With lofty expectations stemming from its incredible RPG Hyper Light Drifter, Heart Machine had a tough task ahead of it with Hyper Light Breaker. A co-op roguelike based in the same universe and with suitably striking visuals, the game was packed with potential, but sadly struggled to find its feet in early access. The studio has been working hard on turning things around with major updates, but it’s now been confirmed that development on Hyper Light Breaker will be ending as Heart Machine goes through another round of layoffs.
Hyper Light Breaker arrived in January, and it quickly became apparent that it needed a bit more time to cook, even if this was an early access launch. While its gorgeous visuals and boss designs were redeeming qualities, performance issues and an unsatisfying gameplay loop meant there was a lot work to do.
Heart Machine has pushed out dozens of updates, including some major content drops that add new characters and weapons. Its Buried Below update made sweeping changes to every core system in the game in an attempt to win back players and prepare it for an eventual 1.0 launch. More recently, its Double Down update brought an additional boss fight, new explorable areas, and modifiers to crank up its difficulty.
However, with daily concurrent player count peaks often struggling to hit triple figures on Steam, it always felt like Hyper Light Breaker’s days were numbered.
After going through a round of layoffs just before the game’s launch, Heart Machine is now unfortunately letting more staff go, and that means the end of development for Hyper Light Breaker. Confirming the news to Game Developer, the studio says: “While this path will include a conclusion on the project, it reflects broader forces beyond our control, including shifts in funding, corporate consolidation and the uncertain environment many small studios like us are navigating today.”
It’s unclear if any other updates, small or large, will arrive for Hyper Light Breaker in the near future as a final closing of the book. There’s also no word at the moment on whether its servers will remain online so you can still play the co-op game together – Hyper Light Breaker lets you tackle runs in a team of up to three players. I’ve reached out to Heart Machine for clarification on both these points.
Heart Machine says in its aforementioned statement that it will continue building videogames as a “smaller core team,” so that hopefully means its upcoming platformer Possessors (slated to launch on Tuesday, November 11) is unaffected. I’ve also asked Heart Machine about whether Possessors has been impacted.