ranzware
Hyper Light Breaker is odd. This is probably to be expected – the Hyper Light series up until now has been charmingly strange in a number of ways. But its strangeness tended to fit with the format. Hyper Light Drifter – and Solar Ash, which I always see as being a sequel of sorts? These were single-player games with fixed campaigns and carefully constructed worlds. They made you work for information but they moved at a pace at which working for information could be part of the fun.
Hyper Light Breaker is a procedural run-based game you play with friends. It’s about gathering loot and becoming more powerful when you have a good run, and it’s about the pain of losing stuff when a run goes bad. Because it’s something akin to a sport, in a way, I’m tempted to say that the series’ deep inscrutability becomes more of a problem than it has been before. This is a world of different currencies, unusual nomenclature and a sense that everything you see is just the tip of some vast submerged work of the imagination. All lovely – well, not the currency part but at least it’s in-game currency – yet when all you want to do is orient yourself and team up with pals? Just a little less lovely.
So my first few hours were filled with slight frustrations – some of them, granted, tempered by the fact they were hilarious. Setting myself on fire (still don’t know how I did that)? Hilarious. Paying a load of currency for a cool weapon that disappeared forever when I died? I wish I’d known in advance that this was how the game rolled.
Here is the gist of things anyway. You and maybe a few friends or strangers choose classes (I’ve still only gotten one unlocked) and then spawn in a procedural wilderness. There are a bunch of boss baddies that you have to take down and then beat it to the exit, and the basic idea is that you’re running around, getting in low-level scraps, finding currency and upgrades and the odd brilliant weapon, and you’re really just trying to get more and more powerful so you can kill bigger things, get bigger loot, and survive a bit longer in this place that really wants you dead.
All fine, even if the game has a habit of couching this in tool-tips like, “Gather Prisms to defeat Crowns,” which sounds, to me, less like in-game advice and more like Ariel from The Tempest has been working on a follow-up to Full Fathom Five. Those are pearls that were his eyes – inevitably I have just talked myself around to being a fan of this way of doing things, but I can at least acknowledge it probably isn’t for everyone.
And that’s the point, in a way. Although I’ve lead with frustrations, my love for this series and its eccentric flair is so strong that I’m willing to stick it out. So I spent a morning spawning, dying, having to pay in-game currency for things I didn’t really feel I should be paying in-game currency for, and slowly seeing more of the world. And what I saw was often kind of brilliant, even if it was often tinged with frustration.
Case in point: slimes. Low-level enemies – popcorn enemies, to use the memorable term of a developer I spoke to recently. Anyway: not much to worry about. But embedded in each slime, and knocked free when you kill them, is the slime’s honeyed skull. Loved that. Also, enemies that cast shields on other enemies forcing you to prioritise more distant enemies. I don’t adore this in games, but here the shielded foe is encased in a kind of clear box of lasery plastic, as if they’d been packaged for delivery at an up-market 5th Avenue boutique. All is forgiven.
Moving outwards and the game I found myself thinking about more and more was not any of the Hyper Light games, but Fortnite. Fortnite back in the very early days of Battle Royale when there weren’t a lot of distractions and lore and battle passes and you really pretty much had to just play Battle Royale or leave. I think of that constantly while playing Hyper Light Breaker. It’s there in the landscape, which offers recognisable hills and cliffs and forests, even if they are all strange Topshop colours and even if I can summon a light-based snowboard to navigate them. It’s there in the sense that, as you move about this world, every second could be your last. I’m exploring, and occasionally stumbling across a kind of disco cathedral I want to take a screenshot of, but the mobs could descend at any moment – death is always thrillingly close.
And it’s there, in the wild-eyed scavenging state that I lapse into because of the environment and the sheer danger of being in it at any moment, that I become hyper focused. I collect everything I come across because who knows when I’ll need it, and when there’s a choice of items – this sword or that, this perk or that? – I often make the decision before I’ve had time to read the descriptions, in part because the stylish typeface they use is not particularly legible – granted, I’m long-sighted so few typefaces are particularly legible – and in part because early on I died and lost a load of things I did not want to lose, simply because I had paused to try and pick up a cool gun.
Here’s the final thing for now, I think. Hyper Light Breaker is really, really punishing. It’s punishing in a way that I understand, because it’s probably balanced for multiplayer and because this is probably a small team who can’t endlessly feed new stuff into the procedural maw, and so they need players to take their time with what’s there. But it makes for an uninviting introduction if you’re a fan of the series and you love these games for their lonely beauty.
In the end I got around this by leaping into a game with strangers. What a difference! Suddenly I was making progress, earning serious currency, and actually helping with boss battles – or at least not hindering too much. The community, while small, seems friendly and accommodating, and it’s already riddled with experts who seem to understand every system and every strange idea floating around in the world.
And here’s the thing – fun as this was, whenever a run was over, or whenever I was between matches, I was back in the hub, which is a cross between a fancy downtown neighborhood and a boutique hotel. It’s beautiful here, as detailed and specific as anything in a Hyper Light game. It felt familiar – like it was part of the series I already know and love. At first whenever I landed back here I felt a little wistfulness: why can’t the rest of the game be like this? Why can’t it be more of what I already know? But over time, I started to change my mind, and another thought crept in. This is warmly familiar, I realised, but the game beyond this hub is new and interesting – and that’s probably something for me to celebrate.
Code for Hyper Light Breaker was provided by the publisher.
Kurt Indovina
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