Last year, developer Heart Machine announced they were adapting the 2D pixelated action of Hyper Light Drifter for their 3D co-op sequel, Hyper Light Breaker. Earlier in January, we learned that Breaker’s roguelike structure would include procedurally generated open worlds, and we’ve now seen them in action thanks to its first gameplay trailer. Breaker doesn’t look as effortlessly stylish as its predecessor, but its bullet-hell action and fast-paced traversal have me eager to learn more when it launches into early access this Fall.
]]>Steel yourself for more stylish exploration and violence next year with Hyper Light Breaker, a follow-up (but not a sequel) to 2016's Hyper Light Drifter. The "action rogue-lite adventure" will explore a new land in the same world, and this time in fancy 3D-o-vision. Plus, online co-op! Check out the announcement trailer below.
]]>Heart Machine's Solar Ash is out now, inviting players on a skating adventure to kill giant bosses. It's a follow-up to their previous game, Hyper Light Drifter, but this time around they've swapped the 2D style for 3D, and are sending you out into a big open world. I'm very much looking forward to jumping into its lush and colourful alien landscapes. Oh, to be a sci-fi skater.
]]>If you're a fan of roguelikes and metroidvanias (hello), then you might be pleased to know Dead Cells added a bunch of weapons, skins and skills from loads of good'uns. The Everyone Is Here update went live yesterday, bringing new challenges to Motion Twin's soulslike that will let you unlock characters from Blasphemous, Hyper Light Drifter, Guacamelee, Skul: The Hero Slayer, Curse Of The Dead Gods, and, most importantly (for me), Hollow Knight. Hooray for Hollow Knight content!
]]>Everyone loves a good action game. It's the driving force behind so many of our favourite PC games, but only a few can lay claim to being the best action games of all time. That's why we've compiled this list - to sort the pulled punches from the bestest biffs that PC has to offer. Whether it's the joy of pulling off a perfect combo, riding the wave of an explosive set-piece or the hair-raising thrill of dodging enemy attacks in slow-motion that gets you going, there's an action game here for you.
]]>Another week, another free game on the Epic Games Store - two, even. Until next Thursday you can grab the tip-top tactical action of Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden and the top-down zip-zoom explore-o-action of Hyper Light Drifter for free. MYZ is a wild freebie, both because it came out less than one year ago and because it's chuffing lovely. Our former Alec (RPS in peace) proffered plenty of praise in his Mutant Year Zero review but I, a fool, did not heed his wisdom until a demo came along this year to show me oh yep, it is great. Now you can see that in full for free. Don't be as daft as me.
]]>Almost exactly three years after launching Hyper Light Drifter, Heart Machine are ready to announce their next game - Solar Ash Kingdom. Right now there's not much to go on beyond a pair of screenshots, a short teaser trailer and a brief chat between developer Alx Preston and IGN here, but it's an unsurprisingly striking-looking game. While it's not a sequel, it does share a palette with Hyper Light Drifter, bringing us another strange world painted in deep purples and cyans, and another caped protagonist, this time surfing through clouds in the third dimension. Take a look for yourself below.
]]>The old quote is wrong: neither death nor taxes are, it seems to me, as terrifyingly certain as the Steam Summer Sale. Yes, once more we can add to the heap that is our backlog by buying games for, what, five quid, on average? But there are so many to choose from that it's easy to get flustered, so who better than the staff of RPS to hand-pick the best ones for your consideration (rhetorical question; do not answer)?
Check out the full list below for a mix of games that should suit all pockets and tastes.
]]>The Steam summer sale is in full blaze. For a while it even blazed so hot that the servers went on fire and all the price stickers peeled off the games. Either that or the store just got swamped with cheapskates looking for the best bargains. Cheapskates like you! Well, don’t worry. We’ve rounded up some recommendations - both general tips and some newly added staff choices.
Here are the things you should consider owning in your endless consumeristic lust for a happiness which always seems beyond reach. You're welcome.
]]>I finally completed Dark Souls III [official site] last week, a world that I have been dipping in and out of between bouts of listlessness since its release in April last year. It didn’t grip me like the first revered Dark Souls, but it still made me sad to know it was all over. Where could I go now for my Souls fix? The answer, it turns out, is loads of places. The games industry is quietly reverberating with the series’ influence. From small games boasting “souls-like” combat, to bigger games doing weird things with death and player messages. Meanwhile, our PlayStation brethren got Nioh, which took the “pocket full o’ souls” idea and simply renamed them “Amrita”. There is a popular complaint that everything in the industry is now being compared to Dark Souls, and it's easy to forget that games embraced difficulty and strangeness long before the Bed of Chaos made you weep with frustration. Nevertheless, the mechanics and the tone of Miyazaki’s magnum opus is leaking into games everywhere.
That there's an influx of Soulsian disciples out there isn’t a problem to me. My problem is that they are learning all the wrong lessons. At least, they are neglecting the most important one. But first let’s look at what sly tricks are being lifted from the series, and who is lifting them.
]]>Podcast klaxon. The Electronic Wireless Show has recently awoken from the depths and has been going on a rampage, talking to developers like Tim Keenan of Duskers about science-fiction and Christine Love of Ladykiller in a Bind about sex, among many other industry sorts. We're like real radio journalists!
In the final episode of this special run, we are talking to the makers of hack 'n' dash explorer Hyper Light Drifter and dreamlike detective adventure Virginia, and how both games aim to tell a story without using a single line of dialogue. Show offs.
]]>Hacking heist 'em up Quadrilateral Cowboy has won the Grand Prize at the 2017 Independent Games Festival awards, taking home $30,000 (and another $3,000 for winning the Excellence in Design award). The ceremony went down last at the Game Developers Conference, with other winners including Ladykiller in a Bind and Hyper Light Drifter. The IGFs may no longer turn up many huge surprises but they are a handy pointer for some good games you might have missed. As luck would have it, Brendan's first IGF episode of the RPS Electronic Wireless Show went up only last night, chatting with Quadlatcowbo creator Brendon Chung.
The Game Developers Choice Awards were also last night, right after the IGFs, but tch! you don't need them to tell you about the existence of games like Overwatch, Firewatch, and presumably other things suffixed 'watch'. Pokéwatch Go etc.
]]>And so this cosmic dance begins anew. The finalists for the Independent Games Festival awards 2017 have been announced. Out of 650 games examined by the giant gang of 340 judges, a final 30 have been selected for a bunch of categories. There’s plenty of familiar names among them, including Inside, Stardew Valley, Virginia, Hyper Light Drifter and Event[0]. But also some other boyos worth giving some attention. Come on over here and let’s take a look at them all.
]]>I hardly see 60fps support as essential in games but I won't say no to it. So coo, look, gorgeous fight-o-explorer Hyper Light Drifter [official site] can now run at 60fps, thanks to a new update in public beta. This also boshes in a Boss Rush mode, for people who simply want to duff up big monsters. Good things!
]]>I do like a fantasy landscape with ridiculous unearthly scale, and I very much like the look of the ones in the newly-announced No Place for Bravery [official site]. An eerie colossus looms behind distant snowy mountains. A skeletal giant is buried up to its hips in the desert sand, hand still resting on its sword. A huge shadow of a dragon casts your party in darkness. That's the good stuff. Beyond the pretties, mind, No Place for Bravery is a roguelikelike action-RPG with inspirations including Hyper Light Drifter and the time travel trickery of Super Time Force. Here, watch this trailer:
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Hyper Light Drifter [official site].
Hyper Light Drifter is a game about exploring mysterious ruins and killing the monsters that inhabit them with ferocity and precision. Whether you favour a slash-slash-shoot, a dash-slash-slash-dash, or any other combination thereof, combat is built on a holy trio of sword, gun and a dash move. The dash gets you into and out of scrapes in a moment, and the sword, with a wide slash that almost encompasses 180 degrees, is your trusty mainstay.
And the gun… Being slow to fire, with limited shots and requiring careful aim, it might not seem it at first, but the gun is your most powerful asset. Its place in Hyper Light Drifter’s arsenal is down to single and subtle design feature that keeps its relationship with the sword close and maintains a sense of its shots feeling both valuable and always available:
THE MECHANIC: Recharging ammo
]]>Last week I played Hyper Light Drifter [official site] and wrote my thoughts - thoughts stymied by reaching a boss I couldn't even get close to killing, and believing my progress was blocked. It seems I was wrong. Sorry about that. Due to a combination of incorrect assumptions I'd made while playing, and some poor communication from the game, I had failed to notice I could have gone off in other directions that weren't flagged as now open, and gathered more abilities, before making another attempt on that boss, and indeed the others. So I've gone back to the game to reappraise based on this.
]]>Right, so I messed up below. I could have gone in other directions and played more of the game. I've done that now, and my mea culpa and further thoughts are here.
I'm so furious. I've ranted about boss fights SO many times, and argh, it's happened again. A game I was absolutely adoring is now a game I can't play at all, because of a wildly difficult boss fight. Hyper Light Drifter [official site] is absolutely wonderful. Ridiculously lovely pixel graphics that are constantly breathtaking, a clever world that evokes classic 8- and 16-bit classics, elements of Zelda, but with a hefty focus on Nuclear Throne-like combat. And it's tough. The fighting is surprisingly tricky, waves of enemies in small locations, early on when your arsenal is limited and your skills unhoned. Exploration is key, discovery is splendid, and it's all a really rather superb time. I've been playing since yesterday, having such a brilliant time - then the first boss fight happened, and now it seems I'll never get to play most of the game.
]]>Here I was, taking this little note about Hyper Light Drifter's [official site] latest trailer off the RPS' organisatron, thinking it'd be another relatively innocuous video showing off the gorgeous pixel art or the fluid combat and then the release date. There was no way I could want it more than I already did, right?
But this last trailer took me by surprise and stopped me in my tracks: it's quieter than usual, and the dramatic piano music frames all the footage very differently. Hyper Light Drifter had beauty, style, action, atmosphere. Now it also has pathos. But I'm not going to cry. Not here, in front of everyone. Maybe past the break. Oh, it's coming out on March 31st.
]]>I played Hyper Light Drifter [official site] in November of last year and it was already superb; a tight, topdown action game about slicing apart monsters with dashes and sword combos, and about solving Zelda-like dungeon puzzles to progress deeper into its strange sci-fi environments. It was also clear at the time that the game had changed and improved a lot since Nathan had played it a year before that.
Now another year has nearly passed and you can catch sight of how it's changed again in the new trailer below, which heralds with "certainty" the game's release window: spring 2016.
]]>Stop. Slow down. Hyper Light Drifter's cape-wearing main character carries a sword whose swipes and slashes can be performed in rapid succession, but that doesn't mean you can charge your way through its hunched henchman, skittering spiders or gun-wielding grunts. You've got to take your time if you want to go fast, as I've learned through playing the game's Kickstarter preview build.
]]>Hyper Light Drifter is beautiful: a stunning pixel art Zelda-like set in a magical, twinkling world full of colourful. You probably already know this. If you're one of the 24,150 people who backed it though - earning it $645,158 on an initial goal of just $27,000 - then what you don't yet know is how it feels to play. You might be able to correct that this weekend, as the developers have announced that the game will be available as a three-day preview build this coming weekend.
]]>Old facts: Hyper Light Drifter is a 2D action RPG with i) beautifully drawn and animated pixel art ii) a Kickstarter campaign that asked for $27,000 and received $645,158 iii) the best videogame name around. New facts: i) Hyper Light Drifter won't come out in June as originally planned ii) a closed beta will arrive near June instead iii) the development team are targeting an end-of-year date for the release of the final game.
Hows, whys and new images below.
]]>Hyper Light Drifter is beautiful. Its loud yet effortless art direction screams a quiet confidence, a vision that's both bold and incredibly vulnerable. I very much like what I see, and many, many others agree - to the tune of $645k, in fact. But looks alone don't make a game. If Hyper Light Drifter doesn't play well, then all the glowing pinks and passionate purples in the world won't mean jack. And that would be very, very sad indeed. Go below to watch me play an early demo of the game and find out if it's on the right track.
]]>Hyper Light Drifter is looking magnificent. It's playing quite beautifully too, and you will hear my impressions of it very soon. But first, let's delve into the stylishly pink wonder's past, which definitely isn't all roses. Heart Machine head Alex Preston was born with a number of life-threatening heart defects, and he's spent his life alternatively triumphing over them and falling at their feet. Hyper Light Drifter is, in large part, inspired by those struggles - a swarm of ideas that have been flitting and buzzing about in Preston's mind for as long as he can remember. It was only this year, however, that he finally realized he *had* to breathe life into this game. Good ideas are infinite, but time, unfortunately, is painfully limited.
]]>Hyper Light Drifter wasn't just the perfect name for a videogame, it was also the perfect concept art, the combination of which acted as an accelerant for a Kickstarter that asked for $27,000 and ended up buried in over $645k. It seems like all this isn't a fluke, either, because the game itself looks like a fever dream from the minds of those of us who grew up with such top-down exploro-combat games in the '90s, only to see them vanish with the cathode ray afterimages of that era. Of course it's stomping on the unclipped toes of a sleepy and unimaginative Action RPG genre too, so that's to be welcomed.
You'll want to have a look, and have a listen, below. It's beautiful.
]]>This week, on a very special episode of As The Greenlight Turns, social intrigue rules the spotlight. Remember Race The Sun? It's an excellent blink-and-you're-wall-pizza racer in its own right, but it also recently catapulted its way into prominence due to its trouble getting on Steam, abysmal initial sales, and a subsequent, er, sale its developers organized for others suffering from their same plight. Well, all that stuff worked! Kind of hilariously quickly, given that the sale only started yesterday. Race The Sun has been greenlit. Other standouts this time around include Thief/Dishonored-inspired roguelike wonder Eldritch, Kickstarter darling Hyper Light Drifter, and PULSAR: Lost Colony.
]]>Oh. Oh my. That is the second post I've introduced with those words today, but that does not (necessarily!) mean I'm creatively bankrupt. Rather, it's been a very good time for brilliantly impressive games that just sort of appear out of nowhere. First Eden Star took me entirely by surprise with its runleaping Minecraft's Edge antics, and now Hyper Light Drifter is dazzling me with glorious grimdarkpink art and music provided by Fez chiptune maestro Disasterpeace. Oh, and then there is this: "It plays like the best parts of A Link to the Past and Diablo, evolved: lightning fast combat, more mobility, an array of tactical options, more numerous and intelligent enemies, and a larger world with a twisted past to do it all in." Mmmmmmmm, yes. Good. Goooooooood.
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