Hyper Light Drifter is the textbook definition of an indie darling. Propelled by an incredibly successful Kickstarter, Heart Machine’s debut became an instant classic. The team followed Drifter up with Solar Ash, which cast off pixel art in favour of a 3D world. Then, earlier this year, came Hyper Light Breaker. The extraction roguelike had a divisive launch, but with its latest update Heart Machine puts the game on an entirely new path. With plenty of changes shaking it up, I sat down with one of the game’s developers for an exclusive PCGamesN interview to dissect where Breaker has been, where it is now, and what the future holds.
When Heart Machine launched Hyper Light Breaker, it was met with a very mixed response. Our own Nat Smith said Breaker had turbulent co-op, a blunt intro, and a fragmented gameplay loop in her early access review, but this didn’t mean there wasn’t “a lot of promise” underneath the noise. Since Steam Early Access began, then, Heart Machine has been hard at work on reshaping the extraction roguelike game, and the redemption arc begins with the latest update: Buried Below.
While a lot of Hyper Light Breaker might feel similar to how it did before, Buried Below is an update brimming with changes. There’s a robust tutorial, a shift to a more traditional roguelike structure, and changes to characters and vendors. Heart Machine has repositioned Breaker in the middle of early access, and when I asked the team how daunting this was, I got a frank response.
“In a word – Extremely,” Heart Machine lead producer Michael Clark tells me. “The Buried Below update changes pretty much every system in the game in some fashion, and every element of the game had to be rebalanced. It was a full team effort, as pretty much every part of the game had to be cut out and re-wired together around a few new core concepts.”
Instead of playing like an extraction roguelike, as it did at launch, the team has repositioned Hyper Light Breaker to feel more like a traditional genre entry. A lot of Breaker’s original DNA remains intact, but your moment-to-moment experience is now very different from what it once was. With so much vocal feedback from players, I wanted to know exactly why Heart Machine committed to the change.
“When you’re making something new, you need to experiment and push things into unfamiliar spaces,” Clark explains. “Breaker was always pitched as an open world roguelite, and extraction was added to the game to make that work – allowing us to create larger worlds while allowing them to be broken into smaller sessions.
“We didn’t make this shift because of player feedback, but rather, player feedback validated this shift,” Clark says of the Buried Below update. “We felt this would be a stronger foundation for the eventual v1.0 game, and so, shortly after the early access launch, we started prototyping this change to test that hypothesis and put an experimental branch out back in February for folks savvy enough to read the patch notes fully. That feedback validated our hypothesis, and we started the months of work that it would take to fully shift the game in this direction. Since we launched the update on Tuesday April 29, that’s only continued to confirm that this is the right choice for the game.”
Whether you’re a new or old player, your experience with Breaker since the Buried Below update begins with the new onboarding tutorial. You watch an intro cinematic and are thrown into a guided level that helps you get to grips with the core mechanics. This wasn’t in Breaker at launch, so I asked Heart Machine what led to its introduction amid the game-changing alterations.
“We saw in social channels, in Steam reviews, and in external playtests – if folks stuck with the game for a few hours, they loved it, but if they didn’t, they were frustrated by it and often confused,” Clark says. “Since launch there have been a series of tutorial cards that info-dump a lot of information on players at the beginning of the game – but the reality is that nobody reads those. If it was important, the game would stop you and make you learn it, right? You see the card pop up, you smash the button to close it, and move on – we even saw this internally – more than once I watched someone on our dev team playtesting immediately close the tutorial card and then ask, with all sincerity, ‘Did we remove the tutorial cards?’ One of them worked on the tutorial card they just closed.
“We originally planned on making a robust, ‘hand-holding’ tutorial closer to hitting version 1.0. However, between that feedback, and with Buried Below making some big changes, it was the right time to go deep on teaching people how to play the game.”
With all of these changes to Hyper Light Breaker in mind, it’s important to note that Heart Machine doesn’t feel like it would have done anything differently knowing what it does now. This is a mindset I truly commend, as Breaker’s team embraces what it learned from the initial feedback instead of dismissing it outright.
“No,” Clark says. “I wouldn’t change anything with the direction. If you don’t attempt to innovate, if you don’t take risks, you can’t make anything new or learn. We chose early access because we wanted to be able to innovate and explore new design spaces, and the best way to do that is with a continual feedback loop with players. You can’t look back without having stepped forward.
“We could have played it safer, been less interesting, and maybe that would have been fine? Has that worked for a lot of the ‘too big to be risky’ games in the last few years? But we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing now, and we wouldn’t know what we now know.”
Buried Below might have altered how Heart Machine is approaching the rest of Hyper Light Breaker, then, but that doesn’t mean the entire early-access roadmap has changed. Instead, Clark assures me that the team already had this type of scenario accounted for, and that most of what’s to come is still on the way.
“We’ve always built in some ‘flex time’ to allow us to chase opportunities and react to player feedback, and while a lot of these changes ripple through the whole project, the majority of the top level features are still part of the plan, but details within them change,” Clark says. “We’re excited to share more of those plans with an updated roadmap after the release of our monthly update for May.”
After Breaker’s initial launch woes, it’s all too easy to dismiss the game ahead of the eventual 1.0 launch. So many games launch today in a broken state that it’s become somewhat of a norm, but then again, so has the redemption arc. Final Fantasy 14. Cyberpunk 2077. No Man’s Sky. Fallout 76. All of these games have risen from beleaguered ashes to become something else, and I have faith that Hyper Light Breaker can join them.
