ive taken basically every opportunity to beat the hyper light breaker drum on account of it being a promising openworld roguelike coming from an indie studio with an enviable track record and edge 384 on sale now has given me an easy in by confirming that as i suspected the game does indeed borrow from one of my favorite games of 2021 solar ashdirector alx preston of studio heart machine which developed solar ash and is now working on hyper light breaker told edge about the challenge of meshing two very different types of game genres that in some respects seem fundamentally incompatible with hyper light breakers openworld roguelike setup a big part of that is that balance where the world is not just open for the sake of being open and finding a middle ground for handcrafted and procedural levels even with a procedural game good level design is superimportant to us preston says its just a different way of thinking about level design involving algorithms and math you can still achieve good level design this way obviously it isnt a purely curated experience like youre gonna get in hyper light drifter its just a different structure and format and thats why we went with something more open in the first place it was to embrace that realityimage credit heart machinethe kicker for me is prestons note that as hyper light breakers trailers have implied and as youd expect from a studio making its thirdever game and only second 3d game its bringing elements over from drifter and even from solar ash in some ways as i said in my solar ash review the 3d platformer ended up being one of my favorite games of 2021 despite slipping in right at the end of the year in large part because its spellbinding movement is the focus of the entire experience ive seen glimpses of solar ash protagonist rei in the flourish of hyper light breakers playable characters and its exciting to hear that the games dna lives on through drifters spiritual successor i cant wait to see and feel how it does so for myself even so breaker is doing its own thing and for good reason preston says because ultimately we wanted to try out this unique format and structure that nobody else is doing and make our own subgenre for this stuff and were doing it pretty successfully troy baker and roger clark clash in scifi thriller fort solis cover star of edge 385