The ruins hum. Indecipherable hieroglyphs pulse with blue and purple light. Water, in the form of one flickering stream of pixels after another, drips down the subterranean walls. Listen closely and the ambient soundtrack sounds like a heartbeat rising from within the earth. In Hyper Light Drifter, available now for PC and later this year for consoles, the post-apocalypse is alive---and it's fighting.
The story it tells is minimal and wordless. A short opening cutscene reveals everything the game thinks you need to know: a vision of an arcane futuristic utopia, destroyed in a burst of impossibly bright light. In the aftermath, you play as a cloak- and goggle-wearing drifter. The drifter is sick. Every now and then he coughs, glitchy fuzz covering the screen, thick globs of blood coming from his mouth. He's searching the ruins of this old civilization for a cure.
Hyper Light Drifter, a Kickstarter success made by a small team led by graphic designer Alex Preston, is about survival. The world survives what appears to be a concerted effort to kill it, and the drifter survives the world's concerted effort to kill him. It's a game built on a core structure of slow exploration and fast, complex combat in a beautiful two-dimensional world. The combat can be punishing, but Hyper Light Drifter aims for, and reaches, a level of grandeur and liveliness that immediately impresses. Its world is among the most incredible places ever put to pixel art, and if you listen closely, you can hear it breathing.
