bwandong

A new day. You gather your things. The sickness broils in your throat. Old dreams fizz in the back of your head. You press on. The world rolls out before you, an emblem of decay and ruin, a winding path, circuitous—all that remains, maybe. You’re a drifter, you drift. Everywhere the same. Monsters. Foliage, sparse some places, dense elsewhere, entwined with ruins. Other drifters, scribbling hints on paper. A village. Libraries, the haunts of animals and rusty machines, huts, temples. Old technology in the pockets of the dead. Somewhere, a cure. Day slides into dusk. A storm rages overhead, a blister in the sky, eking blood, puss, radiation on the ground. You camp for the night on a cliffside, you cough, you dream of something wretched.

In Hyper Light Drifter, this is your moment to moment. You’re a drifter, you drift. You seek a cure to your disease. Combat is slick, by the skin of your teeth, hack and slash. Exploration feels good, vital, demanding—some reviewers were frustrated by how hidden the bunkers and secret areas were, but I managed to get along okay. I never would have thought to bomb a wall to find a secret in The Legend of Zelda, for context. Hyper Light Drifter belongs to a similar tradition, both in the foundations of its gameplay and in its storytelling. That is, there is very little telling, and what is there is fairly obtuse. There is no written language in the game at all, only images, the swing of your sword and the thrumming of your noggin, as you dash and thrash through new areas and comb over old ones, seeking out their secrets. The atmosphere of the game, borne out in breathtaking pixel art and an eerie Disasterpeace score, aids in its obtuse nature, pulling you into a strange world and helping you feel befuddled. I have not finished the game, so perhaps there is more of a plot than I think. I don’t think it matters much—what matters is that the world is a hard place, and you are sick, ill fit to survive in this hard place, yet you manage to slip through the thinnest of cracks every day, persevering. Its perceived obtuseness is really a throwback to an old kind of experience, the kind that allowed its players to insert themselves into circumstances all at once beautiful, mysterious, strange, redeeming and relatable.

For me, there is the heart of the game. Perseverance, despite disease and physical weakness. The combat is fun, no doubt, but it is also stacked with significance. You persevere. Every encounter you beat, you also beat your sickness, sometimes only by an inch, a split second, a hair. If an act of artistic expression is also an act of naming, then Hyper Light Drifter names the harsh place in which you live, the harsh place that made you sick, and asks you to refute its logic, time and again, with every swing of your neat laser blade.