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Am I heartless? Has my soul inside become chilled? Am I incapable of being wowed by repeated tropes? Or am I simply unable to appreciate a game like…
Let’s play a game. It’s called “do you care.” I’m going to ask you a couple questions, and all you have to do is answer the question, “Do you care?” Okay, let’s begin. *ahem*
You are in a place. Do you care?
“No?” Hrm. Odd. Let’s try again. You can walk around this place. Do you care?
Okay, you can swing a sword and destroy things. Do you care?
You can dash around. Do you care?
You can push buttons. Do you care?
Sometimes you run into things that make your red thing in the top left corner go down. If the things make it go down all the way, you travel back in time about 15 seconds to before you encountered them. Do you care?
Sometimes there’s pictures of things. Do you care?
Sometimes you hit more buttons and they make things appear on your map so that you can go there and hit even more buttons. Do you care?
Do I need to continue doing this?
This ultimately is the insulting problem with Hyper Light Drifter. There’s a difference between a game that makes you think and uncover the truth and a game that doesn’t tell you anything. HLD tells you nothing. It shows you a bunch of weird images of some sort of vague threat. Then it shows you a picture of a dog. Then it shows you a picture of a dog-person! Woopee! Oh, now you’re expected to go out and explore the entire world, combing it from top to bottom for secrets, switches, and little widgets that add widgets to your existing widget that might (if you collect them all) put a widget amongst many blank widgets in the center of your map! Fantastic! Please, engage me more with this unparalleled structure of gameplay! Oh wait. What did I mean instead of unparalleled? I think I meant steaming pile of–
Pretentious doesn’t even begin to describe this game. Look, I get it. You don’t want to give away all your secrets to the players right off the bat. You want to intrigue them. You have some neat ideas but you want to save them for the right moment. Fine. You know what you can’t do? Exactly what you did in our “Do you care” game, because if you don’t tell the player anything then that’s all you’re doing to them. You’re dropping them into a blank space after having flashed several random images in front of them and asking them to spend several hours running around your stupid world pushing McGuffins which unlock more McGuffins so that you can McGuffin.
Oh sure, it looks unique. I say unique and not “amazing,” or “beautiful” because I actually hate the graphic style for this game. However, I understand that it’s my opinion and in spite of my opinion I certainly wouldn’t try to deny that a great deal of effort has been put into the game’s visuals. It clearly was a large part of the game’s design. That being said, does any of it matter? HLD tries to tell its story without words. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is that it doesn’t tell any story at all. If we don’t know what we’re doing, if we don’t know who we are, if we don’t know who anyone else is or anything about the world we live in–we’re not going to care. At all. Do you want to know another game that doesn’t use words to tell the story? True, in fairness there are technically a few words in it, but it’s Ori and the Blind Forest. It has an amazingly powerful beginning and there’s no over-dramatic garbage trying to wow the player into wanting more. It simply creates an emotional, potent opening that needs nothing more than the visuals it presents to get its point across.
There was only one visual in HLD that piqued my interest. This one.
This looked cool. Exciting. Interesting. Apparently it has very little meaning. It’s just another “~WooOooOoo scary things are coming! WooOooOoo!~” You can practically see the developer cutting eye holes in bed sheets and donning them, desperately attempting to convince the player that something cool is going on. This is Tier 3, which I know rubs against the grain of the majority of reviewers on Steam. I don’t know–is it possible that I have this opinion because I expose myself to countless games? Is it because I can see that mechanically, when you strip away the visuals, this game is nothing special? Is it because I have a pool of prior experience with which to form a basis of comparison and so my bar is set higher? I’m not sure I know anymore. What I do know is this–if you like the game’s visuals, give it a try. If you’re on the fence about the game and you need something aside from the visuals to seal the deal on whether you purchase this or not, move on to something else. It will probably be less frustrating than trying to play this.
