YMMV / Hyper Light Drifter

• Awesome Art: One of, if not the most praised aspect of the game is its art style, with the animation and the pixel art for both the cutscenes and the in-game experience being very detailed and very well done. Its art can be described as the love child of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and sci-fi Franco-Belgian Comics, such as those of Mœbius, and the music compliments it tremendously. It also helps that the game follows a similar school of thought for Scenery Porn and pixel art as Titan Souls.
• Awesome Music: The whole darn soundtrack, composed by Disasterpeace, has been widely praised. Being a dynamic soundtrack that builds and abates depending on where you're located, and with a propensity for swelling to a crescendo when you walk in on a particularly powerful vista, it's incredibly good at adding layers to the already thick atmosphere as you explore the world around you.
• Breather Boss: The Hermit can be this, depending on when you fight him. He's slower than the Hanged Man or the Hierophant, his attacks are more visibly telegraphed thanks to his larger size, and he's the only boss who can be stunned, letting you whale on him with impunity for a bit.
• Broken Base: The game's difficulty. Either it's a fun, fast-paced challenge, or the severity of it once it really kicks in makes the game significantly less fun. There was also a hot debate with the game's FPS capped at 30 FPS. Further down the line, there was an update with a Newcomer mode and an experimental beta on 60 FPS, and the flames died down.
  • The extreme end of Show, Don't Tell story method, including people that talk in pictures only, makes going anywhere seems frustrating for some people.
  • The ending. Many fans were very upset when it's revealed that the Drifter dies despite all of his efforts toward being cured.
• Fan Nickname:
  • While it's officially called the Jackal, there are some fans that call it "Anubis", after the jackal-headed god of Egyptian mythology.
  • A ton of them, thanks to the wordless style of the game: The boss of the west is called Raccoon king, the mysterious jackal is called Anubis due to its striking similarity to the Egyptian god.
  • Although the pink drifter has no official name (besides possibly being referred to as "BD" for "Badass Drifter" in game files), the fandom early on decided to call them "the Guardian".
• Fridge Logic: The number four is a prominent theme in the game. There are four regions to explore, four diamond-shaped Modules that you need to deactivate in each of those regions (with four more being optional), you need to collect four Gearbits for every one unit of currency, four monoliths are found in each quadrant, and the Immortal Cell has four sides to it. The creator of Hyper Light Drifter, Alx Preston, has a critical heart condition that could kill him at any time. How many chambers does a heart have?
• Friendly Fandoms: With Dead Cells and Hollow Knight. There's even artwork floating around of the three protagonists spending time together.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The map only tells you the general area you're in, not your specific location. It becomes especially irritating when you're trying to determine how close you are to a module.
  • Chain-dashing. mostly for the fact that if you can't do it, you cannot get 100% Completion. Even one of the Modules (and subsequently one of the weapons) can't be reached without it.
• That One Sidequest: Getting one costume requires you to perform 800 chain dashes on a closed track. The timing and rhythm to pull this off is already incredibly difficult without having to worry about crashing into the walls. And while it's possible to cheat using a keyboard and mouse (the player character will always dash in the direction of the cursor, meaning if placed just right, will cause them to just dash back and forth over a single point), you still have to deal with the monotony of pressing the dash button 800 times with perfect rhythm.

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