The closest games to Hyper Light Drifter are Death's Door, Tunic and Hollow Knight. Below, 9 picks with the reason for each — what carries over from Hyper Light Drifter, and what does not.
Hyper Light Drifter tells you nothing. No text, no tutorial, a world you read through pictograms and ruins, and combat that is fast enough to kill you in three hits. The pixel art and the Disasterpeace score do the storytelling, and the difficulty is deliberate rather than incidental.
Hyper Light Drifter released on the PlayStation 4. The list below is not restricted to that console — a recommendation is only useful if you can actually play it, so it spans generations and platforms.
Compact top-down adventure paced almost identically, and kinder.
Wordless adventuring where the in-game manual is itself the puzzle.
The same refusal to explain, at four times the size.
One arrow, one hit, sixteen bosses in a quiet overworld.
Gorgeous pixel art and heavy, deliberate combat.
Fast, lethal 2D action with a striking hand-drawn style.
Melancholy, beautiful, and mechanically sharp.
Pixel art of the same quality in a much warmer game.
For the same emptiness and the same refusal to narrate.
Several of these have their own page here: games like Death's Door, games like Hollow Knight, games like Katana ZERO, games like Shadow of the Colossus.
The 4 of these picks that have a page here, and the console each is catalogued under. Most are on more platforms than one — remasters and back catalogues move constantly — so treat this as where to start looking rather than a complete availability list.
| Game | Catalogued under |
|---|---|
| Death's Door | Switch |
| Hollow Knight | Switch |
| Katana ZERO | Switch |
| Shadow of the Colossus | PS2 |
Death's Door. Compact top-down adventure paced almost identically, and kinder.
Death's Door, Tunic and Hollow Knight are the closest. The full list of Hyper Light Drifter similar games is on this page — 9 of them, each with the reason it is here rather than a genre tag that happens to match.
The picks above span platforms rather than sticking to the PS4, because the thing worth copying about Hyper Light Drifter is not a property of the hardware. The PS4 list further down is the place to go for more from that library.
Because the thing you liked about Hyper Light Drifter is not a property of the hardware. Restricting the list to one console would drop most of the good answers, so the picks above span platforms and eras. If you specifically want more from that library, the PS4 list further down is the place to start.
By hand, one game at a time, on what the source game actually does — its pacing, its movement, its difficulty, its tone. Genre tags alone put Hyper Light Drifter next to games that feel nothing like it, so they are not the basis for this list. Each pick carries the reason it is here so you can judge it yourself.
No. The whole list is on this page, free, with no sign-in and no email. We earn a small affiliate commission if you buy through a retailer link, which is what pays for the site.
If you already know what kind of answer you want, these are the same list cut by genre — and each one says what it leaves out as well as what it includes:
More from the PlayStation 4 library, each with its own recommendations page: