There is a review of this game I could write where I spend the majority of the time rambling furiously about the output of Heart Machine at the present date. I, lightly, did not care for Solar Ash, and am disappointed to see them invoke this game's world for the game Hyper Light Breaker appears to be alongside Gearbox of all publishers.

The flipside of this collection of emotions is that in order to feel let down, something had to build me up. So I'm going to choose to talk about that for a brief moment. If I'd written this review closer to the release of this game, it would have read as glowingly as I could ever choose to praise a game. After years of preaching the kinds of things I'd like to see in a game (eerieness, stories with no dialog, no worldbuilding, friction filled action, using your aesthetic in line with a message instead of as just aesthetic) Hyper Light Drifter had, line item list, all of them. It is in many ways everything I could have wanted in a game. It is one of the best video games I've ever played, to the point that it has justified the rest of the time I've spent with this hobby because without those peaks and valleys, the learning of the history, the time I spent trying to decipher the industry... all of that was justified because it all tucks into and back into this game in a way that I dare not dream to ever see again. It was so miraculous to see it all add up to this the one time. Why be so arrogant to desire a second?

But I couldn't help myself, and so that one empty star there is for my own broken heart. For the time I got my hopes up. Maybe it was just a spark, but it shone so brilliantly I found peace. What could live up to that?