Like a lot of people, I adored Hyper Light Drifter, the debut title from the Culver City, California-based game devs Heart Machine.
Drifter was one of those rare indie games where all the component parts just clicked: it had a gorgeous art style, an unbelievable soundtrack, and sparse but very effective storytelling that hinted at a genuinely original world. The dashy-slashy combat was slick and the overall vibe of the game was, as the kids say, immaculate.
So I was a little disheartened this month to see that Drifter’s long-awaited followup, Hyper Light Breaker, is getting less-than-stellar reviews from players and critics after its launch on Steam Early Access. It’s currently sitting at a score of 63% out of 2,576 reviews.
Many players have taken issue with Breaker's uneven difficulty curve. The game is brutally hard at first, but can become trivially easy if you manage to gear up properly. There are also problems with several key gameplay systems (especially perks, healing, and weapon durability), and combat that can feel both unfair and one-dimensional. "Just dodge. Always," one Steam reviewer advised players.
And yet, another phrase appears constantly in the player response to Hyper Light Breaker: “This game has potential.”
You can see it in the comments on YouTube reviews of the game, even quite negative ones like Skill Up's.
Even the negative reviews on Steam carry this sentiment. One player concluded a long, multi-paragraph rant about the game's shortcomings with "Keep at it, the game has potential," as well as a promise to change their review to a "thumbs up" if Heart Machine fixes the issues.
Heart Machine, to its great credit, has responded with grace and humility to feedback like this. They've been quickly shipping fixes and their public communications have been world-class.
Here's what one Heart Machine dev wrote in response to the review referenced above:
When you see stuff like this, you've kinda gotta root for this team.
But the challenges that lie ahead for Heart Machine are stark. It's really tough to turn around mixed review scores. More bluntly: it's rare. Every dev who launches to poor or mixed reviews dreams of becoming No Man's Sky (2025), but most are destined to remain No Man's Sky (2016).
But there’s cause to believe that Hyper Light Breaker can be one of the rare exceptions to the rule. I wondered, what would the next six months and the next year look like if the Heart Machine team can deliver for players the way they want to?
So last week I called Hyper Light Breaker’s Lead Producer, Michael Clark, to ask him directly.
Breaking New Ground
Early concept art for Hyper Light Breakers, via Heart Machine.
One unusual thing about the Breaker team is how open they’ve been about their process creating the game. The team invited YouTuber Danny O'Dwyer and his team at Noclip to capture Breaker’s evolution in a series of well-produced documentaries. As a result, fans have gotten a rare behind-the-curtain look into Breaker’s creation and the sometimes messy process of development, which included a painful wave of layoffs the studio announced late last year.
Below is one mini-documentary which explores how the game shifted to an “open world” concept over time. It’s worth watching in full, but the TLDW takeaway is that the Breaker team rescoped the game and went through multiple iterations that effectively changed its genre:
Hyper Light Breaker Lead Producer Michael Clark says that in some ways, this evolution was driven by lessons learned from Heart Machine’s second game, Solar Ash.
“We wanted to make something that was replayable, that was systems-focused, because Solar Ash had a lot of very specific content,” Clark says. “So with Breaker it was like, we should not make a lot of content that has to be radically recreated—a lot of level content. So that pushed us into procedural generation from the get-go.”
When this new, open world procedural generation tech was shown off over a year ago in the above Noclip documentary, many players responded enthusiastically:
Still, other players seemed to anticipate that such a dramatic change from Heart Machine’s previous games could take some time to get right:
Because of the Heart Machine team’s openness, their fans understand that they’re trying to do something truly different. “I don't know of any games that are doing anything like what we're doing,” Clark says. “We're not trying to play to the mass market—to the lowest common denominator. Our fans don't want that either. And so we want to listen to those folks and figure out what they’re looking for.”
In their effort to build something new, Clark says, the Heart Machine team is trusting that their fans are players like themselves: “We didn't sit there and look at a bunch of charts and KPIs and go, alright,according to this, statistically, players will like this,” Clark says. “Instead, we're targeting people that are very much like us. And that gives us a really good focus group internally.”
Hyper Light Improver
Now that Hyper Light Breaker is out and player feedback is coming in, the challenge for the Heart Machine team is to deliver on its roadmap while also reacting to player feedback. “The biggest focus right now is on smoothing out the onboarding and giving you more in the game,” Clark says. “We also expect to triple the content in most areas of the game. A lot more bosses, playable characters, new biomes, new everything.”
Of the complaints that have appeared in reviews, Clark says that some of it was expected—or at least not totally surprising. “I don't think anyone in the audience has said something that we haven't had bubble up internally,” he says, “but it's nice to get that external validation of the things that are important.”
One standout example of this is Breaker’s difficulty curve. Clark says that the team was still tweaking the difficulty “radically, even right up to the launch.” He says they reduced the amount of health available to players shortly before launch because the team was finding the game too easy. “We were like: people shouldn't be able to sit down and beat it on the first go,” he says. “But clearly we steered it too far, and this is one of those things that Early Access for roguelikes in particular is great for. It's the reason you go Early Access.”
Sidebar: An 18 Year Journey Through the Games Industry
Many of the team members at Heart Machine are games industry veterans, and that includes Clark, who got his start in games as a self-taught artist working at Volition on games like Red Faction Guerrilla and Saints Row 4.
After leading weapon design on SR4 and rising through the ranks to become a lead artist, Clark gradually grew into an art producer, then a lead producer.
“I had the opportunity to touch a lot of different art, mostly props and vehicles, but a lot of different art in the pipelines there, which is great as just sort of getting a broad understanding of things,” he says. “And then I sold out and became a producer and moved to California and basically, like, with a small chip on my shoulder. It was like, hey, you know what? I could do this better. I could be better at this because I actually know the intricacies and the details, and my ADHD desire to hyper optimize things would be really useful here.”
After four years as a producer and game director at the VR studio Survios, Clark joined Heart Machine in 2023. He speaks highly of the studio, and particularly the simplicity of working with creative director and studio head Alx Preston.
“When I came here,” he says, “it was really about: how do I build the optimal production environment for a creative direction that’s fast and responsive, and it’s not a slow committee thing with a cabal of directors that need to agree.”
Hyper Light Believer
After talking through the specific changes the Heart Machine team is making to Hyper Light Breaker in the immediate time period, I asked Clark what he hopes to deliver to players over the next six months, or year, or however long the game is in Early Access.
“We want to make things that are impactful and good, and make us feel better,” he said.
As I spoke with Clark, the smoke from the recent Los Angeles fires still hung in the air in the city where Heart Machine is based. “Right now, I'm looking for games to escape from everything else,” Clark said. “We've had the LA fires burning. I’ve got rent to pay, and cats to take care of. I know a lot of people are looking to games to escape.”
Clark continued:
“Telling stories, entertaining other people, bringing joy to others is of fundamental value for the world. So we want our true believers to feel their faith in us is rewarded… with something that excites and entertains them, that brings them joy, gives them escapism when they need it, gives them challenge when they need it, gives them whatever they look for in games—because I think we've all looked for a lot of different things at different times. We have a team that’s capable of delivering. We have fans who are hungry for it and who believe in us. So it’s on us to deliver.”
That’s it for this week. This just reminded me I’ve gotta feed my cat.
A great read as always! Thanks for your articles every week :)