Hyper Light Drifter - S.E.

Abylight Studios

About this game

Finally, the console award winning slash-'em-up arrives to Android in the most polished and refined version yet, the Special Edition.

► Winner of the Audience Award and Excellence in Visual Art awards of the prestigious Independent Games Festival.

► 14 + nominations among the Best Visual Design, Best Audio and Best original Game categories.

► 9/10 Destructoid - A hallmark of excellence. There may be flaws, but they are negligible and won't cause massive damage.

► 9.5/10 Game Informer - The combination of soundtrack, art, and combat creates a rabbit hole worth your full exploration.

► Eurogamer Recommended - Heart Machine's slash-'em-up is punishing and precise - and incredibly beautiful.

► 9/10 GameSpot - It is more than simply pretty; Hyper Light Drifter uses its visuals to both guide and relax you. The grandest vistas calm your pulse between difficult, breathless combat sequences.

► 8.5 Polygon - Hyper Light Drifter deftly mixes contemplative moments with breakneck action.

► 5 Stars Darkstation - The top-down action-RPG Hyper Light Drifter is an amazing game: gorgeous, a fascinating world to explore, tight controls, beautiful music, and the faith in the player for you to figure things out on your own.

Echoes of a dark and violent past resonate throughout a savage land, steeped in treasure and blood. Drifters of this world are the collectors of forgotten knowledge, lost technologies and broken histories. Our Drifter is haunted by an insatiable illness, traveling further into the lands of Buried Time, hoping to discover a way to quiet the vicious disease.

Hyper Light Drifter is an action adventure RPG in the vein of the best 16-bit classics, with modernized mechanics and designs on a much grander scale. Explore a beautiful, vast and ruined world riddled with dangers and lost technologies.

Features:

● Achievements.
● Haptic Vibration.
● From each character to subtle background elements, everything is lovingly hand-animated.
● Easy to pick up, difficult to master; enemies are vicious and numerous, hazards will easily crush your frail body, and friendly faces remain rare.
● Upgrade weapons, learn new skills, discover equipment and traverse a dark, detailed world with branching paths and secrets abound.
● Evocative soundtrack composed by Disasterpeace.
● All the content from the original game + more weapons, enemies and areas from the Special edition.

Ratings and reviews

3 gripes: 1. It doesnt look like boss rush is accessible even though there are achievements relating to it. 2. Movement when exiting buildings like the shops has some weird "flick" that reverses the movement, causing the player to go straight back into the building. 3. The save file doesnt follow the same convention as every other version of the game (I have a rooted phone, so I tried to check my saves but theyre not decodable like the PC or switch versions). Other than that, great port.

Brutal difficulty. But with some practice can be overcome. The game doesn't really tell you where to go or what to do, but that isn't too much of an issue as the game does somewhat explain the main objective... but not by much. Some NPCs do help with some world building but the vignet style explanations leave a bit more to be desired. Item functions are never explained(aside from keys), but general rule is to pick up everything. 3/5 would dash in to a pit again.

The game translates well to mobile, to the point where I can play even better than console! My only gripe is the game can crash while pausing in-between some action, or when transitioning to another part of the map ( Happened to me twice in the western dungeon area of the map. If this ever gets buffed out, this game will be 5 stars IMHO.) Definitely worth the price of admission.

What's new

- Added Boss Rush mode.
- General bug fixes and improvements.