Hyper Light Drifter is a game about a world; sure, there’s a lot of fighting and weapons and upgrades (and even a bit of football), but ultimately everything is about the world Heart Machine set out to create. And what a world it winds up being.

You start off alone, in the mountains, and sick. Hyper Light Drifter is careful to make your sickness apparent, but never let it weigh you down. Immediately, your presence and purpose is set up – an indeterminate time ago, a catastrophe happened, and you’re at ground zero hoping to find a cure. It’s unclear exactly how you’ll find the cure, but the only hope is the technology of a civilization that destroyed itself.

After briefly succumbing to illness, the Drifter wakes up in town, and takes their first steps into the unknown. You get scraps of information from the townspeople: someone of the Drifter’s race was mugged on their travels, the mysterious drifter who saved you has a penchant for defending the weak, and the key to finding the cure is in the center of town.

And none of these stories are delivered via words – they are presented through carefully, lovingly drawn images of the events. All of the stories you’ll hear are like this: when you enter a new area, you’ll find out about the area boss’ history through visual recollections of their deeds; when you find a secluded survivor, their tragedy is rendered in detail more explicit than text can easily provide; when you run across the other drifter, he simply sketches on your map.

But these encounters are rare. The world of Hyper Light Drifter is a hostile and uncompromising one, which leaves you without friends or sources of information for most of your journey. To compensate, the world around you is the story. You’ll run across houses and people consumed by crystal, and you’ll see the corpses of giants in the distance that you eventually see up close later. As you go, you start to piece together a rough history of the world just by existing in it. Later, when you find that survivor, it provides just enough clarity to establish a foundation of lore, but doesn’t overwhelm what your imagination can come up with. In the end, how you experience Hyper Light Drifter – and, more importantly, how you perceive Hyper Light Drifter – becomes the narrative.

It’s also possible to overlook survivors (though they don’t go anywhere, and can be discovered later), which can drastically affect your understanding of the world. The experience of having your own canon superseded by a game is not a common occurrence, but it’s a thrilling experience when pulled off properly. When my Drifter first set out, they were in a hurry to explore: as a player, I wanted to play; as a Drifter, I wanted a cure. As such, I paid little attention to the details around me, and carried out my task and left. When I came back after two more area bosses were defeated, I found the survivor I never spoke to, and all of the details I had overlooked previously were suddenly relevant and ominous.

This only accounts for the surface, though. One elevator ride down, and you start finding entirely new fragments of lore that help you piece together what happened in this world. You see drifters that were killed – or possibly killed each other – in their quest to retrieve modules; you never learn the cause of their demise. Beyond a new source of narrative nuance, the buried laboratories help teach you one constant truth in Hyper Light Drifter: everything has a secret.

The Drifter is more than proficient at fighting (though how proficient you, as a player are, is another story), so combat is a way to keep the stakes high while you fulfill your true purpose: exploring. You’ll find fake walls, invisible platforms, and cleverly hidden switches, all which take you to new resources, new story, new items, and new clues.

And the best part? You won’t know any of this from the get-go. Even as a player who knew there would be secrets to look for, I overlooked several in the first area I went to. But the second area taught me a bit more about how the world of Hyper Light Drifter works, and by the end of the third, I knew a lot. On return, I found secrets I had easily overlooked – ones that didn’t even take upgraded abilities to reach.

Which puts Hyper Light Drifter in a really interesting position: it’s Metroidvanian, in a sense, but it rarely gates off areas based on what abilities you have. Rather, Hyper Light Drifter gates off areas based on what you’ve learned about how the world is constructed. There are also gates that require specific areas to be cleared, but you would almost need precognition to find everything in an area your first time through, and that’s what makes exploring so enjoyable.

This focus on exploration plays brilliantly with how the game presents its narrative, as you are required to explore to the best of your abilities, and encouraged to discover new ways to explore beyond what you’re used to. As such, you naturally run across tons of ponderous scenes, and uncovering well hidden ones feels extra special.

Hyper Light Drifter, to me, is a lot of things: it’s Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, but as a game; it seems like a spiritual successor to Bokura no Taiyō; it’s beautiful sprite graphics in an age where sprite graphics are fading away; it’s ambiguous in its narrative in the best possible ways.

Hyper Light Drifter is a game I’ve known I wanted since 2013 – but it’s also a game I’ve longed to see happen for longer than that.