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This is a highly impactful game: the pixel art style is haunting, as is the sound design and musical composition -- transitions of the musical composition leads to profoundly interesting moments. As might be well-known, Alx (the lead dev) suffers from heart disease, and the game communicates something of this experience.
Really couldn't recommend it more.
Disasterpiece is a fantastic composer. His work on Fez is probably some of my favorite video game soundtrack work on any game ever. I remember hearing that he was working on Hyper Light Drifter when it was on Kickstarter and I was thrilled and while it's not as individually memorable (in my opinion) is still great work.
If anybody was wondering about the music, or wanted to purchase it:
> https://disasterpeace.bandcamp.com/album/hyper-light-drifter...
> https://disasterpeace.bandcamp.com/album/hyper-light-fragmen...
For those who would like to watch in Youtube (and save it to their playlists?):
Disasterpeace has a bunch of breakdowns of his work on his youtube channel. Including a session about his work on Fez. He's a really interesting guy, both artistically and technically very skilled.
I quite like this one
If you liked HLD this is your reminder that Heart Machine made three other games.
Solar Ash - rail-grinding and schmoovement, with a joyfully colorful visual style and a melancholy story, well worth the ten bucks or so it is on Steam right now
Hyper Light Breaker - free-roaming online roguelike, did not make it out of early access, really not worth the twenty bucks or so it currently is
Possessor(s) - a very pretty and melancholy metroidvania, a great value for the two bucks it's priced at on steam
Last I heard Heart Machine seems to have pretty much evaporated, their bluesky is pretty much nothing but nine-month-old reblogs of their laid-off devs posting their Linkedins. Maybe it will return but I'm not holding my breath.
Too bad...
HLD is peak indie dev 16-bit revival arthouse.
I feel like that was all kicked off by "Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery" (followed by "Fez")
my ears are mushrooms, this to me feel the same as fez.
It's the same composer: Disasterpeace.
But I think HLD takes his pioneering style (chip tunes but also more and better) to the next level.
The launch trailer is worth watching: https://vimeo.com/806155790
Also, there was a super interesting talk about how they made Hyperlight Drifter using GameMaker. What they built in GameMaker wasn't the game directly, but a game editor. Doing this let them edit and playtest in one very tiny run-edit-play loop.. I argue all games (and even apps) should follow this Smalltalk-y approach.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024062/-Hyper-Light-Drifter-S...
(2017)