Hyper Light Drifter :: Moribundity :: Of Death and Misguidance
Hyper Light Drifter is a game released in 2016 by Heart Machine. It follows a character called “The Drifter”, who explores a ruined land seeking a cure for its disease.
I first heard about Hyper Light Drifter when it released, but didn’t give it much thought. I was (at the time) obsessed with Starbound, and would spend the next years on Hollow Knight and Splatoon 2. But in 2021, during a COVID-19 spike, I found myself with way more free time than I knew how to fill. Thankfully, Steam decided it was the perfect moment to recommend Hyper Light Drifter. I then proceeded to play it in its entirety in the span of 3 days, and took the next week to complete an alt. playthrough (where you play as a slightly different character) and a NG+ playthrough (standing for “New Game +”, a harder version of the base game).
Gameplay and Game Design
There isn’t much to say about Hyper Light Drifter, design-wise. It’s a very simple combination of “the game isn’t telling you anything, figure it out yourself” and “there are secrets everywhere”, two pretty popular tropes in this kind of indie game. Hyper Light Drifter pushes this to the extreme, but it’s still a pretty simple loop : find secrets, get rewards, upgrade gear, etc…
The game really captivated me with it’s environmental storytelling. The characters (and the entire game, more generally), forgo dialogue entirely, speaking only in few pictures. Every detail of the story, every information on each area, is only given to the player by the environment. Hyper Light Drifter falls in the category of “Wake up in a ruined world” games (like “Zelda : Breath of the Wild”, “$\text{Drehmal : PRIM} \Omega \text{RDIAL / APOTHE} \Omega \text{SIS}$”, or even “Hollow Knight” (sort of) )
Meaning behind the game
During my first three playthroughs, it didn’t really occur to me that the game might hide a deeper meaning behind it. I mean, sure, there was clearly hidden lore and a lot more to discover, but usually back then I didn’t care for that kind of stuff - I could just watch a 2 hour long lore video from some guy to catch up on that. I thought this was just a video game, and nothing more.
A few weeks after my third playthrough, I randomly stumbled upon the Hyper Light Drifter subreddit. I just browsed the fanart for a bit and found a post asking about a certain Alx Preston’s whereabouts. I looked his name up on Google, realised that he was the man behind Heart Machine, and read the post. In there, I learned something that changed my opinion of Hyper Light Drifter from a pretty cool game that was pretty fun, to a masterpiece.
Alx Preston has congenital heart disease.
This doesn’t seem to be too important, at first glance. The obsession with hearts and the studio’s name, Heart Machine, suddenly makes a lot more sense, considering the pacemaker they’re implanted with. But it still made me wonder. The protagonist of the game is afflicted by a disease, too. How much of Hyper Light Drifter is a metaphor of Alx Preston’s life ? So I played the game again.
Hyper Light Drifter is a metaphor of trying to live while knowing you’re going to die. In the game, an entity known as Judgement kills the Drifter repeatedly during visions, and is the final boss of the video game, guarding an artifact known as the Immortal Cell. A lot of people suppose that the Cell represents life, and that Judgement represents death, but this makes not much sense. If Judgement was indeed death incarnate, then he would hunt the Drifter relentlessly, instead of showing them visions of death, and wouldn’t be guarding the Cell/life. I would argue that Judgement represents fear of death, guarding the Cell and preventing life from being fully enjoyed. He shows the Drifter nightmarish visions of death to keep them from enjoying life, and only by overcoming him can the Drifter finally access the Cell. It is unknown how the game ends : the Drifter dies underground, close to the Cell, quickly after, while another entity, known as the Jackal, watches.
The Jackal is an interesting entity in Hyper Light Drifter : It’s the one bringing you to where the story takes place, It guides you towards the cell, only to watch you die at the end. Being depicted very much alike Anubis, both in appearance and in purpose, It guides the player, yet never is direct about it - Judgement kills you in visions, in a different way every time, which is clearly meant to inspire fear, but the Jackal is extremely neutral. It often appears either while the Drifter is wounded, or weakened in some way, leaves in a direction, and disappears. There are multiple other Drifters, and they each see a different form of Judgement, however the Jackal’s form is unique for all.
This would imply that while the fear of death - personified by Judgement - is different for everyone, whatever the Jackal represents is universal, or at least appears to be. It is not clear however what exactly the Jackal represents - I would argue it is the drive to live, a sometimes senseless, seemingly random force guiding us through despite the fear of death. It would make a good conceptual opposition to Judgement, as well.
So is there a conclusion ?
No. And how inane of you to assume anything I create follows some semblance of structure.
Hyper Light Drifter is a game that, through implication and suggestion, explores pretty deep philosophical subjects that most pieces in the medium would not dare to venture into. You should play it by the way. I don’t know if I emphasised this enough, but play the damn game. It is an impressive work, a chef-d’oeuvre, an artistic tour-de-force, and Alx Preston better not fuck up with its sequel, Hyper Light Breaker.
Post-Scriptum : they fucked up the sequel (slightly)