HYPER LIGHT BREAKER
You break it, you bought it
Developer Heart Machine
Publisher
Gearbox Publishing
Format
PC
Origin
US
Release
Summer (early access)
Given that one wrong move can potentially mean having to start the whole thing again, lending tension to every enemy encounter, Roguelikes are among the most high-pressure games you can play. Throw in time constraints and that tension heightens further. And when you’re sharing your screen with a game’s director, as we are here with Heart Machine’s Alx Preston silently observing our every mistake, well, that’s a new level of pressure entirely.
Our session begins gently enough, with our nimble, blue-haired Breaker warping from a peaceful (read: empty) floating city hub down to the more verdant but hostile Overgrowth below. The generic slimes we bat away with our sword quickly give way to more challenging feral beasts jumping in to take a swipe at us. Our attempt to make a run for it, with the help of a hoverboard activated by clicking in the left stick while sprinting, only lands us in an ambush: waiting on a slope in front of us is a new enemy type that fires laser beams. We’re soon overwhelmed by these, our Breaker collapsing to the ground. And so we begin again.