New Hyper Light Breaker trailer shows off gameplay, fall 2023 release

It’s been just shy of a year to the day since Hyper Light BreakerThe third Heart Machine game, titled ‘, was revealed to the public with an animated trailer featuring a sickly-looking character (directed by Spencer Wan). Castlevania fame, no less). As if to mark the occasion, Heart Machine and Gearbox Publishing have shared a new trailer for the studio’s upcoming 3D adventure game and boy, it looks as sharp as a phase-shifted Hard Light sword.

The trailer, which premiered on IGN’s YouTube channel on Tuesday, features the first extended look at the game we’ve seen. Set in the shared universe of 2016’s Hyper Light Drifter and 2021’s Solar Ash, Hyper Light BreakerThis is an action-roguelite 3D game that takes place in the Overgrowth, a procedurally created open world. As a “Breaker,” players must explore this beautiful yet hostile world to fell foul beasts and unearth new weapons in their quest to overcome the mysterious “Crowns” and their leader, the almighty “Abyss King.”

You have too many synthetic proper nouns. Let’s break it down: In Hyper Light Breaker, you hack ‘n slash enemies à la Hyper Light Drifter; glide across surreal and picturesque expanses à la Solar Ash; get bludgeoned by giant brutal bosses à la Dark SoulsAnd Elden Ring; and can team up with up with other players to overcome challenges à la Destiny 2. See — that’s much simpler to understand, right? This is especially true when you see it in action using this trailer.

No one should be surprised that this is the case. Hyper Light BreakerSince its initial announcement last year, the game has seen significant changes in development. Noclip recently released a behind-the scenes documentary that explains how the game evolved from its original concept. It was initially intended to be a level-based, procedurally-generated roguelike. Over the past year, however, Heart Machine adopted a “Pangaea Shift” approach to the game’s level design: merging all of the stages of the game’s setting into one seamless, procedurally generated open world.

This design recalibration has resulted in what the studio describes as “an open world you’ll only see once,” because every time the player dies — and from the looks of it, players will be doing quite a lot of that — the world of the Overgrowth will be regenerated with a new landscape across the game’s roughly five distinct environmental biomes. It’s certainly an ambitious design approach, which explains why the game’s Early Access release has been pushed to fall 2023 of this year instead of its previously stated release window of this spring. Although it is disappointing at times, the game does not cause too much frustration. The best things are always in the right time.

Hyper Light BreakerEarly Access Steam will release the following fall.