I’m here for the hoverboard

Hyper Light Breaker She is a hoverboard sim. Technically, it’s a third-person roguelite adventure set in a cyberpunk fantasy world, but after playing a 30-minute preview, it became clear to me that Hyper Light Breaker It is all about the hoverboard. Fierce monsters, secret alcoves, and shiny weapons are secondary to the feeling of gliding over green hills and shallows on my glowing blue board, finding joy in narrowly avoiding enemy encounters.

Intentionally skipping battles was probably the opposite of what lead animator Chris Bullock wanted me to do during my first public hands-on opportunity with Hyper Light Breaker -But if that’s the case, he shouldn’t have told me about the hoverboard.

Hyper Light Breaker The stream is scheduled to go live in Early Access on the steam This summer, with a three-player online co-op game. The developers at Heart Machine are letting people play it for the first time at Day of the Devs: San Francisco Edition, which is taking place in conjunction with GDC this week. I played a remote preview of the game at home, solo style, while Bullock watched on Discord (and probably got quite annoyed).

Crusher It is an open world game with a central station called the Cursed Outpost, a futuristic mall with shops, upgrade stations, and NPCs. I explored the location briefly, but the bulk of the game takes place in the Overgrowth, a landscape of ever-changing biomes, and I focused on diving into it. The biomes in Overgrowth are created using handcrafted and procedurally generated items so players never enter the same world twice, and each one has a boss to defeat called the Crown. Despite my desire to fly peacefully through the half-hour demo, I fiddled with a couple of gear sets, took out a few slime hordes and twice tried to kill one of those crowns – a massive, golden-sword-wielding bipedal wolf warrior named Dro.

In both of my fights with Dro, she began attacking immediately and with incredible force, swinging her blade wildly as she leapt in a giant arc across the temple and directly at my head. I dodged and tried to fill its staggered meter by launching basic attacks with my sword and firearm, but the wolf was relentless, especially compared to the basic enemies I easily dispatched around the biome.

Drew beat me twice. At the end of each fight, I heard the game’s siren song drawing me in, making me believe I could beat the big bad wolf next time, if I used an updated strategy. Parrying was key in this fight, according to Bullock.

“Her first attack, I immediately countered that,” Bullock said as I prepared to fight the boss again. “I love that you picked up on that right away; that was the intent of it.”

The parry was an accident on my part, but I immediately noticed how effective it was, giving me half a second at the start of the encounter to step back and strategize. Bullock explained that what I experienced with Al-Bari was an angry attack. Some monsters in Hyper Light Breaker It glows red and then performs large movements that must be perfectly blocked in order to cancel damage, reflect a projectile, or stun the enemy. In the case of a furious attack, a less-than-perfect parry will only mitigate some of the damage.

“That’s definitely the design goal, is to make combat clear, and know when you’re doing something good,” Bullock said.

These moments of tactical clarity are exactly what makes a roguelike so addictive. I can see how to beat the boss. Now all I have to do is get good enough at the game to pull off those moves before I get killed.

There is no dialogue in Hyper Light BreakerMuch like its predecessor, Hyperlite Drifter. The wanderer An incredibly stylish 2D action RPG that was released in 2016 after a few years of crowdfunding and significant hype, it cemented Heart Machine’s reputation as an excellent indie studio. Hyper Light Breaker It is technically a precursor to The wandererIts events take place 15 years before the events of that game.

The wanderer cDesigner Teddy Dief founded OFK and released the musical visual novel We are OFKwhile lead developer Alx Preston stuck with Heart Machine and released Solar ash In 2021. Pretty much the same Crusher, Solar ash It is set in the same general universe as Hyperlite Drifterbut it’s a completely different game and not a direct sequel. Solar ash It’s a third-person action platformer built around an incredibly satisfying slide-and-scroll mechanic, with a world filled with bizarre environments, massive monsters, and mysterious gods.

“Hyper lite It was a way for me to get started, and it was a way for me to be more consistent and build a crew and understand, can I do this? Can I actually make games? In 2021, during the lead up,” Preston told me Solar ashrelease. “So after answering that question, the next natural step for me was to work in 3D. Can I come up with something that really opens up the world and makes you feel like you can really escape into something, into another worldly creation, that you wouldn’t have otherwise experienced?” ?I spent a lot of my childhood escaping into those larger experiences.

Crusher Seems like the perfect amalgamation of Hyperlite Drifter And Solar ash. replace Solar ash Snowboarding with a hoverboard, add some friends and you’re good to go. The developers at Heart Machine plan to keep it Hyper Light Breaker It’s been in Early Access for about a year, though they note that this timeline may change with player feedback.

Full version for Hyper Light Breaker It will support up to three players in online co-op, and will feature a handful of characters to choose from, each equipped with customizable gear. I tried a basic slash blade and a massive sword, as well as a regular rifle and a shotgun-type firearm, and both performed well, though I ran out of ammo quickly and often. The heavy sword was slower than the simple blade, but it moved smoothly and struck powerfully. In Cursed Outpost before loading a new biome, I was also able to select four abilities called Holobytes from about a dozen options, such as increased armor or faster healing. My favorite trait was the Blooming Corpse Seed, which planted an AOE explosive flower on the bodies of slain enemies.

But once Bullock told me water skiing was an option, that was all I wanted to do. I’ve spent a good portion of my own Hyper Light Breaker Demo Time Gliding along the bright green grass, landing with little jumps and occasionally falling into the pond. I’m still itching to find Dro again and fine-tune my dodging abilities via a combination of weapons (and corpse flowers). Even so, I’ll mostly still be dreaming of that bright blue painting Hyper Light Breaker It hits early access this summer.