Hyper Light Drifter – how heart disease inspired one of 2016's great games

The central character in this brilliant new game is haunted by a deadly illness - something with which creator Alex Preston is all-too familiar

Hyper Light Drifter is a game about struggle. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.