Hyper Light Drifter : A Realm for the Forsaken

'On to El Dorado, we go...'

Summer melts through the window blinds in the form of laser rays, highlighting the workspace where my computer fires up the installed game of Hyper Light Drifter and I to close the blinds to reveal the emanating pixel effects on my laptop screen in the sudden, dim room. Hyper Light Drifter brought me back to playing video games for the reason that the music playing in the background lifts the spectator to immerse in the wondrous pixelated world of a wandering survivor of a fallout. Playing as the lonesome soldier seeking to understand who they are in the reinvented world, with little-to-no dialogue for guidance but enough of a grand open-world to fulfill your wanderlust, I wanted to keep exploring more and more.

Perhaps I was lonely, perhaps I was a little adventurous, but nonetheless--- Hyper Light Drifter was a game for the forsaken wanderer, a haven for one to trek through the dense forests, or interact with the locals rebuilding their cities, or perhaps as one seeking to learn the mysteries behind your player's past. I had to admit: as someone who has little experience with playing games due to fear of losing quickly, the game instead made me fall in love with the soundtrack, world-building, pixels, and so much more. Granted, with all the praise here, there were times where I can to complete certain challenges with the lack of dialogue to help me understand of how to move on from one point to another. Another time I found myself stuck was handling the controls, in terms of the sequence of how should I attack my enemies before losing my life points in the process.

One of the moments that sold me in playing the game was after traveling through an elevator carrying you deep beneath the fallen earth into the one of the first levels of the entire game. Using my sword to slash through enemies, bushes, and poles, I found my sword as my most trustful guide to lead me into the beautiful pixelated yet forsaken world. If you are attacked by the enemies spawning the game, you can take quite some damage but you can recover yourself by finding cubes to pump up enough energy to give yourself enough health before you die. As I see it, the meat of this game is discovering the enemy attack patterns for yourself and experimenting with fighting styles.

Because you are immediately thrust into the game world, you must rely on experimentation and exploration to see this game through to the end. Your first priority in combat encounters should be to avoid taking damage. A starting character cannot block physical attacks. To avoid damage you must either dodge an enemy or be reasonably certain of the window in which an AI will not attack. Otherwise, you spawn back to the level. Other than respawning, using a sword, or have a little sprite guide to motivate you, you find yourself traveling deeper and deeper into the world without any dialogue. What felt memorable to me was that it wasn't just some dungeon crawler, but an experience to understand of who you previously were before the world fell. This wonderful blending of the story with the game mechanics gave myself so much more initiative to keep on playing as your story kept building little by little.

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