Thoughts: Hyper Light Drifter

I just finished Hyper Light Drifter! I want to start actually putting down thoughts when I finish games and they are fresh in my memory, so here goes.

Warning: there will be minor spoilers. But there’s not a ton of story to spoil so I wouldn’t be too worried.

Overall

I really enjoyed the game. If your game’s premise is “Top Down Metroidvania + Intense Action Combat + Beautiful 2D Art” and you deliver at all (and HLD does), I will like your game. HLD delivers. I liked it a lot and would strongly recommend it to anyone who likes tough action games and exploration/Metroidvania games.

Highlights

  • Level Design - The level design was just fantastic. Navigating the levels was easy, there were quite a few gorgeous, well placed vistas, the levels were designed to make your navigation abilities (dashing, chain dashing, etc.) super fun. Secrets were abundant and well telegraphed, and about halfway through I began to realize the language that the game uses for secrets (there is a little symbol the game uses in most places! Keep an eye open!).

    Additionally, it’s really impressive how the game made such thorough use of relatively few tools in enough varied ways to keep them interesting! There were very few one-off gimmicks in levels and the game never really broke its rules.

    The game also made great use of the Metroidvania trick of showing you things that you can’t get to yet, to pique your curiosity and help you understand the flow of the level without making it overly linear. Particularly, the doors that only open when you’ve collected ¾ pieces of the triforce for a given area (it’s a triforce okay) provide a great leading tool for the player without overly constraining them.

    Honestly this game is a master class in 2D top down level design.
  • Art - I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what drove most people to the game. It’s what drove me to it! But the art is just gorgeous, the palette tasteful (and more important varied - each of the main areas has a very strong aesthetic that is very different from the others), the animation is punchy and expressive. Just a gorgeous game.

    I believe super strongly that  “art style > hi-tech graphics” and this is a stellar example of that.
  • Music and Sound - The music is sparse and ambient for most of the game, which is why when it DOES kick in, it’s very intense and matches the emotion the game is trying to build quite well. When you hit an impressive vista, or a tough fight, and the music swells, it does exactly what great game music needs to do - works in harmony to make you feel what the game’s trying to express.

    The sounds is great on it’s own, as well, but also provides great gameplay feedback, which is something I felt other aspects of the game could have done better - but the sound nailed this.
  • Standard Enemy Design - The bestiary in each of the areas felt extremely different, worked really well together, AND had a ton of personality! Their gameplay and art worked together fantastically as well - the swoopy bird guys mechanics instantly sold why I couldn’t slash them when they were flying, and led me to try to shoot them out of the air - when it worked, I was thrilled! The frog ninjas instantly read “frog ninja” which, besides being awesome, led me to think “i bet that frog’s gonna throw a shuriken” before he did, and that felt awesome!

    It’s pretty rare that you can spawn a bunch of enemies in a room, let their AI drive them, and get decent gameplay. These enemies are so well designed that it works.
  • Atmosphere, Character and Mystery - I’ve felt like designers, especially narrative designers, can overemphasize the importance of the player understanding what is happening in the game world. Instead, I think it’s actually much more important that the player understands the big themes, the “flavor” of the world, and the details are actually often unimportant and boring - in fact, not knowing them, leaving them mysterious, are much more engaging than spelling them out. This is part of the magic of Dark Souls, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and Hyper Light Drifter really succeeds.

    Additionally, the decision to make the friendly NPCs animal people, and to have them tell little visual stories, was brilliant. It made me care about the world far, far more effectively than dialog would have.

Critiques

  • The Bosses - The difficulty level of the boss fights felt pretty all over the place. The bird boss was a super easy one-shot, and the west boss was pretty darn difficult. That’s normally fine, but it didn’t mesh well with the overall area difficulty to produce a “standard path” - I found the west area’s standard enemies to be easier than the bird area’s, for instance.

    Also, I felt the bosses tended to highlight some of the control and feedback issues I’ll raise below.
  • Controls - For the most part, the game controlled beautifully, felt fluid, smooth and precise. But a few issues really marred that:
    • Dashing - The game has either a hidden cooldown, input lag, or just a bug with dashing. It felt like there was a cooldown potentially after 3 dashes in a row (talking about standard dashes here - not chain dashes) but it was very unclear what in particular triggered the cooldown, how long you needed to wait in between dashes to clear the cooldown, or really just why sometimes you’d press the dash button and nothing would happen.
    • Hit Reacts - Hit reacts on players are fine. Long hit reacts are cool. But, it felt like you regained movement control of your character after a hit react before you regained the ability to dash - I’d need to really dig in to figure out what felt wrong here - but in general, I find that it’s clearer when there’s a very firm hierarchy of actions - e.g. you can always do action A if you can do action B. If I can dash while moving, and cancel attacks with dashes, I’m going to assume that any time I can move I should be able to dash. It didn’t feel that way - but I could have been wrong.
  • Non-audio Feedback - While there were strong indicators when e.g. you got hit (including massive hit stop), some indicators felt missing - for example, after firing the shotgun, you have to cock it to fire again (your character automatically cocks it after a time, but other actions, like dashing, can delay your ability to cock it). How do you know if it’s cocked? Well, there’s a sound. That’s it, as far as I can tell. No animation, no UI indicator, nothing. For something as critical as when your buttons will work vs. do nothing, that’s not good.
  • Perspective & Depth Perception - Overall the game did a great job with this, but because it uses an orthogonal projection (there’s no foreshortening) and because some enemies and objects are quite tall, trying to tell what I could and couldn’t walk “behind” was often kinda frustrating. There’s not a great solve for this IMO, but it’s one of the drawbacks of their otherwise super super cool art style.
  • Visual Noise & Getting Lost - It was way too easy to lose yourself onscreen in chaotic firefights. Additionally, the visual they used for Dashes didn’t do enough to help situate the player onscreen AFTER the dash - I really needed to know where I ended up, and the visual did a better job of showing where I WAS then where I ended up. This problem was especially pronounced in the bird area, where some of the bird-man attacks used the same color palate as the drifter’s dash visuals.
  • Minigames - The Soccer and Dash minigames were awful. Don’t ask or encourage players to engage in a repetitive stress inducing “repeat this thing 800 times” activity. Especially don’t reward it. Please. These things would have worked as cute little side activities (the 100 dash challenge was OK, the soccer game should have just been an easy little goof).
  • RPG Progression - Overall I thought this worked well, but I did feel that the “big upgrades” (the sword and dash upgrades) shouldn’t have been priced the same as the “little upgrades” (the gun and health pack upgrades). The sword upgrades and dash upgrades were way more “fun” - it felt like the gun, bomb and health pack upgrades were the wrong choice - even if maybe they were pretty good gameplay-wise.
  • Balance - The shotgun, IMO, was stupid overpowered on bosses and the “dodging through projectile” upgrade on the dash shouldn’t have refilled your ammo - the game should have done more to force you to use the sword on bosses more often.