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

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 tells me Hyper Light Breaker will include online cooperative multiplayer that’s flexible to wherever different players might be in the game’s story. There will be different character classes, he says, with different abilities as well as some degree of customizability.

As a “Breaker,” players are sent out into the Overgrowth to take down minions of the Abyss King, the mysterious big bad at the heart of Hyper Light Breaker. But it doesn’t seem easy to get to said Abyss King. To do so, players have to take down multiple bosses across different procedurally generated biomes, each of which is gated behind multiple “beacons” that must be activated for each boss to appear. Preston starts out in a lovingly pink biome deeply reminiscent of the first area of Drifter, and begins zipping around in search of beacons as a number of small enemies pop up to waylay him.

I’m optimistic that the transition from top-down to 3D combat won’t be too tough to make for those who loved Drifter.

Fortunately for Drifter fans, combat in Breaker (at least visually) seems familiar. There’s a wider array of weapons than before for stringing together combos, with customizable loadouts of melee and ranged weaponry alongside special abilities such as grenades and (my favorite) a giant cube that Preston dropped on enemies’ heads repeatedly. But the familiarity comes from a certain pleasant chunkiness that I loved from Hyper Light Drifter, where hits connect hard with satisfying sounds and reactions. While it’s hard to say more without actually having hands-on time, I’m optimistic that the transition from top-down to 3D combat won’t be too tough to make for those who loved Drifter.

That familiarity is also aided by what looks to be some fun movement tech. Breakers can do more than just dash around the Overgrowth – they can climb, leap off cliffs and glide, and (my favorite) scoot around on a hoverboard, shooting off ramps and walls in a system clearly taking cues from Heart Machine’s recent Solar Ash. I’m not sure just yet if the movement tech will be quite as robust as Solar Ash, but letting players parkour their way around each biome freely was certainly the right lesson to take.

I watch Preston track down a few beacons, each of which is accompanied by its own challenge. Most are combat-oriented – he fights a miniboss to gain access to one, another is guarded by several waves of smaller enemies – but one beacon he finds hidden inside a crumbling building that isn’t guarded at all, just tricky to find. It strikes me as a significant diversion from the narrow, room to room structure that’s become the common parlance of the roguelike genre lately. At any point, Preston can wander off to a different biome and tackle some beacons there, or farm some enemies, or just explore some of the cool decaying structures if he feels like it. It’s all open from the start of each run, though some biomes may be trickier to navigate early in a run than others. He later plunders a lush, nature-themed green biome, and I can see a snow-covered area in the distance that we don’t visit. I point out a massive, building-sized sword sticking out of the ground in the distance, and Preston confirms I can go there if I want. He notes there are five biomes “right now” – he’s coy as to whether or not there may be more.

There’s a lot happening on screen at once as Preston explores. He’s collecting materials off enemies that he hints will be used for weapon upgrades, noting that you’ll keep some currency after each run. Players will always get something out of a run, he says, “even if you die in like ten seconds.” There’s also a day/night cycle constantly chugging along that coincides with periods of relative safety and danger in the world, as well as indicating that the enemies in the current run are growing more and more challenging as time passes.

With all the requisite beacons lit, Preston heads for a “boss gate,” where the area’s boss appears for a confrontation that showcases more of Breaker’s combat. He’s fighting in a sizable colosseum of sorts against a bipedal, vaguely lizard-like creature that throws enormous punches. There’s another boss I see later that’s a large bipedal wolf holding a giant glowing sword. It’s tough to get a sense of boss combat at this stage – Hyper Light Breaker is still months away from its planned early access launch, so some of the monsters and bosses such as these are still a bit overtuned and not representative of final combat, Preston tells me. But I do learn that story progression is tied to these bosses, and every boss kill unveils a little more of the story, the Abyss King, and the “mystery of the Never-Die Curse,” which Preston says is at the heart of Hyper Light Breaker.

My takeaway from seeing almost 45 minutes of Hyper Light Breaker played in front of me is that this is functionally a very different game from Hyper Light Drifter, but that the vibes are right. It’s a different genre, a different (if linked) story, and with wildly different gameplay loops and combat styles, even if the chunky feel and fundamentals remain at the heart. But the dreamy futuristic aesthetic and overall mysterious vibe is, thus far, spot on, and I’m eager to see how Hyper Light Breaker fits in the larger Hyper Light universe that Heart Machine seems to be building.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.