The UI, map and menus feature arcane symbols and characters of a fictional language. Seriously, none: Dialogue with the NPCs you meet in the game is presented exclusively in pictographs. Here's a fact to set the scene: Other than a handful of tooltips explaining what buttons do what, there are no written words in Hyper Light Drifter. I'm hesitant to break down the backdrop of Hyper Light Drifter, because its plot, setting, characters, history and world-building are so ethereal. Hyper Light Drifter's specifics are entirely up to interpretation
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Learning how to swing a sword and dodge fatal attacks is easy enough - finding your place in a world that tells you virtually nothing about itself is a far more involving challenge. Its larger, more imposing request is how you have to interpret literally everything else that happens in the game.
Progress isn't promised in Hyper Light Drifter it can't be earned by grinding or executing cheap strategies and exploits, only practice, practice, practice.īut the mechanical difficulty, the tense, balletic, close-quarters battles that punctuate your exploration of the game's gorgeous setting, is a relatively small component of what Hyper Light Drifter demands. It tosses roadblock after roadblock at its protagonist with no easy way out. "We're going to make it cool," Preston promises, so we'll just have to wait and see how this comes to fruition.Hyper Light Drifter demands things from its players that few games are even willing to request.
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"Could it be a more silent series or would we have voice acting? Considering Hyper Light was wordless, there's an idea there of how much that would carry over to a show." "There's still a question of how much dialogue we really have, if any," Preston continues.
Right now he and Shankar are "leaning a lot more towards something that's representative of the game on the style side," although anime is likely the style they'll go for with this project. For a series, the question is: how do you sustain and keep your attention on a non-interactive run? Does it get really, really dark and serious? Does it have some levity?" Hyper Light as a game was pretty atmospheric and kind of overbearing at times. "The difference between a series and a game is vast in a lot of ways. The details on how to make the game into a series haven't quite been nailed down yet though, as Preston says: Adi Shankar is responsible for the Castlevania series on Netflix that has already gathered a lot of praise, and now a new report from Polygon claims that he'll also be bringing a Hyper Light Drifter animated series to life, with developer Alex Preston saying that he and Shankar are reaching out to writers to lead it.