Hyperspace!

Hyper Light Drifer is pretty challenging. Part of that challenge is from some good old-fashioned action game design: Learning enemy attack patterns, dodging and striking judiciously, and being paranoid about your surroundings. With a few exceptions so far, I haven't been terribly inconvenienced by death, so I'm feeling encouraged to try failed encounters again (and again, and again) to truly figure them out.

Unfortunately, another part of the game's challenge is that the controls simply don't feel responsive enough. I have to assume that this is at least slightly due to the somewhat-bullshitty GameMaker engine underpinning it; but whatever the reason, Hyper Light Drifter demands an amount of precision that the controls feel inadequate for. Trying to pull off a chained multi-dash is ... infuriating.

That aside, I am having fun exploring the game world, slowly making my way toward bosses - which I've yet to fight - and finding hidden pickups for ability upgrades. It's a fairly hands-off, unguided experience, feeling more like the NES Zelda than any of its more narratively-iterative sequels. (While there seems to be a story in Hyper Light Drifter, with shades of post-apocalypse, cyberpunk, and Ghibli inspiration, I still have no clue what's really going on.)

Progress: found some triangles?