I've taken basically every opportunity to beat the Hyper Light Breaker drum on account of it being a promising open-world roguelike coming from an indie studio with an enviable track record, and Edge 384 (on sale now) has given me an easy in by confirming that, as I suspected, the game does indeed borrow from one of my favorite games of 2021: Solar Ash.
Director Alx Preston of studio Heart Machine, which developed Solar Ash and is now working on Hyper Light Breaker, told Edge about "the challenge of meshing two very different types of game – genres that, in some respects, seem fundamentally incompatible" with Hyper Light Breaker's open-world roguelike setup. A big part of that is "that balance where the world is not just open for the sake of being open" and finding a middle ground for handcrafted and procedural levels.
