Hyper Light Breaker is a 3D co-op follow-up to Drifter, coming next year

Find out if your friends are Drifter compatible

Heart Machine is fresh off its most recent game, Solar Ash, and already has another in the works. Today, the studio revealed Hyper Light Breaker, a new game set in the Hyper Light Drifter universe.

Today is the sixth anniversary of Hyper Light Drifter‘s launch, and developer Heart Machine took the occasion to unveil an animated trailer and a very brief snippet of early footage of its follow-up. Hyper Light Breaker takes some noticeable strides away from Drifter. It’s 3D, rather than 2D; and while Drifter was a solo affair, Breaker will have online co-op as the focus.

The original creative director, Alx Preston, is taking lead on Hyper Light Breaker as well. In a press release, Preston described Breaker as a “new path and culmination of everything we have learned over the past eight years of development at Heart Machine.”

Hyper Light Drifter was a pretty big hit for Heart Machine, standing out with incredible style and action blending into one gorgeous, challenging adventure. While Solar Ash had a similarly stylish look, it sounds like charm couldn’t quite carry it to the same heights.

A return to the Hyper Light world sounds great, though. And a focus on both 3D graphics and online co-op sounds intriguing, too. Though Drifter had some local co-op potential, it seemed fairly barebones at the time.

With Hyper Light Breaker, it’ll be interesting to see what Heart Machine does with a multiplayer set-up right out of the gate. Here’s hoping to a lot more neon slicing-and-dicing, and maybe some of those giant creepy robot faces too. The Steam description advertises plenty of enemies to fight, an arsenal to grow, deep storylines hidden in each attempt at the roguelite structure, and movement using wall-dashes, hoverboarding, and gliding.

Hyper Light Breaker is aiming for early access on Steam in Spring 2023. You can find it on Steam to wishlist ahead of time here.