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In a library at the top of the world, I found a few moments of peace. The journey up the mountain had been hard, past frosted willows and over ancient tumbledown staircases. Crows attacked - huge things in robes, capable of violent magic. Wolves sent deer scattering. And then I found my way here: to row after row of documents, scattered papers on the floor, shelves creaking and broken-backed. Sunlight angled in through shattered rafters. Silence except for a distant wind. I knew the nods towards secret areas by now, and I sounded them all out: health packs in a shuttered reading room where a skeleton sat at a desk, money out on a spar of rock overlooking an endless drop and a rosy horizon. Up ahead there was more of what I'd left behind. More encounters. More breathless dashing. And a boss was looming. But for now - only for a minute or two - it was me and the wind and the ancient bookshelves. A moment to simply enjoy the beauty of Hyper Light Drifter without the attendant carnage.One of the strengths of this game is that it explains almost nothing. It hints at a basic narrative - you play a stranger in a ruined land, searching through the rubble of a long-gone civilisation for some kind of cure to a blight that has afflicted you - but it doesn't fill in the blanks particularly willingly. Its landscapes, filled with prison forests, mountainous archives and underground robot factories, all hint at rich depths, aeons in which nature and technology have twisted themselves together, and little of this is initially exposed to the player. In the first few minutes you have to learn to identify the health packs scattered about the place, and in the first few hours you have to learn how the game deals with the money you need for upgrades. The only thing Hyper Light Drifter is swift to make entirely clear, in fact, is that this is not the game that the dreamy, delicate art initially suggests. It is not a gentle Zelda dressed up in Topshop cyans and hot pinks, a place where dungeons succumb to quiet intellect as much as the sharp point of a sword. In fact, it is a relentless battle, grinding and exacting. It is a game about fighting, and an adventure that does not trade in joy so much as relief.
And at first it is overwhelming. Hyper Light Drifter's map is divided into four sections, with a small nub of upgrade shops in the very middle. Your job is to venture north, east, south and west and defeat the creatures living there - I hesitate to apply the word "evil", because, by the end of the game, I wasn't entirely sure that I was exactly on the side of the angels. There is some freedom to the order in which you take things on. Hyper Light Drifter is an intricate beast geographically, but it's best not to think of the game as being built around four dungeons. Each area, instead, tasks you with taking out a boss and tracking down four separate terminals, all of which lurk in their own mini-dungeons, often underground and tucked away from the overworld. Navigation is an early hurdle, since the maps on offer only really highlight the very basic area in which you are located: you then have to work out how the hubs fit together with the spokes. The upside of this is that I always felt pleasantly lost, and I had to make notes as I travelled so that I would know to return and clear up loose ends. I couldn't live within the map screen; I had to pay attention to the territory itself. The downside is that Hyper Light Drifter has a very instanced feel: its separate areas are connected, but they never feel like they seamlessly lock together in the manner of a Lordran or even a Hyrule.
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