Hyper Light Drifter
One of my earliest impressions in playing Hyper Light Drifter was that this was a game made by a person or people whose primary wheelhouse was animation, who while obviously a fan of games very much did not understand games. If you bothered to read the Wikipedia link, you may notice that the main person behind the game was, in fact, an animator for several years before starting the Kickstarter for the game, consistent with this impression.
I could spend ages describing in detail the game's myriad failings as a video game. It would, in fact, be ages, because the game can't really do much of anything right in this regard. The game's fourth major boss -where the game has only five major bosses- is the easiest in the game by far, which stands out particularly starkly because the first three can be fought in any order and so wonky difficulty progression would actually be understandable with those three. The game has no concept of what it looks like to match player skill to gameplay difficulty, with the fourth and effectively final area of the game largely giving up and throwing hordes of enemies at you... in a game where most of your attacks, particularly your generally best ones, auto-scale infinitely with number of enemies, making this fairly ineffectual. Exploration and discovery is clearly meant to be a major part of the gameplay, but the game's ability to reward such mechanically is inherently limited by the kinds of rewards it's actually willing to dole out, and on a more pure player enjoyment level it's not really any better; I only rarely reacted to finding something hidden with 'Ah! That's clever, and I enjoyed figuring it out.' So what's my incentive for exploring? There isn't one, not really.
But the above is basically all I'm going to cover of the actual gameplay, because while it's impressive how the game so consistently fails to understand even the most basic of basic game design elements, and indeed fails to even accidentally achieve competency through blind imitation the way so many not-very-great games do, these failings are fundamentally repetitive. The developer doesn't understand how games work. They don't show any sign of learning as the game progresses. Repeat until you've beaten the frustratingly boring, badly-made game. What is there to even talk about there, beyond maybe griping over the fact that the game has somehow won awards?
No, I'm bothering with this post firstly because of the animation thing, and secondly because of a thing closely tied to the animation thing.
So. Animation. The head person's primary wheelhouse was animation. On a purely technical level, the game reflects expectations of competency therein fairly well. The aesthetic is distinctive, the palette surprisingly good for being so non-standard, and animations are clearly largely handmade and actually flow quite well. A video Let's Play could be pretty enjoyable to watch just to see the game in motion.
Unfortunately, the game consistently makes dire errors when it comes to the process of visual storytelling, which is particularly problematic because the game insists on telling its story (almost) purely visually. There's no text past the tutorial portion of the game, and the tutorial text is strictly aimed at the player with no attempt to pretend anybody in-universe is talking, with the utterly inane caveat that there's secret monoliths that have text in a cipher. The actual reason I mention these monoliths, however, is that they're closely tied to my criticisms of the game's capacity to tell a story with its visuals: if you completely ignore the monoliths, the game is incredibly murky but one might assume that the game is shooting for an artsy 'interpretative' story whereby the developer doesn't intend any particular interpretation to be true and wanted players to develop their own narratives. I personally tend to be distinctly unimpressed by such attempts, but I wouldn't bother to criticize Hyper Light Drifter's storytelling if it was designed to be an interpretive story because there wouldn't be anything to discuss.
However, the monoliths lay out enough factoids about the story that it's painfully obvious that the actual artistic storytelling fails to remotely communicate the creator's actual intentions.
I'd say you might want to jump ship if you care about spoilers, but really, the more relevant concern is that if you liked the game because you filled in what you saw with something actually put together well you might be unhappy to find out what the story actually intended.
So. First of all, the opening animation. The whole thing is a bit of a mess and frankly large parts of it could probably stand to be cut -I'm particularly thinking of the giants with the faces melting off and whatnot, which has literally zero relevancy to the actual game- but the bit relevant to my point is the part where the Drifter (Player character, blue-skinned guy with a cape and all) bleeds and out pops some manner of shadowy demon creatures that try to attack the Drifter.
The first issue here is that this suggests something vastly more interesting and compelling than anything the game actually does. In spite of the fact that the Drifter will, in fact, leave behind blood spatters periodically if you drop to 1-2 HP, this is a purely graphical effect. You never have to worry about demons springing from your own blood and trying to kill you. Hitting low health doesn't lead to you needing to urgently heal yourself before the demons come for you, and it certainly doesn't lead to you desperately running, looking for a health pack while the shadows hound you, because you're out. That would be a pretty amazing game concept, but no, we got Hyper Light Drifter instead.
The second issue, more directly tied to my point, is that this is the first example of a recurring trend in what the visuals communicate, which the monoliths make clear is not the intention. The shadow demon creature -apparently called Judgment- shows up not only here, but in repeated visions the Drifter experiences over the course of the game. More precisely, at various points in the game the Drifter will slow down, start coughing up blood while the screen flickers oddly, and in several such cases Judgment will appear and murder the Drifter, only for the Drifter to wake up without a scratch.
One of the most obvious ways to interpret all this is that the Drifter is ill, and in his dying state his mind is periodically producing vivid hallucinations of a demonic entity that isn't real. The final boss fight reinforces this interpretation, in that when you finally strike down Judgment the Drifter plays an animation culminating in stabbing Judgment in the head, only for the screen to abruptly flash to the Drifter being over by on energy widget in the background, stabbing into that, with no sign Judgment ever existed. The strong implication of all this should be that the boss fight you just went through was the Drifter vividly hallucinating a wholly imaginary shadow demon.
But no, if you read the monoliths, they confirm that Judgment is supposed to be an actually-existent evil godlike entity that needed killing.
There's other ways of interpreting all the visuals, such as that Judgment is an actual factual demon that has cursed the Drifter, explaining why the Drifter is sick, but the key point here is that there is no way to take the visuals we're given and extract the story that the monoliths spell out as being the intention.
This is a massive failure of visual storytelling.
A bonus issue closely related to all this is that of the dog-creature from the opening. Its stark black coloring with a tendency for its head to be haloed by a white diamond effect is almost unique -the key point being almost, because it shares this with Judgment. Without context that doesn't sound so bad, but the issue is that this clearly communicates that Judgment and the dog creature are clearly related, possibly even the same creature, and then the ending ultimately makes it clear you were intended to always assume the dog-creature was an ally, never mind that the only being it shares the distinctive visual effects with being the game's actual villain. I half-suspected that maybe the dog-creature was meant to be an ally from fairly early on, but it was perfectly possible to assume that the recurring tendency for the dog-creature to be followed by the Drifter was not 'dog-creature is leading the Drifter, as an ally' but rather was 'Drifter is chasing dog-creature, because he knows it's Judgment in an alternate form and needs to die', up until you got to the end of the game and killed Judgment and the dog-creature is still around and leads you out of the collapsing building.
Again: massive failure of visual storytelling. There needed to be some, much earlier, indication that the dog-creature is an ally, or at least not an enemy. Something like seeing it get in the way of the shadow demons attacking the Drifter, or seeing them rip out a part of the dog-creature and then gaining the visual cues of the dog-creature, to communicate that they look alike because they draw from the same power source or something. Or even just something like the dog creature licking the Drifter's face as he wakes up from the hallucinations of Judgment killing him. Anything to actually communicate that the dog-creature and Judgment are neither the same being nor aligned with each other.
Third and closely tied into this prior issue is the Drifter's illness itself. Everything the game is doing to draw the player's attention to the Drifter's illness communicates that this illness is directly tied into the main plot. Exactly how it's tied up is ambiguous -the 'Drifter is hallucinating because he is sick' interpretation makes it central in a radically different way from 'the Drifter is sick because Judgment has cursed him, and the hallucinatory deaths are the demon trying to punish him/discourage him from continuing in his quest'- but regardless of that point the game is completely consistent about signaling that the Drifter's illness is actually tied into the main plot, not an incidental truth.
And then no, it's not tied into the main plot. It is an incidental truth. So... why does the game so consistently signal otherwise?
This, by the way, is itself the second reason I bothered to make this post. I'm personally all for seeing games that provide real representation for eg sickly people, but this is not how you go about it. You cannot give a character an unusual characteristic and consistently signal that this characteristic actually matters to the main plot while actually intending for it to be merely a distinguishing quirk disconnected from the main plot.
As a comparison point, I could point to the Legend of Zelda series. Traditionally in the Zelda games, Link is left-handed, which is a mildly unusual detail. However, the games normally don't draw your attention to this point. It's true, but it's not plot-important. One could argue that this is in part because being left-handed is not a big deal the way being sick is, but it's actually pretty easy for a story to make such a detail plot-critical: a Zelda game could, for example, have people looking for the Destined Hero in part by looking for people who are left-handed.
Conversely, it would be easy for Hyper Light Drifter to have made the Drifter being sick a characterful detail that isn't handled so it blatantly looks plot-critical. An easy example is how the Drifter will, on clearing some rooms, perform a quick animation of whirling his sword about and stabbing it into the ground. This normally occurs in rooms that lock you in with a particularly large number of dangerous enemies, where the intention is clearly that they are challenging, difficult rooms. This animation could instead have depicted the Drifter coughing up blood and struggling a bit, under the idea that the exertion briefly exacerbated his condition. Little details like that would communicate that the Drifter has some manner of condition without making it look like said condition is directly tied into the main plot.
Again: I'd really like to see games do things like incorporate sickly characters who nonetheless are treated as perfectly valid protagonist material. That would be great and I want to see more of it.
But Hyper Light Drifter botched it.
-----------------------------------------------
So yeah. This game headed by an animator is bad at visual communication, and part of its badness undermines what should be a cool thing of having a sickly protagonist. Which is particularly frustrating since said head person based it on their own health issues, and so you'd think they'd have avoided this kind of issue.
In conjunction with how it fails so completely to understand game design... I'd originally intended to try to 100% Hyper Light Drifter, because that's the kind of thing I normally enjoy doing.
Instead, I uninstalled it after I beat it, and have no intention of ever touching it again.
I could spend ages describing in detail the game's myriad failings as a video game. It would, in fact, be ages, because the game can't really do much of anything right in this regard. The game's fourth major boss -where the game has only five major bosses- is the easiest in the game by far, which stands out particularly starkly because the first three can be fought in any order and so wonky difficulty progression would actually be understandable with those three. The game has no concept of what it looks like to match player skill to gameplay difficulty, with the fourth and effectively final area of the game largely giving up and throwing hordes of enemies at you... in a game where most of your attacks, particularly your generally best ones, auto-scale infinitely with number of enemies, making this fairly ineffectual. Exploration and discovery is clearly meant to be a major part of the gameplay, but the game's ability to reward such mechanically is inherently limited by the kinds of rewards it's actually willing to dole out, and on a more pure player enjoyment level it's not really any better; I only rarely reacted to finding something hidden with 'Ah! That's clever, and I enjoyed figuring it out.' So what's my incentive for exploring? There isn't one, not really.
But the above is basically all I'm going to cover of the actual gameplay, because while it's impressive how the game so consistently fails to understand even the most basic of basic game design elements, and indeed fails to even accidentally achieve competency through blind imitation the way so many not-very-great games do, these failings are fundamentally repetitive. The developer doesn't understand how games work. They don't show any sign of learning as the game progresses. Repeat until you've beaten the frustratingly boring, badly-made game. What is there to even talk about there, beyond maybe griping over the fact that the game has somehow won awards?
No, I'm bothering with this post firstly because of the animation thing, and secondly because of a thing closely tied to the animation thing.
So. Animation. The head person's primary wheelhouse was animation. On a purely technical level, the game reflects expectations of competency therein fairly well. The aesthetic is distinctive, the palette surprisingly good for being so non-standard, and animations are clearly largely handmade and actually flow quite well. A video Let's Play could be pretty enjoyable to watch just to see the game in motion.
Unfortunately, the game consistently makes dire errors when it comes to the process of visual storytelling, which is particularly problematic because the game insists on telling its story (almost) purely visually. There's no text past the tutorial portion of the game, and the tutorial text is strictly aimed at the player with no attempt to pretend anybody in-universe is talking, with the utterly inane caveat that there's secret monoliths that have text in a cipher. The actual reason I mention these monoliths, however, is that they're closely tied to my criticisms of the game's capacity to tell a story with its visuals: if you completely ignore the monoliths, the game is incredibly murky but one might assume that the game is shooting for an artsy 'interpretative' story whereby the developer doesn't intend any particular interpretation to be true and wanted players to develop their own narratives. I personally tend to be distinctly unimpressed by such attempts, but I wouldn't bother to criticize Hyper Light Drifter's storytelling if it was designed to be an interpretive story because there wouldn't be anything to discuss.
However, the monoliths lay out enough factoids about the story that it's painfully obvious that the actual artistic storytelling fails to remotely communicate the creator's actual intentions.
I'd say you might want to jump ship if you care about spoilers, but really, the more relevant concern is that if you liked the game because you filled in what you saw with something actually put together well you might be unhappy to find out what the story actually intended.
So. First of all, the opening animation. The whole thing is a bit of a mess and frankly large parts of it could probably stand to be cut -I'm particularly thinking of the giants with the faces melting off and whatnot, which has literally zero relevancy to the actual game- but the bit relevant to my point is the part where the Drifter (Player character, blue-skinned guy with a cape and all) bleeds and out pops some manner of shadowy demon creatures that try to attack the Drifter.
The first issue here is that this suggests something vastly more interesting and compelling than anything the game actually does. In spite of the fact that the Drifter will, in fact, leave behind blood spatters periodically if you drop to 1-2 HP, this is a purely graphical effect. You never have to worry about demons springing from your own blood and trying to kill you. Hitting low health doesn't lead to you needing to urgently heal yourself before the demons come for you, and it certainly doesn't lead to you desperately running, looking for a health pack while the shadows hound you, because you're out. That would be a pretty amazing game concept, but no, we got Hyper Light Drifter instead.
The second issue, more directly tied to my point, is that this is the first example of a recurring trend in what the visuals communicate, which the monoliths make clear is not the intention. The shadow demon creature -apparently called Judgment- shows up not only here, but in repeated visions the Drifter experiences over the course of the game. More precisely, at various points in the game the Drifter will slow down, start coughing up blood while the screen flickers oddly, and in several such cases Judgment will appear and murder the Drifter, only for the Drifter to wake up without a scratch.
One of the most obvious ways to interpret all this is that the Drifter is ill, and in his dying state his mind is periodically producing vivid hallucinations of a demonic entity that isn't real. The final boss fight reinforces this interpretation, in that when you finally strike down Judgment the Drifter plays an animation culminating in stabbing Judgment in the head, only for the screen to abruptly flash to the Drifter being over by on energy widget in the background, stabbing into that, with no sign Judgment ever existed. The strong implication of all this should be that the boss fight you just went through was the Drifter vividly hallucinating a wholly imaginary shadow demon.
But no, if you read the monoliths, they confirm that Judgment is supposed to be an actually-existent evil godlike entity that needed killing.
There's other ways of interpreting all the visuals, such as that Judgment is an actual factual demon that has cursed the Drifter, explaining why the Drifter is sick, but the key point here is that there is no way to take the visuals we're given and extract the story that the monoliths spell out as being the intention.
This is a massive failure of visual storytelling.
A bonus issue closely related to all this is that of the dog-creature from the opening. Its stark black coloring with a tendency for its head to be haloed by a white diamond effect is almost unique -the key point being almost, because it shares this with Judgment. Without context that doesn't sound so bad, but the issue is that this clearly communicates that Judgment and the dog creature are clearly related, possibly even the same creature, and then the ending ultimately makes it clear you were intended to always assume the dog-creature was an ally, never mind that the only being it shares the distinctive visual effects with being the game's actual villain. I half-suspected that maybe the dog-creature was meant to be an ally from fairly early on, but it was perfectly possible to assume that the recurring tendency for the dog-creature to be followed by the Drifter was not 'dog-creature is leading the Drifter, as an ally' but rather was 'Drifter is chasing dog-creature, because he knows it's Judgment in an alternate form and needs to die', up until you got to the end of the game and killed Judgment and the dog-creature is still around and leads you out of the collapsing building.
Again: massive failure of visual storytelling. There needed to be some, much earlier, indication that the dog-creature is an ally, or at least not an enemy. Something like seeing it get in the way of the shadow demons attacking the Drifter, or seeing them rip out a part of the dog-creature and then gaining the visual cues of the dog-creature, to communicate that they look alike because they draw from the same power source or something. Or even just something like the dog creature licking the Drifter's face as he wakes up from the hallucinations of Judgment killing him. Anything to actually communicate that the dog-creature and Judgment are neither the same being nor aligned with each other.
Third and closely tied into this prior issue is the Drifter's illness itself. Everything the game is doing to draw the player's attention to the Drifter's illness communicates that this illness is directly tied into the main plot. Exactly how it's tied up is ambiguous -the 'Drifter is hallucinating because he is sick' interpretation makes it central in a radically different way from 'the Drifter is sick because Judgment has cursed him, and the hallucinatory deaths are the demon trying to punish him/discourage him from continuing in his quest'- but regardless of that point the game is completely consistent about signaling that the Drifter's illness is actually tied into the main plot, not an incidental truth.
And then no, it's not tied into the main plot. It is an incidental truth. So... why does the game so consistently signal otherwise?
This, by the way, is itself the second reason I bothered to make this post. I'm personally all for seeing games that provide real representation for eg sickly people, but this is not how you go about it. You cannot give a character an unusual characteristic and consistently signal that this characteristic actually matters to the main plot while actually intending for it to be merely a distinguishing quirk disconnected from the main plot.
As a comparison point, I could point to the Legend of Zelda series. Traditionally in the Zelda games, Link is left-handed, which is a mildly unusual detail. However, the games normally don't draw your attention to this point. It's true, but it's not plot-important. One could argue that this is in part because being left-handed is not a big deal the way being sick is, but it's actually pretty easy for a story to make such a detail plot-critical: a Zelda game could, for example, have people looking for the Destined Hero in part by looking for people who are left-handed.
Conversely, it would be easy for Hyper Light Drifter to have made the Drifter being sick a characterful detail that isn't handled so it blatantly looks plot-critical. An easy example is how the Drifter will, on clearing some rooms, perform a quick animation of whirling his sword about and stabbing it into the ground. This normally occurs in rooms that lock you in with a particularly large number of dangerous enemies, where the intention is clearly that they are challenging, difficult rooms. This animation could instead have depicted the Drifter coughing up blood and struggling a bit, under the idea that the exertion briefly exacerbated his condition. Little details like that would communicate that the Drifter has some manner of condition without making it look like said condition is directly tied into the main plot.
Again: I'd really like to see games do things like incorporate sickly characters who nonetheless are treated as perfectly valid protagonist material. That would be great and I want to see more of it.
But Hyper Light Drifter botched it.
-----------------------------------------------
So yeah. This game headed by an animator is bad at visual communication, and part of its badness undermines what should be a cool thing of having a sickly protagonist. Which is particularly frustrating since said head person based it on their own health issues, and so you'd think they'd have avoided this kind of issue.
In conjunction with how it fails so completely to understand game design... I'd originally intended to try to 100% Hyper Light Drifter, because that's the kind of thing I normally enjoy doing.
Instead, I uninstalled it after I beat it, and have no intention of ever touching it again.
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