But I currently have enough support through family, friends, people I care about and my work that I can deal with the struggle. “My life will never be normal, I doubt my health will get much better – there will always be problems, and I suspect this state of generally feeling bad is sticking around for some time. I still struggle daily with diet, medications, trying to feel less like horrible garbage so I can get up and work on something.” “I just had a heart valve installed in November of 2015. “I see my cardiologist every six months, as well as another for my cholesterol and pacemaker checkups,” he says. The sense of physical fragility has been with him his whole life. Preston underwent gruelling open heart surgery as a baby and had a pacemaker installed a few years ago. It was incredibly helpful to make some trashy work that I eventually burned or gave away, as it made me a better artist, brought me closer to defining what I actually wanted to say with any of my work moving forward.” I threw stuff at the walls to see what stuck, what resonated with me and my peers. “I made a lot of unsatisfying, straight-up bad work,” he says. He explored the subject during college in the form of painting and film, experimenting with both abstract and hyper-real styles. Hyper Light Drifter isn’t the first time that Preston has channelled his fluctuating health – and the proximity of death – into art.
That’s something I’m keenly familiar with.” “The main character in Hyper Light Drifter suffers from a deadly illness, one he is desperately seeking a cure for. This gives me a certain perspective on life, and plays into the stories I want to tell. “A plethora of digestive and immune system problems have left me hospitalised on numerous occasions, often near death. “I’ve dealt with serious health issues since I was born: congenital heart disease, to start,” he says. This is all metaphor – and it is about the game’s developer Alex Preston. Right after that, the character is shown entering a colossal fight with a large, relentless monster made of black ooze, which eventually engulfs the drifter in a dark webby prison. In it, you see the drifter coughing up bright pink blood, bent over in pain as their insides rip apart. But everything you need to know about the game’s underlying story is there in that opening animation, which recurs like a nightmare throughout the journey. It’s a game that shows rather than tells, and it expects you to pay attention to its every detail to piece it all together. Hyper Light Drifter Photograph: Heart Machine Yet not much is told of the world along the way save the occasional slideshow of images that stand-in for the spoken words of the frightened locals. You dash through lush woods and crystal lagoons, and you fight poison wolves and old knights with an electric blue sword and a modifiable gun. Ostensibly an action role-playing game, it borrows the best parts of classic titles such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Diablo, to produce something that looks like a classic 1990s console adventure. Put in the eight or so hours to beat Hyper Light Drifter and it’s likely you won’t learn much more about its mysterious world. It looks like a standard science-fiction tale of doomed planets and extraterrestrial invasion, but it turns out these scenes of massacre are the visions of a single person, the titular drifter. Released in March to wide critical acclaim, it opens with a wordless three-minute animation in which an unknown land is ravaged by a blinding explosion a lake of blood forms and quickly fills with the corpses of alien creatures. H yper Light Drifter is a game about struggle.
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