1/26/2024 0 Comments Character hyper light drifterMikami's sterile blaster boldly focuses in on the awkward moments of combat and charges you with making them sing. Most people have not actually played it, mind. Still! P.N.03! Not widely regarded as one of Shinji Mikami's better works by most people. (In fact, I emailed the developer, and I now know it isn't intentional.) I don't think this similarity is intentional, of course. I suspect there's a touch of Hyrule in the wider structure - and there's certainly something of Navi to the weird emoticon teapot who flits around you, popping up to open doors - but the game the whole thing really reminds me of - and I can't fully contain my joy at typing this - is P.N.03, the Capcom Five shooter that sold so badly it remained exclusive to the GameCube. In truth, I couldn't have been more wrong about that part. I knew little of Hyper Light Drifter before I wandered into the demo dungeon, but I was aware that it was good-looking, all Topshop pink and turquoise, and I gathered that the whole thing was a bit like The Legend of Zelda: sweet and delicate and perhaps dreamily keen on puzzles. The latter needs three stages of preamble before it's at full power, and the former takes a wonderfully agonising few seconds to reload. That teleport's a violet blur accompanied by the flutter of the protagonist's prog-rock cape, the swordplay is sheer Errol Flynn, a flickbook transition from one heroic pose to the next, and the blaster is soon joined by a charge-up sniper rifle. As I test the boundaries of my starting moveset, what excites me isn't the fact I've got a teleport dash, a sword swing, and a sort of space blaster to mess about with, but that they're all delivered with such light-fingered style. Characters are tiny, but combat delivers a real sense of force.Īnd yet, so pretty! It's a prettiness that extends to the actual business of playing, too. The doors have faces like Transformers and there are the dark, gloopy remains of experimental life floating, dead, in the crimson fluid that fills a handful of specimen tubes. The stones here are battered cubes, riddled with traces of primeval machinery. I begin the current backer demo - popular demand has extended its run for the entire length of October, but it's only available on PC and Mac - in what can only really be described as a glade, and how many of those do you see anymore? A temple's gaping entrance beckons. This is one of those games about exploring a broken and ancient world, rooting around in the debris and discovering its awful secrets. ![]() ![]() The whole thing's been given a crunchy megalithic weight, too. Heart Machine - the name of the developer - is also the phrase that ultimately seems to get at it most precisely: messy life meets cold hardware. Grottoes and forests and shattered twists of circuitry thread together and entangle. The world of this action RPG is organic and day-dreamy, but it's also tartly technological. What's the best way to describe Hyper Light Drifter's art style? It's the art, after all, that immediately excites.
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