Hyper Light Breaker Exclusive First Gameplay Preview: Familiar Colors, New Light

ign.com:

Watching developer Alx Preston walk me through some early Hyper Light Breaker gameplay at this year’s Game Developers Conference makes the already inscrutable world of Hyper Light feel even more esoteric. Hyper Light Breaker was already a game told in strong imagery rather than language, with a story to be slowly puzzled out over time and significant effort. But Breaker is a total gameplay departure from Drifter, so experiencing it through cryptic hints from Preston about what’s going on as he pummels his way through piles of enemies in rainbow-tinted biomes gives it even more of an aura of mystery.

As with Drifter, Hyper Light Breaker’s world is awash in brilliant colors, littered with strange runes and ruins, and is completely devoid of actual language explaining what’s going on in it, with characters using pictograms to express their thoughts instead. Everything I see is vaguely futuristic, but also ruinous, and somewhat overgrown, with characters and enemies alike fusing technology with vaguely shade-like presences and monstrous forms. Lacking explicit storytelling context and full of colorful mystery, it’s easy to recognize Breaker as a Hyper Light game on sheer force of aesthetic alone.

But aesthetic is where most of the at-a-glance similarities end. Where Hyper Light Drifter was a single-player (at launch), top-down, action-adventure game, Hyper Light Breaker is a different genre entirely. It’s a multiplayer 3D roguelike action game centered around players heading out from a hub into a procedurally generated world, defeating bosses, and returning to do it all again. I watch Preston putter briefly around a bustling hub city full of NPCs before he heads out into the world for a run. He’s playing single-player, but