Hyper Light Drifter
BANGER · RPG · 2016
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $4.99.
- Length
- 7.8h
- Value
- $0.64/hr
- Reviews
- 93% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Hyper Light Drifter is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 512 mb video memory, 2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Explore a beautiful, vast and ruined world riddled with dangers and lost technologies.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $4.99. 33 discounts in the 10 years on record. They run about 50 percent off, roughly 12 weeks apart. Today's $4.99 at 75 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
Take the discount away and it is a 68. With it, 89.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 97 percent. The nearest things to it, Convoy ($14.99, scores 48) and Death's Gambit: Afterlife ($9.99, scores 60), are both worse buys on this math.
$7.54 is where it would stop being a BANGER. Today it is $4.99.
The press gave it 84; the people who bought it give it 93 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says under 1 percent of players ever finish it. On a 7.8-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 13 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written May 2020 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 3,416 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,538 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 71 percent of the 1,119 reviews written there were positive, against 93 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 7.8 hours; clearing it takes 27, which is 3.5 times the campaign.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 7.8 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
49% start to <1% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 7.8-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
44 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I finally 100% this game and I am finally ready to make my review on it! Playtime: It will take roughly 8-10 hours or so for a first, full playthrough of the main game, give or take, other content you get for beating it is just added challenge or alternative playstyle stuff and you've likely seen everything the game has to offer by then. This game is stunning, the art and animation is very well made and quite...
What a stunning game. I can't believe it sat unplayed in my library for so long. I've loved every second of it, so far, and there's still more to go. Thanks, Alx.
This game is the peak of the peak in terms of visual appeal and soundtrack, I love how the story is told in pictures rather than text. the gameplay style is pretty interesting like how you got to eye for the secrets the time when you go and hit the enemy and so forth.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Hyper Light Drifter scores 89/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/257850/hyper-light-drifterThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.