- Spoiler: show
I was at a bit of a loss at what to play next for a little while, so I ended up going back to HLD and doing a run as the Alt Drifter. This time I wasn't being as thorough with collectables, I just wanted to see how the game differed playing as this character. Not massively to be honest, but it was still fun anyway. The differences are a change to how your main melee attack works, and having only 3HP instead of 5. So rather than a sword, you attack with a sort of palm-blast that has longer range than the sword, but a narrower area of effect. And of course the lower HP gives you less room to mess up. The increase in difficulty that would have brought was offset however, by me using a technique that I picked up from watching some speedruns, called "plinking". It's really simple, anyone can do it, but it massively increases your power output, that is very useful against enemies with larger health pools. All you need to do is fire your gun point-blank at enemies and immediately follow it up with the usual melee combo. I think it works with any gun, but used with the shotgun it can do some huge damage. Oh, and one other difference is a slight change to the story. You skip the intro sequence and initially spawn in the central town, and you don't get the visions of Judgement every time you activate four modules in each zone, as it seems you're not afflicted by the same illness as the main character. You still see visions of Anubis though.