Hyper Light Drifter Review

Recommended

A great, well designed world to explore in an action, top-down fashion.

The pixel art is beautiful, well designed and consistent in the game world. Personally, I think the graphics could have been a lot more beautiful without pixelation, and at times I was a little bit annoyed or sad about the pixelation, but that is subjective I guess, and not a show-stopper.

The sound design and music is great.

Progression is good, although mostly unguided. The world has visual cues about different things, paths, etc, and you will get additional abilities, although they are not introduced before-hand. You will discover them within the world, with a visual representation. This makes the game not a simple run-through or guided experience, but incontrary definitely adds to the plausible and consistent world and exploration aspects.

It’s not an easy game. As you will not identify, find or solve everything on your first pathing, you will probably visit some places twice or more often.

The world is well designed throughout, the world and story has room for interpretation, even beyond the playthrough itself (glyphs for translated texts etc). Everything is presented visually, some things, specifically combat and movement, is in no less presented with sound as well. Some scenes are very beautiful or even touching.

If you like action games, an unguided but well designed exploration, and think you can handle fair/harder difficulty, this is definitely a great game to look at. A well designed experience throughout.

Originally posted as a Steam Review