This is a highly impactful game: the pixel art style is haunting, as is the sound design and musical composition -- transitions of the musical composition leads to profoundly interesting moments. As might be well-known, Alx (the lead dev) suffers from heart disease, and the game communicates something of this experience.

Really couldn't recommend it more.

If you liked HLD this is your reminder that Heart Machine made three other games.

Solar Ash - rail-grinding and schmoovement, with a joyfully colorful visual style and a melancholy story, well worth the ten bucks or so it is on Steam right now

Hyper Light Breaker - free-roaming online roguelike, did not make it out of early access, really not worth the twenty bucks or so it currently is

Possessor(s) - a very pretty and melancholy metroidvania, a great value for the two bucks it's priced at on steam

Last I heard Heart Machine seems to have pretty much evaporated, their bluesky is pretty much nothing but nine-month-old reblogs of their laid-off devs posting their Linkedins. Maybe it will return but I'm not holding my breath.

Disasterpiece is a fantastic composer. His work on Fez is probably some of my favorite video game soundtrack work on any game ever. I remember hearing that he was working on Hyper Light Drifter when it was on Kickstarter and I was thrilled and while it's not as individually memorable (in my opinion) is still great work.

For those who would like to watch in Youtube (and save it to their playlists?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1b9xKRC74E

I quite like this one

https://youtu.be/U4FNBMZsqrY

my ears are mushrooms, this to me feel the same as fez.

(2017)