The Early Access launch of open-world roguelike Hyper Light Breaker, the latest game from Solar Ash and Hyper Light Drifter developer Heart Machine, has been pushed back from late 2024 to early 2025. And if you need me, I’ll be in the Sad Corner.
The news came in the middle of Gamescom opening night livejust not at the fair itself. Founder and creative director Alx Preston of Heart Machine says in a Steam blog post “After careful evaluation and numerous discussions with our publisher Arc Games, we have come to the conclusion that we need a little more time to refine the gaming experience to our standards.
“So we’re now planning an Early Access launch date early next year. We don’t want to ship a project, even in Early Access, that we’re not happy with in many ways. Especially in the current state of the industry, we need to put in the best effort possible.”
Preston emphasizes, “We believe in maintaining a sustainable development pace for our team, which means taking care of everyone’s mental and physical health first, rather than overburdening the team trying to meet a specific launch date.” Aside from doing this is the right thing to do, Preston says it also sets the team up for “better, more responsive” development as the game evolves later in Early Access.
Heart Machine is planning more Hyper Light Breaker demos at various trade shows and conventions in the coming months, and Preston emphasizes: “We REALLY want to get Breaker out there and see people engage with a game we’ve all worked so hard on.”
At the beginning of the year I was finally able to try out Hyper Light Breakerand even in a subpar demo setup that almost had a TV shoved right in my face, it showed tremendous promise. This delay was a real monkey’s paw moment; what a fool I was to hope for a release date update.
At Gamescom itself there was news about Infinity Nikki, the cozy open-world dress-up adventure game led by a Breath of the Wild developerwith a new trailer and an incredible soundtrack brain worm.
