Sno

Hyper Light Drifter

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Yeah I went West first hahah. I've swooped around to East where I think I'm about to collect the last of the four pieces of this corner of the quadforce.

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the table in the house where you wake up in in town shows a diagram of the north part of the map with some triangles filled in, which sorta indicates your objective to be up that way. It's also probably the smallest area, so it feels like an introductory dungeon.

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Oh, and on retrospect the north is where the tutorial area is, and it loops back to bring you to the town too.

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I went east, west, north. I'm now in south (which I think is gated off initially anyway unless I'm misremembering things). I thought the boss battles were tremendous fun. Two of the fights ended where I was staying alive with 1 HP for the last 1/4 and managed to get the last hit in before I would have wiped.

 

I finally got a handle around how the dungeon maps work.

 

I don't like the shotgun at all, but I like the laser gun a ton.

 

I also upgraded the spin attack, but it takes so long to charge up I end up never using it.

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I really liked the shotgun for the enemies that crowded you, really useful on the birds too.  Also good at one-shotting some enemies.  Laser gun was really useful, pretty much how I killed the last boss.

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I am hopeful I can come back to the game. Looks like there's already been a patch. Maybe once it's smoothed out in a couple more I'll be here with you.

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Went through with the help of some guides and collected all the diamonds and tablets and enough keys to open the door in town (I won't spoil what's down there but it's pretty fantastic). Also picked up the last two weapons.

Not sure I love the rubbing against walls method of secret collection, but it is impressive how much stuff they managed to hide in plain sight.

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Not sure I love the rubbing against walls method of secret collection, but it is impressive how much stuff they managed to hide in plain sight.

 

Absolutely agree with this. My M.O. for these areas is to go kill the boss, then spend a ton of time just walking against the walls of each screen. Not fun, but cool when you find something weird. I found a really weird thing last night, a particular area in the west where you can go behind a tree and there's a fairly big area to move around and an area where you just get stuck. Here's a video of it, spoilers for what the west looks like I guess 

EDIT: thanks SuperBiasedMan

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You can add spoiler tags with

tags, just make sure you also do a /spoiler one (also in square brackets).

 

I agree about it being a bad way of hiding secrets for completionism's sake. If I just finish the main game and then put this down, I'll be perfectly happy with this secret hiding. But if I do decide that I want to get everything, then it's gonna be a real pain.

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Just finished NG+. Initially daunting, but turned out about as hard as the regular game was first time through. Fun stuff.

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Finished the game. Final thought:

 

That soccer game is bullshit! A bunch of reviewers complained about the bosses, which gave me no serious difficulty, but no one warned me about this infuriatingly difficult minigame! Oh yeah, also loved this game through and through.

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I've beaten 2 bosses and gotten to the west boss. The other two were no problem but this one's been wrecking me a bit. I went back to town to get upgrades for the sake of the small boost that gives me, and was frustrated to find a bunch of enemies respawned. I had thought that they basically never did, except if something triggered a respawn. But it seems like maybe they respawn if you leave the whole area and then return later? If that's the case I'm much less inclined to be a completionist after finishing the game. The combat's good but I don't want to wade through enemies while checking every nook and cranny.

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Yeah fuck soccer man. I thought I'd get something nice for finally beating that cheating bastard but no.

 

no.

 

Also the rest of the game's pretty cool. Currently going back and trying to clear out the areas. It's disappointing when I think of something clever to do in an area and it turns out it wasn't hiding a secret.

What's the deal with NG+? What all does it reset? Just the diamonds and boss switches?

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Yeah fuck soccer man. I thought I'd get something nice for finally beating that cheating bastard but no.

 

no.

 

Also the rest of the game's pretty cool. Currently going back and trying to clear out the areas. It's disappointing when I think of something clever to do in an area and it turns out it wasn't hiding a secret.

What's the deal with NG+? What all does it reset? Just the diamonds and boss switches?

Its basically a complete do-over except you are always wearing a cape that reduces your max health to 2 (cant change it) and you start out in town with no weapons but all sword and dash skills.

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I still dream of a Wii U version of this game that was originally promised... my only hope is that Curve Digital would port it.

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I haven't 100%'d it but I've seen credits roll and I have some thoughts!

 

Warning, there are some spoilers in the following.

 

Visually, I love how the game looks. To me, video games are supposed to look like the way I remember SNES games looking. It's entirely a taste thing. That said, the readability of the game world is not great. Frequently I would get stuck in areas because I didn't see the exit, which is something that you'd think would be blatantly obvious. A couple times I thought I was in some kind of challenge room or a place where I'd be deposited after going through some other area, only to discover I'd just missed a hallway or an elevator after exhausting all over avenues of investigation. In a weird way, the secret passages were better marked, as they'd always be telegraphed by some prop partially obscured or an item you couldn't obviously reach. If I saw a clue I knew something would be there.

 

The difficulty of the game is, of course, a hot topic. I personally found it just about right, but again that's a matter of taste. Because you can go any of 3 directions (and arguably, the 4th direction might be the easiest area) and since the upgrades definitely make you more powerful, as opposed to just opening up options, the hardest the game ever is is at the beginning. I think everyone probably has a different first boss they beat and I wonder how powerful people typically are before they beat even one. 

 

Due to the confusing world map and level design I, by happenstance, pretty much cleared out all 3 starting zones and got a few upgrades before finding any boss. If I'd found the bird boss in the first couple of hours as I would have if I'd noticed a certain hallway I might have experienced the show stopping difficulty spike as was described by John Walker at RPS.

 

The obtuseness of the upgrade system is also something I have mixed feelings over. I've said it elsewhere, but I feel like a lot of my success in Hyper Light Drifter is due to a literacy in a certain type of ambivalent game design I developed playing Souls games. Wanting to exhaust every nook and cranny before moving on. Even then, the sheer number of shops in the village where you start was kind of tedious and the iconography wasn't immediately clear. The Gun and Sword shop where not the first ones I saw and so I didn't know what I was looking at. And when I did explore the first couple of shops (the grenade shop and the dash shop if I recall correctly) I thought what I was seeing were tutorials and was really confused when doing the button prompts displayed in the previews didn't work. Once I got it, I got it, but I'm not sure if it was an insight any player would be guaranteed to have.

 

As for the upgrades themselves, I found a couple were true upgrades, and a couple were basically mandatory. Particularly the chain dash upgrade felt like just a quality of life upgrade more so than a combat upgrade like most of the others. The ability to either reflect shots or dash through them feels like something that should have been given to you at the start. Even if the reflection ability was changed to just absorb a shot and the upgrade caused it to reflect, I think that would have been better. Otherwise the early game was largely defined by eating shots I couldn't avoid either because I couldn't dash enough or because I was trapped by bullets. If the dash gauge was something that you could upgrade to be larger, that might mitigate the balance of having those abilities by default. But that's all just backseat game design so whatever. 

 

Ultimately, this is a very strong and interesting game. The style and animation is gorgeous and the melancholy environmental story telling is wonderful. I got a similar joy from this as I did from Titan Souls, which is a title that seems to have been forgotten but which I dearly loved when it came out last year. 

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Reytunrner, I'm really interested that you found the chain-dash to not be an essential upgrade! I found it to be by far the most useful upgrade, with either sword deflection or X+A dash attack the second. You are aware that the only limit to the number of dashes you can chain together is your stamina bar right? That's 25 dashes with a full bar of stamina (and 51 if you get the super secret stamina upgrade that it stupidly difficult and tedious to unlock). Not only do chain dashes provide that quality-of-life because you can traverse the map way faster, but I found several of the southern boss fights and end boss we're much easier when I could dance around all day.

 

I also got that Titan Souls vibe. In the art style but also in the trial-and-error nature of boss fights, respawning right before the fight after each death.

 

This game is not without it's quirks. I definitely dashed and fell through the floor in a few places, or got caught on invisible walls and pixel thin edges that caused me to take hits that felt "unfair". But aside from those issue, this game was a visual delight and has some of the most viscerally satisfying combat I've played in a while. Definitely recommending this to friends and other devs that are fans of the ARPG genre.

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Oops, I was unclear. 

 

What I meant to say is that the chain dash shouldn't have been an upgrade and instead should have been the default behaviour. 

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I have conquered East, North, and West in that order. Time to go south and finish it?

I love this game so much. A few upgrades and a mind sharpened to pick up on enemy behaviors, so good. In the West I was clearing many areas with no hits. I only brag because I'm usually not good at action games like this. I don't know what's different here.

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a patch to make the game easier!
 

 
Most of these just seem like streamlining more arduous tasks, like warp pads refilling health kits instead of having to go chasing after them in the easier dungeons when you run out. Invincibility frames is interesting, might lead to a more up close and personal play style. Personally i would always keep distance and kite groups around in a circle, as being able to get away from all possible enemy attacks real quick was pretty necessary in the later levels. The faster heal speed seems... unnecessary. Not something I recall anyone being frustrated over, and it's not like the windows to heal were too short in any of the bosses.

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The health pack refill change is really nice. I'd like to see a "gun ammo recharges slowly on it's own without having to wack every prop all the time" change. 

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I don't think I agree with that one. Would undermine a pretty important part of the core combat loop.

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