The game was a very personal project for Preston, as he is suffering from a chronical congenital heart disease that could take his life at any moment, so he decided to let Hyper Light Drifter be his mark in the video game industry, making video games having always been a dream for him. Many of the drifters the player character encounters have the disease as well. There are other beings in the world who are called 'drifters,' being an occupation born by nomadic people who explore the world and collect ancient technologies.

Playing as the Drifter, the player also collects ancient weapon technology. There are allusion to the fact that the people of the world, most of which are anthropomorphized animals, created Judgement in their search for immortality, and wound up at war with one another, as well as allusions to giant titans, both organic and artificial ones, being involved in the war or cataclysmic event that destroyed the world. Meanwhile he gets visions of a dark entity known as Judgement, as well of a jackal or Anubis-like deity who guides the Drifter through the post-apocalyptic, war-ravaged continent to find and destroy Judgement, which fester below the ground in the form of a kind of artificial intelligence computer chip that still corrupts the Land of Light, the continent that the game is set on. In Hyper Light Drifter, the player takes control of a character referred to as 'the Drifter,' a blue humanoid, seemingly of an outcast race, possibly artificial, who has been taken by a terminal disease and is searching for a cure. It is a science fiction top-down view pixel art video game with cyberpunk-like color aestethics, hack and slash mechanics inspired by both The Legend of Zelda in terms of trajectory and with very strict dodging mechanics reminiscent (but not inspired by) Dark Souls. Singleplayer Local co-op Hyper Light Drifter was Heart Machine's first video game, and was the first look into the fictional universe that Solar Ash also occupies.

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