You play as an eponymous Drifter, a silent hero who travels around the land alone and he certainly has a lot of problems that need solving. There are tons of side paths that offer small rewards upon completion as well, with clever level design that minimises needless backtracking. From the hub town you can go in any of the compass directions, leading you down a path full of danger and reward.
The tutorial is basic and doesn’t teach you everything, but this is very intentional: Hyper Light Drifter uses symbolism at every opportunity from the wordless expressionistic plotline to the basic mechanics and controls. You start off with a quick tutorial (after an intro movie that raises way more questions than it answers) before being dropped off context-free into a quaint little town. The key pillars of Hyper Light Drifter are exploration, problem solving and combat.
Hyper Light Drifter is definitely the type of game that retro enthusiasts look for when they seek modern reinterpretations of the classics – Heart Machine is adept at taking inspiration from the classics without blatant imitation, creating a game with its own unique identity that manages to still extract a comfortable familiarity in the hands of a veteran player. I’m going to try and not make this review a comparison study between Hyper Light Drifter and A Link to the Past, but there will be times where making these parallels really highlight the strengths of Hyper Light Drifter in an easily quantifiable way. Hyper Light Drifter is a semi-open world top down action game reminiscent of the SNES era.
With a tight game engine, challenging difficulty, voluminous game world and a compelling yet esoteric story, Hyper Light Drifter stands as one of the best indie action games available on PS4. Where Zelda wowed audiences with world size and graphical fidelity at the time, Hyper Light Drifter rides on an effervescent sense of style both mechanically and graphically that sets it apart from other games of its kind.
This is a top down action RPG which values skill and exploration, managing to evoke the same sense of wonder and heroic duty that the Zelda series has been so instrumental in pioneering. It’s no faint praise for a game to be compared to the early Legend of Zelda titles, but there is no easier way to express the feel and mechanics of Heart Machine’s indie masterpiece Hyper Light Drifter.
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