Indie studio Heart Machine, best known for Hyper Light Drifter but more recently Hyper Light Breaker and Solar Ash, doesn't stay in one place for long. The studio's next game is a 2D sidescroller Metroidvania, or search action game, called Possessor(s), with combat that's inspired by platform fighters like Super Smash Bros. and a narrative that's much heavier than the team's previous releases. It's quite different from Hyper Light Breaker, a narrative-light open-world roguelike which is still in ongoing, parallel development in early access. That's kind of the point.
"The games industry is changing," director Alx Preston tells me at GDC 2025. "That's been a goal for a long time, that parallel development, because it's safer to have some diversity in your production cycle, and in your release cycle, too, so that we can continue to be in the conversation even between bigger projects that might take three, four, whatever amount of years. And also to make sure, just as importantly, that people on the team can stick around for the longer term, because we might be doing some different projects.
"We're not just making Dark Souls over and over again. We have a variety of skill sets and ideas between all of us that I think people are compelled to do, and harnessing that is really important, I think, for the health of everyone and including the projects that we put out there. So it's a mix of many different things, including business decisions and market decisions and team stuff and skill sets. It just makes a lot of sense at the end of the day to have parallel productions and see what we can do on a variety of scales."
The studio's increasingly diverse roster of games, while all action-focused, does raise a question: what is a Heart Machine game? Preston's vision reminds me very much of what I've heard from the stewards of the SteamWorld series, which has nailed a range of genres. Preston, meanwhile, looks to Nintendo. (The Dark Souls nod is especially relevant today after the reveal of The Duskbloods, a bizarre and Bloodborne-y multiplayer game from FromSoftware that will be a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive.)
"My perspective is always that the games we do should contribute towards building that brand so that anybody can look at a screenshot or a trailer of one of our games and think, all right, that looks like a Heart Machine game," Preston says. "Having an identifiable brand or house style or whatever you want to call it is, I think, important, and even more so nowadays when the markets are saturated.
"Our reputation can only go so far if we don't keep maximizing what came before and translating it into something in the future. So that people can understand, much like Nintendo games, you're gonna get something that's of a certain quality if it's one of our games. That's always the goal, that people can trust the games are going to be good at the end of the day."
Working on something like this alongside Breaker can be refreshing in its own right, says writer Laura Michet. "I think I get most creatively energized when I don't have to bang my head against the exact same problem all day long, because solving one problem can give you ideas on how to solve other problems," she says. I'm reminded of 2023 comments from Obsidian's Josh Sawyer, who championed small and in-between games as team boons.
For narrative director Tyler Hutchison, juggling two big projects can be overwhelming; he finds refreshment in juggling disciplines instead, alternating between writing the story and writing code. "I'm here so Tyler gets to write more code," Michet jokes. Producer Myriame Lachapelle notes that this kind of discipline overlap can also fuel some of the best ideas, with story and level design and combat and other devs working out how to make the most of different areas of the game.
Hyper Light Breaker stumbled at launch but has improved dramatically since, and I had a great time with Drifter and Solar Ash (full Solar Ash review here), so a Metroidvania from Heart Machine immediately caught my eye (even if Preston understandably hates the term and prefers search action). I'm immediately in love with the art, and the idea of platform fighter combat in a sprawling sidescroller gets my brain racing.
