Best Action Games Like Hyper Light Drifter

The best action games like Hyper Light Drifter are Death's Door, Hollow Knight and Titan Souls. Below are 7, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to action costs you.

Why Action Is a Good Answer for Hyper Light Drifter

Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.

What you get: Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.

What made Hyper Light Drifter worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the action part of that answer, and only the action part.

7 Action Games Like Hyper Light Drifter

  1. 1. Death's Door

    Compact top-down adventure paced almost identically, and kinder.

  2. 2. Hollow Knight

    The same refusal to explain, at four times the size.

  3. 3. Titan Souls

    One arrow, one hit, sixteen bosses in a quiet overworld.

  4. 4. Blasphemous 2

    Gorgeous pixel art and heavy, deliberate combat.

  5. 5. Katana ZERO

    Fast, lethal 2D action with a striking hand-drawn style.

  6. 6. Ender Lilies

    Melancholy, beautiful, and mechanically sharp.

  7. 7. Shadow of the Colossus

    For the same emptiness and the same refusal to narrate.

What This Filter Leaves Out

Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.

Specifically, these are strong answers for Hyper Light Drifter that are not action games, so they are not on this page:

  • Tunic — Wordless adventuring where the in-game manual is itself the puzzle.
  • Eastward — Pixel art of the same quality in a much warmer game.

The full list is on games like Hyper Light Drifter — 9 picks, no genre filter.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best action game like Hyper Light Drifter?

Death's Door. Compact top-down adventure paced almost identically, and kinder.

Are all of these on the PlayStation 4?

No. Hyper Light Drifter released on the PlayStation 4, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.

What makes a good action game?

A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.

Are action games always hard?

No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.

How are these chosen?

By hand. Each pick was written for the full Hyper Light Drifter list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is action — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.

Other Angles on Hyper Light Drifter

More Action Games Recommendations

Or read the action guide for where to start in the genre generally.