Recent reviews by Craig

Missing out on playing this game or at least trying it is just outright criminal, in my opinion. Hyper Light Drifter has some of the best combat mechanics, enemy placement, level design, visual style and cinematography I've ever seen in any game I've played to date. From what I've seen (which is nearly 2 full playthroughs), this is a very demanding game that really wants the player to be aggressive, yet methodical and adaptive. It wants split second reactions and well though out manuevers simultaneusly and it gets that out of you whether it be by kicking you into a room full of high damage enemies or sudden pitfalls or excrutiatingly difficult bosses, needless to say, it's a very difficult game ESPESCIALLY on NG+ when you have only 1/3 of your normal amount of heatlh but its all worth it because of the beautiful animations and satisfying vibrations and noises when ever you cut an opponent down which is one of my favorite parts of the game (and why I haven't blown my own brains out), it's absolutely astonishing to me how amazing the animations are in this game. This sort of game is absolutely perfect for me, I've always been a rather aggressive player when it comes to Action RPGs as well as a few other genres of video games so if your like me in that regard then ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dude get in on this. But moving aside from the combat another thing with this game that really grabs my attention is its world buidling and its storytelling. The entire game's narrative is told visually, there's no dialogue, at least of any language we can understand and it's communicated in an inherently abstract kind of way considering it relies on set pieces and staging as well as a few images every now and again which is a pretty risky thing to do considering people can interpert the story in different ways but I'm pretty sure that was the intention. I think it works beautifully. Like I said before the level design is absoluteley perfect, there's a ridiculous amount of secrets hidden in each area of the game so much so that it seems impossible for me to find all of it even though I've owned the game for nearly a year now. The game is chock full of rooms with goodies that you wouldn't know even existed if you didn't notice a slightly ajar pixel. Every detail of the enviornments from the looping pathways right down to the positioning of enemies not only works as a way of conveying to the player the histories of the enviornments they explore but also progress the narrative in a very natural pace. It's a very engrossing method of storytelling that's punctuated by Disasterpeace's phenominal soundtrack which really commands a somber and macabre tone to match the game's imagery as well as seemlessly adapt to whether or not the player is in combat. There was a whole lot of talent and love put into this game and it really shows and I think it's the idyllic tale of a crowd funded game to me, they really didn't put any of the people's money to waste making it and delivered something that was better than I expected and that's saying something because it looked damn good before it came out. Hyper Light Drifter is most definitely one of my favorite games of all time and I seriously implore people who want a challenging game with some interesting concepts to pick it up and at the very least dip your toes in for a little while.

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