A Hyper Light Drifter tabletop RPG is on the way, and its pixel art perfection

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If you think we’ve seen everything when it comes to dungeon-delving, you’ve clearly not encountered Hyper Light Drifter’s very-good-boy dog warriors. The pixel art adventure game made waves when it launched back in 2016, and now the team behind it have turned their sights to a tabletop RPG set in the same universe. It’s currently looking for backers on Kickstarter (opens in new tab). Because the original game began life on the crowdfunding site as a homage to 16-bit classics like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, it makes sense for this new project to take its first steps there as well. Pledges range from $15 for the PDF copy to an expensive-but-cool $300 tier that nets you the game and an opportunity to design a boss or NPC that’ll gets its own entry within the setting book. Meanwhile, those who pay $55 will get their hands on a ‘Drifter Starter Box’ that’s packaged in a faux-SNES case. This contains print and PDF rules, a board, five 20-sided dice, character sheets, and more. The game will be published by Metal Weave Games.

From first impressions alone, its product mockups are stunning – they already give the best tabletop RPGs (opens in new tab) a run for their money in the looks department. You see, Hyper Light Drifter’s world may have come to an end, but at least it had the decency to go out in the most eye-catching way possible. This is a vibrant setting of rich, gorgeous color, and that style carries over to the TRPG’s rulebooks. In fact, the Kickstarter page claims that this is the first TRPG to feature fully-illustrated pixel art. Just pump it straight into my eyeballs.

It’s a fascinating world, too. The setting blends fantasy and sci-fi tech with ambiguous lore, and there’s also a lack of humans that’s refreshing. Your average homo sapiens have been replaced by a variety of anthropomorphic races, and the only ones left are known as ‘Blues’ due to their unusual skin-tone (everyone in-game kinda thinks they suck, too). 

“This is only the beginning of our big plans in tabletop for this captivating game,” notes Metal Weave Games’s creative director, Andreas Walters, in the press release. “Hyper Light Drifter is such a rich and wonderful universe, and we expect to produce an equally evocative line of tabletop products that will last for years to come.”

Intriguingly, the TRPG is set on a different continent from Hyper Light Drifter to differentiate it from the original game. As their Kickstarter entry mentions, the team did this to “keep the open-ended nature of the video game open”.

Interested? The game has set up its own website, and this features an example of the basic rules (opens in new tab). 

In the meantime, get your tabletop fix with the best board games (opens in new tab).