The Loneliness of Heroism in Hyper Light Drifter
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I wake up at 7AM. I feel hungover but I haven’t been drinking. This is just what life feels like now, I guess. Coffee, breakfast, a long shower with the music too loud. Something angry, usually. I’m wearing my nice t-shirt when I clock in, spend a few minutes dismissing notifications, responding to texts, letting people know I’m still here, sort of, and they might see me again eventually.
Somehow eight hours pass and I sit and stare at the wall for a moment, realizing there’s still time before sleep. Maybe I’ll go outside for a bit, or do some yoga, or write, or- It’s time for bed. I don’t check my alarm, it’s been right for months now. My cat is scratching something in the other room but I don’t stop her.
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Hyper Light Drifter (Heart Machine, 2016) is a lonely game. I begin the game alone at a campsite, and I collapse at the same site at the end as I watch my companion wander off. There is no community for me to go back to.
The idea of a drifter often carries a romance with it. A life spent traveling, moving freely through the world, not held down by the demands of modern life. At some point, especially during adolescence, I think we all aspire to be drifters, to liberate our bodies from a particular place. But the Hyper Light Drifter is more restrained than ever.
With each step closer to their goal they begin to bleed a little more. Something inside is killing them, something caught up with who they are and what they’re trying to do. They get to see the world but what do they find? Violence, death, ends which all lead back to the same place. The world is circular, the drifter no more able to escape its rotations than anyone else.
From a central town the environment branches off in four directions, each holding a piece of a key, each leading the drifter back to where they began. Even being unclear as to what I was hoping to achieve by unlocking this door it was the only option before me. I wandered into the wilderness, looking for answers to a question I hadn’t asked.
Hyper Light Drifter tells its story entirely through its environments and a collection of still images, so any conclusions drawn are already working from a level of abstraction. But the specifics were never really the point. Hyper Light Drifter is a mood-piece, a visual poem, an interactive loneliness simulator.
There is the game, explicit, sure. The moment to moment slicing and shooting and dashing. It feels incredible, so smooth and weighty, pixels flowing and shaking as if each is its own being desperate to keep on living. The structure is familiar and comforting: go here, collect these, upgrade that. But this all feels limiting. Talking about the mechanics like this, trying to articulate the what of Hyper Light Drifter so I can explain why it matters so much to me.
Hyper Light Drifter is a place to be inhabited, but not somewhere to live. To be a drifter is to be perpetually alien to those around you. Returning to the town hub I eagerly sought out anyone willing to tell me more about who they were, why they were here, how they’d survived when the world was dead. But all I can do is buy a better gun, some more health packs. These people aren’t here to talk to me, I’m just a drifter. Good business.
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The longer I spend isolating in my home, waiting for the world to be safe again, the harder it is to feel like that world cares if I or anyone else actually gets through this. It’s been months now and things are only getting worse here in the US. I read the news and struggle to tell what’s new and what’s just still bad from before.
Politicians are asking me to die for the economy. Companies are asking for money I don’t have. The internet is failing. My job is moving forward as if nothing is different. Thousands face eviction and somehow this is a success?
I never used to get lonely. I liked being on my own, deciding how I spent a day, hanging out with people when I felt up to it. Now all I want to do is talk to anyone. To be reminded that there was something before this moment and hopefully will be after it. I am not alone, I see people at the store, see my family when I bring them groceries, see my cat. But it’s like I’ve forgotten how to connect with them. I’ve never felt loneliness like this.
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My only means of interacting with people as a drifter is with violence. Outside the town everything wants to kill me, and I’m meant to kill them. Sometimes I stumble upon a survivor but all we can discuss is our shared trauma. Or I’ll find another drifter, always just as they’ve slain the last enemy and now stand among the bodies. They point me where to go next, where I find more who want me dead. Whatever life was like here before, now it is marked by death and the quickening erasure of existence sans violence.
A lot of games prioritize violence, but here it feels inescapable. The most expressive the drifter ever becomes is when they clear a room of enemies or have to catch themselves from bleeding out. This violence doesn’t fade when the next screen loads, it lingers, pulls at you, literally attacks you from the inside.
When we talk about heroes what we are often talking about is how we choose to justify certain kinds of violence. Those justifications aren’t often good, but they’re the story we tell ourselves to resolve the outcome with what was necessary to bring it about. Eventually, it becomes hard to think of heroes separate from violence, it is all about how they use it (try to name a superhero whose powers are not explicitly violent).
Film critic Robert Kolker writes about this image of the violent hero in A Cinema of Loneliness, highlighting the difference between goodness and heroism:
“While individuals may do brave deeds, the concept of the hero and heroism is a culturally constructed myth. It begins in epic poetry and lives on in movies that posit violent individual action as a social good, rendering the community passive and helpless in the face of the man of action.”
In many games the drifter is the hero. They’re the ones which go to great lengths to reestablish order, destroy evil, and sacrifice themselves for the sake of others (whether they were asked to or not). I never felt like a hero in Hyper Light Drifter. Any actions I took were purely for myself, any people I encountered only beacons or shop keeps to help me move forward faster.
Can you be a hero if nobody else calls you one? Hyper Light Drifter’s loneliness prevents easy justifications for violence, answers to why I’m doing this at all, or a comforting ending where things return to normal. I am perpetually, painfully alone, and with only a gun and sword I have no way to change that. I look upon the husk of a giant, frozen mid-climb on the mountain’s face, and feel more kinship than to anyone still alive in the town below.
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I want to be clear, I don’t think I’m a hero for staying inside and away from people during a pandemic. Being safe and helping prevent others from getting sick is the bare minimum anyone should be doing right now. But I understand why some people are framing their actions as heroic.
I would like to think that my inaction is in some way valuable beyond myself, that it connects me to a larger group of others also staying indoors. But this doesn’t work for me. I know, ultimately, the most I’m doing is buying time for a better solution. That’s not heroism, it’s being pragmatic. It’s still important, but I’m not the one deserving of praise.
It was difficult to play Hyper Light Drifter and not feel a deep empathy for the drifter, also alone, also dying from an invisible disease. It’s an easy connection, but when the world is on fire all you can see are embers. Hyper Light Drifter doesn’t prescribe specifics so it’s easy to imprint meaning onto it. But it also resists glorifying those readings.
It is as if the game has anticipated my need to reframe the drifter’s journey, to find something positive in the rubble. So again, and again, and again, it presents me with the reality of my actions. Trauma. Violence. Isolation.
Hyper Light Drifter is not Kafka-esq but I am reminded of Philip Rahv’s description of Kafka’s tone in The Hero as Lonely Man, as “the pathos of loneliness and exclusion.”
“In him the tradition of western individualism regards itself with self-revulsion; its joyous, ruthless hero is now a victim; he who once proudly disposed of many possessions is now destitute, he has neither woman nor child; in his conflict with society he has suffered an utter rout, and his fate no longer issues from his own high acts but from the abstract, enigmatical relations that bend him to their impersonal will.”
The drifter might have been a hero at one point. This world was clearly alive before whatever tragedy brought it to where it is now. But there was never a hope for the drifter after that. They are alive, barely, but to what end? What else can they do which will not push them further away from anything resembling resolution? So they exist in a place in-between. Back to the wall, gun and sword at hand. The fire crackles. A dog looks on from afar, curious, but not enough to get close.
Hyper Light Drifter is available now for Windows, Mac, Linux, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch. I played it to completion on PC.
This essay was made possible through the support of Quinn K. and the rest of my wonderful Patreon supporters. If you enjoyed this post it would mean a ton if you shared it with a friend and considered becoming a supporter yourself.