Heart Machine's open-world roguelike Hyper Light Breaker landed with a thud but has noticeably improved since launch and will soon begin a proper comeback tour of monthly updates, as the devs told us in a recent wide-ranging interview. One of the biggest day-one surprises for the devs, who anticipated some degree of early access growing pains, was the overwhelmingly negative player response to the game's harsh difficulty curve, which has since been toned down to accommodate people who didn't make the game.
"Because of our frequent evolution internally, it can be difficult for the team to judge how easy to learn the game is - we’ve learned literally dozens of different versions, and even small tweaks (like, say, changing the number of medkits you start with) can have major impacts on how you play, and how you learn to play," says lead producer Michael Clark. "We were caught off guard a bit by how oppressive the difficulty was for players - this can be difficult to judge internally because, of course, we’ve all played it for hundreds of hours, and as we tuned the game to be more challenging for us, we overshot."
