Let’s Look At: Hyper Light Drifter

One of my favorite music genres is synthwave (just imagine if the 80s never stopped). I like the little imperfections that synths bring, as well as the art style that accompanies the music. Bright magentas, teals and cyans seem to leap off of album covers and landscapes. Ever since 2011’s Drive, the style has been popping up in other places, much to my delight like Far Cry 3’s expansion Blood Dragon. One of the more unexpected places was Hyper Light Drifter, a The Legend of Zelda inspired explora-thon.

Welcome to pretty colors and total confusion.

Hyper Light Driver does have a story, but good luck figuring it out. Our main character basically appears out of nowhere, not terribly phased by the fact that they came through a dimensional portal into a new world. After a short rest and brief spout of coughing up blood, they’re off to explore their new world. There are several areas to explore, each of which with a theme to its monsters, like the wizard birds in the library-mountain, or the orc-samurai things in the ancient ruins.

As you might be able to tell, there's not a lot of dialogue in HLD, so I'm making up my own names as I go.

Throughout each area you collect little rhombuses that unlock more areas, as well as some kind of giant lock that the main hub town is built around. Each area also has a final boss with unlocks one of the bigger locks. So, you keep moving towards unlocking this giant thing, but why? Does your character know what it is, or what it does? Will it send them home? Will it cure your mysterious illness? Fuck if I know, but it’s a good mystery that keeps you invested.

My absolute favorite part of this game is its design; visual, audio, and story-wise. I’m a sucker for both good pixel art and neon, and this game uses both to fantastic effect. The overall look of the game mirrors 16 bit SNES and Genesis games, but with modern polishes designers of the 90s could only dream about. The colors in the game are bright and vibrant which makes the world seem alien and wild. Everywhere you go, there are signs of previous civilizations and battles, empty except for the enemies and one or two friendly NPCs.

It's always nice to see a friendly face, especially when near everything else in this world is dead.

The whole package has a very solemn and haunting effect. There’s no dialogue in the game, so you never have to stop focusing on the art, which is a concession that few games are willing to make. The soundtrack to this game deserves praise as well. It’s ambient and stirring without intruding on gameplay or overriding any other part of the game. I would bet that the designers of this game are big synthwave fans. Each area has its own unique tracks and ambient sound, which keep every location feeling fresh. Lastly, the story design deserves recognition for its restraint. Much like The Legend of Zelda did, HLD plays its cards close to the vest; if you want to know about the story behind this place, you’re going to have to do some detective work and a good bit of guessing.

There's even a co-op mode, so you can dash around with a friend.

The combat in this game is very satisfying. Your character starts out with a laser sword and acquires several other kinds of weapons as you go including ranged weapons and bombs. Your sword has a nice three-hit combo which you can time to great effectiveness against groups of enemies. You can also get upgrades your weapons that increase their ammo count (in the case of ranged weapons) or give you alternate moves (in the case of your sword). You quickly acquire the ability to dash, which makes you feel like an action hero, zipping between enemies and cutting them down. Enemies in this game come in a variety of types, ranged and melee, and each enemy requires their own strategy. The orcs, for example, are relatively easy one-on-one, but it can be hard to dodge their attacks in groups. The joy of combat really shines in boss fights. Each boss has their own patterns, which you must study in an almost Dark Souls like fashion to beat them. Each of the bosses is difficult in their own way, which makes progressing past them feel as good as defeating some evil titan should.

Despite how much I love the story design, there are some drawbacks to the style. Because everything is kind of mysterious, it can be very easy to lose track of where you’re supposed to be going. There were some rhombuses that took me absolutely forever to find because even though I could see around where they were on the map, I couldn’t find out how to get to that particular point.

The map isn't super detailed, but it is a good general-direction kind of thing.

The game also has a 30FPS cap, which presents its own set of problems. Because the game runs slightly slower than most PC games do, the controls can feel a little fiddly. The game will not react to a very fast combination of buttons which can leave you on the wrong side of a bosses’ weapon swing, or down a pit. This keeps the combat from feeling graceful in the way that you would imagine it should feel like.

Worth Playing?

Yes.

If you’re at all interested in indie action games, exploration, or a mysterious and beautiful world you should definitely invest some time in Hyper Light Drifter. The neon alone sold it for me, but y’all might be tougher customers. Anybody who enjoyed the original Legend of Zelda game will enjoy this one, so I also recommend it to any diehard NES and SNES fans.

If you don’t share this article with everybody you know, you might be whisked away to another dimension. Just saying.

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Let’s Take a Loooong Look: Legend of Zelda Series, The Legend of Zelda

Part 1, Legend of Zelda, NES, 1986

We’re changing things up a little here.

This piece is the first in a long series, where I’ll be playing all the major games in the Legend of Zelda series because, to your great surprise I’m sure, I’ve never played any of them. I’ll be going in chronological order, playing only the ones that appeared on consoles up to the Wii U, without a walkthrough. This is going to be a series retrospective, looking at how the games hold up over time and better understand their place in the series, rather than talking about whether they’re “good” or not.

One of the most influential series in all of gaming, The Legend of Zelda has sold over 75 million games since 1986, beginning with Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The first game sold over 6.5 million units, and was a revolution in terms of open world games for the NES. Legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto was inspired to make The Legend of Zelda by his love of exploring cave and forests around his childhood home and this is really clear to see in how you progress through the game.  

The title screen that launched a million ships. Well, sold a million copies. 6 million, actually.

After playing it, I can see why people love Legend of Zelda so much. Still, I was spewing profanity at my screen for minutes on end at times. To start, I think I’m terrible at this game. I died 172 times, (the start screen keeps track of that for some sadistic reason), and I came close to throwing my controller against a wall more times than that. I beat the game without a walkthrough, but it definitely added several hours to my playtime (and several fits of yelling).

Whyyyyy. I don't need to know how bad I am at this game.

The Legend of Zelda has basically no story. You choose your name and then you’re spawned in the middle of a mountain range, with a door above you and your left. You go in and an Old Man (with a suspiciously large number of brothers/clones) appears and says, “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE. TAKE THIS” and he gives you a sword. And then, bam, you’re off. Here, I hit one of my biggest issues with this game. You get almost zero direction. You are given a sword, and the screen shows space for items if you hit start, something to equip to the “B” button, but that’s about it. I vaguely knew that I was supposed to collect pieces of the “Triforce”, so I wandered around until I eventually encountered the first dungeon.

Who are you? Why are you giving me a sword? Are we related? How do you know I have any idea how to use this thing? WHAT IS ANYTHING.

A huge portion of this game is exploration, so withholding information adds to the adventure gameplay, but even a little hint of “go find pieces of the Triforce” would have been nice. The game has a clear end state, and the empty Triforce is right there in your inventory, so it’s clear you’re not just supposed to wander around aimlessly, but that’s not passed on to the player clearly enough. Older games were designed a certain way to keep players playing, usually with difficulty, so this may be designed purposely to keep the player in the dark, but I still don’t think it’s was the best choice. I can’t say it’s a bad decision, however, because while it’s frustrating, it also increases the sense of discovery that you feel as your journey around the world.

Speaking of the world, the map in this game is impressive to say the least. I wouldn’t have thought that the NES could handle such an expansive world map. I’m not sure exactly how many screens there are in the overworld, but you can find oceans, rivers, graveyards, mountains, forests, and deserts just by walking around. Given how often I died, I got a really good sense for where everything was and how to get from point A to B, and the designers deserve credit for creating an intuitive game world. There are some screens of the map that repeat a number of times before you “pass” them, which is annoying and confusing. On most screens, there is some kind of secret, whether it be a shop hidden in the mountain wall, a statue that can be pushed away for an a creature that will give you a few rupees, or maybe even an old man who will offer advice, or an improved sword. This makes the world map a lot deeper than it might appear in first glance and pushes you to explore every nook and cranny.

Considering how slow you walk, this is basically Skyrim before that was a thing.

Okay, so we’ve explored the world, found a million copies of the same old man, but what about the rest of the game. Combat is simple, but definitely not easy. You thrust your sword in front of you with “A” and use another item with “B”. There are a number of possible weapons, like arrows, a boomerang, a magic wand, and a candle. All of these have an upgrade that you can buy/find somewhere, which is always nice. Combat is difficult because if an enemy so much as touches you, you’ll lose some health, and your starting shield can’t deflect a lot of the projectile attacks you’ll face. Something that I found really aggravating is how short the invulnerability period is after getting hit. It’s usually enough to get away from a melee enemy, but a number of times you can get hit three or four times before you have time to get away.

You'll be seeing this screen a lot. Or maybe I'm just terrible at this game. Damn octoroks. Who taught you to shoot rocks anyway?

There are also a number of non-combat items that change how you can explore the world, or allow you to access certain hidden areas. Some items do both, like the bombs and the candle, which is a cool merging of combat and world. I love the items in this world because there’s such an amazing sense of discovery that you feel when you find a new one. You immediately try to think of what it might do, or the areas where you could use it. This game might not be great at explanation, but it is great at adventure, and making you feel like you’re on an epic journey.

All the stuff on top of the blue box is an upgrade to another item, or a world-use item. All of them are awesome.

While you’re on your adventure, you’ll encounter a number of different kinds of enemies. Some of them have ranged attacks that you can block with your shield, some have melee attacks that you have to avoid. You can find orange and blue varieties of almost all enemies, with blue being the more difficult variety. Most of the enemies are very well designed and force you to play in certain ways, like the Darknuts who are heavily armored and can only be damaged from the sides or back. Some of the enemies are a bit unfair though, like the Wizrobes. There are two kinds of Wizrobes: one kind doesn’t move except to teleport around you and fire off one shot, and one that walks around and teleports and will keep shooting their spells at you as long as you’re in front of them. The non-moving Wizrobes are easy to deal with, so my gripe is really just with the blue, roaming ones. I got wayyy to much satisfaction from stomping on them, after my million deaths. The variety of enemies is awesome and keeps the game from feeling stale, despite the fact that you’re doing basically the same thing in all the different dungeons. They’re cleverly designed in terms of how they look, and you quickly figure out what they can and can’t do. Brevity is the soul and wit, and Legend of Zelda definitely respects your time, at least with the enemies.

Man, they're cuter here. Wizrobes are the ones on in the from the right on the top row, past the snake. They are not to be trusted.

Dungeons are the most challenging areas of the game. There are 9 dungeons, each with a compass and a map in them. The compass tells you where the Triforce piece of the dungeon is and the map shows you all the rooms. For the beginning dungeons, the map is very useful because you generally move through the dungeon by going room to room via door or bombed out wall. In the later dungeons, it matters a bit less because you’ll do a lot of underground travel, which the map does not show. Dungeons also contain secret items, some of which you need to complete the game and some of which are just useful. Each dungeon also contains one or more bosses, with the later dungeons repeating some of the earlier bosses. Usually, there’s also an old man in the dungeon who will tell you a secret about the dungeon or the boss, which is nice, if garbled. “AIM AT THE EYES OF GOHMA” is a little confusing, but once you see that the boss is a giant spider-eye, it makes more sense.

You again! Where do you come from? How did you get here? Why are you always surrounded by fire? Do you even care that I blew a hole in your wall?!

The dungeons can be hard to find, which is aggravating and can make the game feel like a bit of a slog at times. When you die in a dungeon, you respawn in the beginning of the dungeon with three hearts, no matter what the maximum number of hearts you can have is. This is a little annoying because there aren’t any healing items in dungeons besides the rare hearts (or rarer fairies) that enemies drop. For the most part, I really like going through the dungeons, because each one offers a different experience and hope for new items. They offer a sense of progression, adventure, and difficulty that you don’t find in the overworld.

Welcome to Dungeon 1. This is one of the more straightforward dungeons, but if you're terrible like me, you'll probably die a few times.

The Legend of Zelda starts with a boy getting a wooden sword and ends with you defeating a giant, invisible, teleporting pig-man with silver arrows and the Triforce. You rescue Princess Zelda, and your quest is over; congrats, Link. You’re the hero of Hyrule. This game was an experience for me. I was really impressed by the scale, the sense of discovery and adventure, the world design, the map design, and the clever use of items. I was frustrated by the combat and the lack of direction, but that’s about it. For the most part, this game is incredibly imaginative and innovative. I think there’s a lot of great lessons that modern games could take from this game, especially around discovery and adventure.

Stay tuned for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the Legend of Zelda game everybody forgot.