Adventures in Hyper Light Breaking
or: How I learned to give into Early Access and Enjoy The Process™
I know it's kind of a faux pax (and rightly so) but I'm gonna start off this piece about Hyper Light Breaker by talking about a complete different game - but dear reader I assure you it's not a comparison point; more of a historical anecdote about my own experiences. Cool? I promise you I'll get to the Breaker stuff and it'll be worth it.
When Hades was in early access, I had lots of people continuously recommend it to me (it did seem extremely my shit ) but I opted to wait it out and not play until the v1.0 release for reasons I don't rightly remember; most likely time constraints because end of 2018 was chaotic for me and early 2019 I was so sick I missed my own band's MAGFest performance (here's a photo by Loni Lonzo of them with drawings of me taped to a mic stand lmfao) - but I'm glad I held off, when I finally did play it and roll credits and beyond, my severe appreciation of the experience came from it being a completed work (post-release patches notwithstanding). Hearing about the sections / story beats etc that weren't there in EA make me incredibly grateful for my decision.
And look, I know it's self-fulfilling bullshit but BECAUSE waiting in that case turned out to be a good choice...I've more or less adopted a broad "I'll wait for release for early access games that I feel would be extremely my shit" policy. I understand why devs choose this model (getting financing while you're working on a thing is fucking important!!!) and sure there's something exciting about seeing the changes in realtime - but for a work of art I truly think I'll care about as a finished, complete thing - I personally prefer to wait.
Preamble done? Ok let's fucken go
So, yea all the above went out the goddamn airlock when Hyper Light Breaker was announced to be launching into early access.
2016's Hyper Light Drifter is one of my favorite games of the last decade. Full stop. It came out at a time when I absolutely needed it, the art was astounding, and the 'figure it out for yourself' wordless story hit me in ways I wasn't expecting. To this day I can still load it up (even the phone port which is surprisingly good?? better than it has a right to be??) and find something new.
I mean shit, it took me almost 4 years but I got the goddamn 800 dash achievement.
man I distinctly remember this night, two days later US Covid lockdown began
I went into Heart Machine's next game, 2021's Solar Ash with some tempered expectations. The initial premise at the first announce trailers for 'Solar Ash Kingdom' (Announce Trailer | 2021 Gameplay Trailer) didn't appear to be "Hyper Light Drifter but in 3D" but the gameplay wasn't entirely clear. I'm notoriously good (read: dogshit awful) at 3D platforming so watching the trailer where the character bounces around the giant monster gave me trepidation. I do have a fondness in my heart for Shadow of the Colossus but I wasn't sure WHAT to expect with Heart Machine's next title based on what had been shown.
Sure as hell wasn't the 'plums in the icebox' though lmfao
Then came the news articles and interviews over the years where the 'is Solar Ash (Kingdom got dropped from the title) actually a sequel or continuation of 'Drifter or not??' story seemed to change or be misreported until it landed on the eventual 'same universe but not connected outside of the creative director being the same person'. I think that did it a service, because then anything that felt "Drifter-esque" was an easter egg vs something that's plot relevant or attempting to live up to seemingly impossible expectations. Plus, going from a silent game to an incredibly wordy, fully-voice-acted one was quite a bit of difference.
All in all, I really liked Solar Ash for what it was; and one of the things it was not was a sequel to Hyper Light Drifter. They did the right thing by trying to distance it (even if that message that it wasn't a true sequel didn't seem to make it to all the news sites) - so shortly after, Heart Machine announcing another 3D game outright having "Hyper Light" in the title I thought was both a brave move but also a deliberate one. What Solar Ash 'Kingdom' could have been before design changes perhaps? Lessons learned, focused into what would become a true 'sequel' or 'follow-up' to Hyper Light Drifter?
…and at this point several months in, it's still hard to say if that's what Breaker is, even if the similarities are there.
It's not the SAME soccer field but I have to wonder if that fucken kid is out there somewhere
If you've watched the NoClip Documentaries (there are three but here's the first) about the development of Hyper Light Breaker you can see how the design has shifted over the years; these are fascinating, candid behind-the-scenes looks into the game's development and I highly recommend them, but the game as of publishing this post is a bit of a strange egg. There have been multiple hotfix patches since launch addressing various things from difficulty curve to graphic settings, and (after I started writing this) a complete revamp of the entire gameloop, but my personal experience with the game has been even stranger.
uhhhh where am I
The power adapter on my laptop has been shall we say suspect for a while; it has done its job keeping my battery charged and the computer on, but a few times in the last few months a high GPU load in Blender or Photoshop would 'kick me off' to battery mode even though I'm still plugged in. Reconnecting the c13 to the power brick would fix it, but it definitely felt like something was off.
On launch day for Breaker, the game's title screen kicked me off to battery mode which I thought was odd. I'd only (as mentioned) ever seen this with Blender or Photoshop; something about the CPU/GPU load of the game was pushing my computer, and then I realized re-plugging the brick had no impact at all. Charger was fried.
Once the replacement showed up a week or so later, launching the game got me a good maybe 5-10 minutes of play...before my GPU overheated and the computer restarted itself. These types of crashes caused further launches to fail with incredibly unhelpful Unreal Engine errors (that turned out to be corruptions in the save data which thankfully was basically nothing so I could delete and start over).
To put it mildly We were not off to a great start!!
Cleaning out my GPU fans (cat hair baybeee), using the built-in bios fan control settings and the numerous hotfixes to the game have resolved all of this to where I can now log in and play to my heart's (but not time constraint's) content.
let's go fuck up Dro
...and I think it's a testament to how much I believe in Heart Machine that I wouldn't have just given up and sat out until more patches after the game potentially fried my (admittedly dying) power adapter, but my god I really wanted to see what this game was going to feel like.
So here we are, a thousand or so words in and I can finally play the game. What IS it? Is it Hyper Light Drifter in 3D?
the game doesn't do this breath of the wild view for you, you gotta go find em yourself
I mean, no - right? But that's also the point I guess. It's a 3D open world roguelike with multiplayer, which (again with the behind the scenes documentaries) was always the goal. The world you're presented with (outside of the hub town which is eerily named the 'Cursed Outpost' despite basically being a run down shopping hub) is called the Overgrowth - and it's randomly generated at the beginning of a 'Cycle'. Every time you head into the game world you have items to find, secrets to uncover and dangers to avoid. Some of the items and resources are usable to buy upgrades back in the outpost, but weapons and items and such predominantly are for the Overgrowth. The longer you play, a hazard bar increases, upgrading enemy stats or types and the antagonist (the elusive Abyss King) drops random radioactive meteorites, enemy swarms OR a bounty hunter-style character (think Elden Ring invasions) around the map.1
HERE COMES TROUBLE
Your options are to either collect all the glyphs (think of these as key fragments to open mini-boss doors), defeat said mini-bosses (the Crowns), extract back to the hub town for upgrades and story progress and take on the Abyss King....or die and start a new cycle.
In the launch version, when you died four times, the world was reset and re-generated, starting a new Cycle. Likewise if you happened to take down the Abyss King (who is currently absent from the Early Access version - meaning you get end of cycle rewards from just surviving all of the Crowns). Equipment found during your exploration of the cycle would lose a durability (I believe 3-4 was the max so often stuff would break after one death) resulting in you returning on the next life with potentially less options and on the hunt for new gear.
where to go, hmmm
As of the late April Buried Below update, Cycles (and gear) reset on every death which changes the dynamic of the gameplay considerably - and I feel for the better.
Launch edition had a way to 'extract' from the overgrowth without death, but it involved finding a specific point on the map, committing to an extraction, and then fighting a fucking gauntlet of enemies while a timer counts down to safety. If you were in need of 'returning to town' without dying this felt like an unfair challenge which again, has been changed with the recent update.
ugggh this asshole
Extractions can now happen at shrines (where leveling up and medkit refills can be purchased) all over the map and the 'gauntlet' run only happens after all the crowns are defeated - in theory on your way to the final boss fight -but again, they are not yet present in the game
I'm thoroughly enjoying the game now that my own hardware is cooperating but also because the experience of play feels more refined. I had fun at launch but it did feel (at first) way too difficult and then (with balance patches) significantly too easy. Buried Below is a good 'split the difference' of the two.
Since I've gotten the hang of most of the Crowns and the various play-styles for the revamped characters, I'm currently on hunts for all the monoliths to unlock the story panels. Since these appear to be random and not ID'd on your map, it's been closest experience I've had so far to 'walk through a random wall and find a dead body with a key' that 'Drifter offered.
very glad the written language is the same from HLD though, makes translating it fun
My only real complaint at this point is that there's no way to pause or save during a run without extracting - which again, involves traveling to a shrine (there's no fast travel) and shrines have a limit on how many times per cycle you can extract at them; I can understand these limitations when engaged in multiplayer (which I haven't had a chance to test since the last thing I'd wanna do is party up and then have my system crash) but when not engaging in multiplayer, the lack of pause or 'save and quit' feels criminal? When did we as a society decide getting rid of pause was the way forward? Was it Dark Souls? Look, sometimes your cat is throwing up because it ate too much of its own fur and you need to pause to clean it up man.
Anyway here's hoping the rest of the development goes smoothly and the ramen shop eventually gets opened.
C'MON OPEN OPEN OPEN OPEN
1 It looks like after the Buried Below patch, these drops are now always enemies; I haven't seen the radioactive doom meteors since before that patch.