally don't really feel like collecting everything, since its kind of a pixel hunt on every screen just trying to find the secret passages or whatever.

The music is awesome, but also there isn't enough of it, feels like there are a handful of songs at most. The visuals I love a lot.

Beat it as well... 5 hours. Felt a bit short and like I could of finished it quicker had I not been searching every nook and cranny. Art, music and gameplay are all great. But it left me a bit wanting in the end. The bosses were all pretty easy aside from the last bit of the last boss when he goes into fast mode. And the story was kind of just whatever. Worth a play through tho.

I finished it today after taking my time. Since everyone seems to be posting gametime Steam has me clocked at 7 hrs which felt just right for this type of game.

I really enjoyed it all the way through. Each area has a very distinct feel and enemy set and once you get a couple of the key upgrades under your belt the combat really opens up. Absorbing bullets on a perfectly timed dash, to slicing up some fodders mobs, shotgun to the tougher ones, quickly deflect some more bullets with your sword, dash out.. Feels real good.

The story I have to agree with the comments above could have been abstracted a little less. I enjoyed it for what it was but ultimately it would feel a lot more rewarding for your average player to leave that world behind having at least a vague notion of what they've done instead of heading straight to YouTube to look up lengthy theories, or worse yet just shrugging your shoulders in indifference.

Likewise as fun as the combat was, some of the timing for the moves could have been more lenient and it wouldn't have destroyed the challenge or compromised the vision in any way. Chain dashing is real finicky and more so in the heat of battle with 10 enemies on screen, all shooting and jumping at your throat. Some of the skills you buy aren't even very clear. Absorbing bullets seems like it should work all the time, when in fact it works just like the sword deflect, activating only when the projectiles are very close to you.

All that said I think it's an awesome game. Really beautiful art, good progression and most importantly a really fresh and unique vision. I would love to play a Hyper Light Drifter 2 or see the base game expanded in some way with new abilities and more of that beautiful world to explore. I hope they sell a lot because this is exactly the type of indie game we need more of in my opinion.

@humanity said:

Yeah, looked at one or two theories, and boy are they silly. The reality is that even the translated monoliths are only a handful of incredibly vague sentence fragments, and most of the "story explanations" I found seemed like people made up about 90% of the story based on absolutely nothing.

BisonHero's list of things that definitely visually happened in Hyper Light Drifter:

• there used to be some biomechanical giants, but they are dead now. At the very least, the people in the west directly fought them
• your drifter keeps seeing visions of some darkness keeping him from the pink crystal, and also some black tentacle asshole
• your drifter keeps seeing visions of some supernatural dog, and the pink drifter also saw the dog, and by all accounts the dog seems to have led them to their deaths/the afterlife
• the pink crystal was probably some kind of sweet power source, but was corrupted somehow, and the dog was possibly giving you visions showing that your drifter needed to get to it to right that wrong or something
• after you fight the crystal, your drifter has a deathbed vision of returning to the area at the start of the game, even though you very much must not be there
• after your drifter dies, he goes back to that place with the wide expanse of shallow water and the giant tower that zooms out of the ground, and that's probably some kind of door to the afterlife
• there are weird ghostmen beside the monoliths, and they're probably important or something

That's it. The people who have constructed a story or history anymore specific than that are nuts. It's just not there. Like, Metroid Prime has a bunch of specific, sometimes even dated, history logs of cool ancient civilizations that eventually collapsed due to their own hubris. You can piece together a coherent narrative from those. Hyper Light Drifter does not have that.

I like the setting overall and think it strikes a good tone, but I wish people wouldn't give the game more credit than it deserves and pretend there is some super elaborate backstory based on a few ambiguous sentences on some monoliths.

I'm super bummed out by this game. There is a great foundation, but I think the design is absolutely not there. It controls well and looks great, I don't mind the abstract story either as I liked the tone.

But god... you're going to be hugging walls all game long. Even if you don't care about secrets, you need to find health pack so you will always have to slow done and search every areas thoroughly. It just slows down the game to a crawl everytime. Since there is no way to refill all your health packs easily, you might also need to redo some sections to get health.

The difficulty is all over the place. It goes from 0 to 100 randomly. The hardest encounters are just the same ennemies you've been fighting over and over, but in greater numbers and in small places. It doesn't make for interesting fights, it's just more of the same presented in a slightly more annoying manner.

I quite liked the boss fights. They're though but can be easily beaten if you know what you're doing. It really is the only part fights I liked for the whole game.

It took me five hours to finish the game. I think it's interesting and lot of work obsiously went in it, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Game is getting better the more upgrades I'm getting.

@bisonhero: I think the facts pulled from snippets of developer commentary during the kickstarter phase are probably the most sound foundation for those theories. I also think it's kind of a shame that there is so much lore there that they are making an active effort of not showcasing in any way. You might have seen the same video I have where a guy mentions that the Drifters sword is made from "phase shifted energy" or something to that degree, and this is something that was presented in the Kickstarter phase apparently. Granted that doesn't really mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but it's cool to have a tidbit of backstory. It's fun knowing something about this world. I'm certain they have full pages of lore written up, explanations, enemy names, motivations, history, tech mumbo jumbo, and then they condense all this awesome info into a handful of 3 panel illustrated flashbacks. At the end of the day I don't know if the sacrifice is worth the mystery. I mean, if they added text bubbles with some exposition and a few lore dumps along the way from stay Drifters, would that have negatively impacted the game? Would being keyed in to whats actually going on take away from the mystique of discovering this world? I don't think so. Quite the opposite, I think it would draw people in and make them part of the story, rather than be these clueless observers.

@humanity: Ah, that would explain it. Still, as a general principle, creators can say all they want in interviews and other messaging, but if those details aren't in the work itself, then what's the point?

I think the sort of triptych you got from the last surviving "good guy" in each area was effective storytelling, and I would've vastly preferred that the monoliths be more of those visual histories. As it is, the translated monoliths are kinda nonsense for the most part.

Just finished this game.

What a lovely experience. I can say with complete honesty I have zero complaints about the controls, the difficulty, the way secrets are hidden... anything, really. It all worked for me. Man alive do I want the soundtrack something fierce.

I'm starting to come around on the game. I just got to the south area, and I feel like I'm finally getting a grasp on the controls. Sometimes it feels like the dive is unresponsive, but other than that it plays well. I can't get over the art in the game though. It is so gorgeous. The art, music, and challenge of the gameplay kept bringing me back when I was down on the game. But I'm glad I stuck with it.

I love it. It felt unpleasantly hard at first but I had just had to get some upgrades and get good. I like that they chose to make the combat require you to be deliberate but then throws you in to chaotic situations. It gives you just enough tools to deal with it. The West boss is a total bastard, almost more so than the final - but otherwise they aren't too bad.

To talk only about the combat would be to miss the actual point of this game -exploration and navigation. The world is gorgeous and absolutely riven with secrets and hidden areas. Secrets hiding within secrets. Such stuff is gaming crack to me.

I could go on and on. I don't usually go in for this kind of comparison but this game is almost exactly Zelda x Fez.

I'm not sure about it at all...I don''t like the map structure/level design at all. I think it looks gorgeous though!

@nophilip: yup. West boss is ill! Unfortunately I went that direction first and got to him with zero upgrades. Got destroyed over and over again. I gave up, did East (as you say, a piece of piss) and North then went back West and beat him in three. It's that horrible smash attack that does 2 damage, especially when he starts doing three of them when he's around half health. He's an utter prick.

I finished this a few days ago and I loved it, even more so than I anticipated. The world is a joy to explore, and in certain parts, it reminded me of this old anime I watched as a kid called Future Boy Conan. So, in a sense, playing this was a nostalgic experience for me. I think the game’s only shortcoming is its story and the way it’s conveyed. The story or lore is not only obfuscated behind monoliths that need to be deciphered, but it’s largely uninteresting. There are a few revelations about the Drifter’s origin and the ancient race you see when activating a monolith, but nothing wholly original.

That said, this hasn’t affected my experience all that much, if at all. The promise of seeing more of the world provided enough incentive for me to keep playing. Between exploration, traversal challenges and combat, I found the basic gameplay loop to be engaging. The locales you visit are hauntingly beautiful, accompanied by a fittingly sombre score. It also might be worth noting that the game now has icons on the ground indicating the existence of a nearby secret. This means you no longer need to rub against walls looking for secret rooms and passages.

The combat is precise and there’s a nice rhythm to the action; it can be frantic, but it requires finesse and planning in equal measures. It’s almost always satisfying, especially when things are going your way. I liked how enemies give you a narrow window to hit back, which makes downing one enemy a gratifying feat to do on its own, let alone clearing an entire arena without taking damage. The boss fights are some of the best I've seen; they're challenging, but not frustratingly so. Also, the animation in this game is fantastic.

This is easily one of the best games I've played all year. I'm looking forward to next to week's Bombcast to see if Jason has played more of it and hear what he thinks of it.