I’ve not only never seen a retro-styled game as visually entrancing as Hyper Light Drifter-I’m having a hard time thinking of any game at all that I can compare to it in terms of its artistic (read: visual, audio, etc.) design.
Oh, and it’s beautiful: Hyper Light Drifter Screenshot: Heart Machine It is a vast, expansive, open-world RPG with simple yet hair-pullingly difficult combat and a bevy of secret passageways, weapons, and collectibles that make revisiting and combing over every single area not just irresistible, but incredibly fun. (In that, it shares some of its collective DNA with Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight, another clear standout of this retro movement.) In particular, it seems to draw massive amounts of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, as well as, in its artistic style, Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Hyper Light Drifter, the debut game by Alex Preston and Heart Machine, is part of another recent trend-namely, of games that try to mimic the feel, graphics, and minimalist storytelling of the NES and SNES eras. Because, of course, the worlds of art and popular entertainment must never mix… or else who knows what might happen.īut all I can say is how pathetic that argument must seem in the face of a game like Hyper Light Drifter. There has been a recent spike in interest for what people sometimes refer to as “art games”-a subgenre of gaming that includes legitimately interesting pieces like Campo Santo’s Firewatch, flawed yet thought-provoking experiments like Davey Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide, and walking simulators of questionable intent like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. But more often than not, the implications behind the label “art game” and those who use it is that games, unlike most other artistic media, must try in some contrived way to be, well, art.
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