Hyke: Northern Light(s) sits at an increasingly common crossroads for smaller-scale JRPGs, with one foot turned towards adventure and the other towards cosiness. Sometimes it just isn’t enough to send your party out on a quest to save the world: you’ve also got to find a little time to relax.
Life-sim games such as Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing planted this seed and watered it with the potential profitability of the template. Hyke: Northern Light(s) emerges from that trend, although there’s no farming involved here. Instead, it emulates their cosy vibe to varying degrees of success.
As the game begins, we see the fallout of a confrontation between a witch named Aurora and her opponent, Wiseman, which takes place in a ruined landscape. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end well for Aurora, as Wiseman gets a young girl named Neir to do a little weeding for him. We then jump into the future and step into the shoes of Aurora’s daughter Hyke as she travels the country with her best friend Riko in search of her missing mother. When her mother disappeared, her father raised her alone, but now he has passed, it becomes even more important to find Aurora.
This plot frames the journey that follows, as Hyke continues her search for her mother while being led by a mysterious voice from a portable radio. Hyke inherited her mother’s witchy powers, and during her travels, she meets other young women with unique abilities of their own.
Of course, journeying the wilds of the semi-apocalyptic environment of Hyke: Northern Light(s) isn’t safe, and Hyke must learn to defend herself. You’ll view Hyke’s world from a top-down perspective reminiscent of the 2D Zelda games. You have access to a melee attack, which has the advantage of not being on a cooldown timer, unlike everything else. Your other options include a dodge and Hyke’s sorcery, with two magical abilities equipped at any one time. Your spell choices start off limited, but later expand, with the same being true for the other girls who join your party.
One of the strengths of Hyke: Northern Light(s) comes from the mechanical diversity of the characters in your roster. Hyke’s powers feel the most straightforward of the bunch, with a mix of long-range and close-range attacks, her simplistic design works well as an introduction to the core gameplay loop. When you get the chance to play as Riko, things take a left turn.
Riko’s basic attack restores her health when her blows connect, with the trade-off that they land weakly, doing very little damage. However, by charging up her attack, she can transform into a hideous pink bunny, whose features make a Labubu’s look positively normal. This form sees her unleashing deadly attacks, although it only takes a couple of hits before it’s back to plain old Riko again.
The other characters also demonstrate this variety of approaches. These include the android character Mother Brain (undoubtedly a reference to the classic Metroid villain), whose controls turn the game into a twin-stick shooter, flipping everything on its head in a delightful fashion and bringing me back to long-gone days playing Smash TV in the arcade.
Although Hyke: Northern Light(s)’s visual presentation sometimes lacks consistency, Hyke’s party members have beautiful character portrait art, which look like they come from a good shojo manga. Their in-game pixel art equivalents keep the distinctive looks, but feature the occasional odd disconnect between the two; for example, Mother Brain’s pixel incarnation has a face resembling the robotic aesthetics of Astrobot, whilst the standard portrait art makes her look more human.
Hyke: Northern Light(s) gives us a range of environments to explore, and this helps to refresh the experience upon completion of each section. You start in Neverland, an irradiated forest landscape with a Ferris wheel at its heart, its autumnal air establishing an atmosphere of loss and reflection. You’ll later visit Savage Island, a robot-infested paradise, and Fifty-One, a comical version of the fabled Area 51, complete with squishy-looking aliens and a crashed spaceship.
In every realm of Hyke: Northern Light(s) you will meet a new member of the cast; each thematically linked to her zone. In Neverland you’ll encounter Fall Out, a softly spoken girl who can summon animals to assist her, and Fifty-One has Extra, an eccentric ET with a metallic tail. The girls initially oppose Hyke and function as boss characters before finally agreeing to join in her quest.
Hyke: Northern Light(s) divides its realms into several levels, each covered by a “fog of war” that dissipates as you adventure further in. You hack and slash at the numerous area-appropriate beasties that inhabit these places, discovering chests and collecting currency until you reach a green glowing exit, which signals the end of the ordeal. Whilst initially attractive, these levels feel repetitive in their design, with elements such as crashed planes in Neverland and various buildings elsewhere subject to frequent reuse.
You also won’t be doing a lot of varied activities whilst you complete your traversal. Although inspired by Zelda (Riko even says that it’s “dangerous to go alone” at the start of the game), the game doesn’t offer puzzles or other diversions to break up the flow. At most, you get the challenge of locating treasures off the beaten track, but you won’t find this especially difficult to achieve.
Between these excursions you return to your campsite. Hyke loves camping, as reflected in Hyke: Northern Light(s)‘ cosy gameplay elements that I mentioned earlier. You can fill your camp with items that you obtain through adventuring or from shops. You rotate and place them as you wish, although within a very limited space. You also choose which of your characters inhabit the space, and once placed they wander around, sometimes sitting in the chairs you may have put down. You have the option of choosing the background music from tracks you accumulate through play, and you can photograph the scene for posterity if you so choose.
Here you also engage in cooking, which I found essential for beating the game’s most difficult areas. Whipping up a recipe on your portable stove affords you bonuses to your attacks, magic, or movement speed, which wear off after a time or when you complete the level. You can experiment with cooking equipment and ingredients, but I just followed recipes provided and never felt the need to do anything else.
I like camping as much as anyone, so I can appreciate Hyke’s enthusiasm for it. However, the cosy camping elements of Hyke: Northern Light(s) did very little for me. The activities have no real hook to them; none of that addictive quality that other games in similar genres offer. The campsite’s size ensures that any additions to it automatically clutter up the space provided. It all feels tacked on and superfluous.
Combat forms the true centre of Hyke: Northern Light(s). Fast-paced and frenetic, the game hurls tentfuls of terrors at you, which can sometimes be overwhelming. To be successful, you will need to activate your skills effectively. The combat occasionally reminded me of roguelites like Hades in this respect and in the need to constantly keep moving to keep on top of the situation. Having the dodge on a cooldown felt frustrating, though, and dampened my ability to form effective strategies on the fly. Furthermore, Hyke: Northern Light(s) doesn’t have the tight precision of Hades, with battles feeling chaotic and uncontrollable.
Some of the powers can be a tad unbalanced, too. One of Hyke’s abilities sees her project a ring of force around herself which not only deals damage but heals Hyke as it does so. This often meant that Hyke was my default choice, allowing me to cheese through enemies for most of the game.
The boss fights redeem this somewhat, changing things up when they arrive and featuring enjoyable set pieces; again, I would highlight Mother Brain who turns the whole arena into a weapon to crush Hyke.
Hyke: Northern Light(s) has towns that you can visit, one for each location. Here you can buy camping equipment and ingredients. Disappointingly, towns feature very little interaction, which reduces the impact and sense of exploration of Hyke’s travels. The feeling of living in a unique world unlike our own and the sense of discovery this brings make the best JRPGs so special, and I was very much looking forward to getting that from this game, but sadly, it did not deliver.
In the towns you can sign up for sidequests, but don’t expect much from them. They drop your chosen character into an arena and ask you to defeat a specific number of creatures, or to survive for a set period of time. As in the main game, enemies seem like reskins of each other, so boredom quickly sets in.
The same can be said for the story. Although you’ll encounter a few intriguing twists and turns in the plot, Hyke: Northern Light(s) places most of the emphasis on its characters to drive engagement. This approach falters due to the lack of time we spend with these girls, with their personalities mostly being one-note. For instance, Extra says crazy, “fish out of water” things, and Hall Keeper expects everyone to love her.
They expand upon this in the camp events you activate, which show conversations between party members, but they don’t last long and leave no lasting impressions. The presence of voice acting elevates them, and bizarrely, the camp events have more voicework than you find in the main questline.
Despite not living up to its potential, Hyke: Northern Light(s) still has its charms, and I don’t regret the time I spent hanging out under the stars with Hyke and her friends. Hopefully, if she gets another outing, she will pitch up on more pleasant ground and serve us a meal we can properly enjoy.
