Hyper Mode (sometimes called Hyper Missiles) is a state in which the game's internal clock is imprecise, which causes certain mechanics to run faster and cooldowns for certain actions to be reduced.
Most notably, missiles can be fired much faster in Hyper Mode.
Hyper Mode is a banned Glitch, and can't be used in any category!
To enter Hyper Mode, you need to do the following:
Hyper Mode will persist across save files and runs, so long as you do not close the game in between runs. To keep Hyper Mode for a later day, put your Switch into Sleep Mode. If the total time your Switch has been on and running Dread hits a bit more than 6 days (145 hours and 38 minutes), you will encounter more bugs and you will have to start over.[1]
The following mechanics are affected[2]:
The game keeps a running counter of how long the game has been running (called GameTime in this explanation). GameTime starts at 0 when you launch the game, just before the logo appears, and counts up each frame by the amount of seconds that have passed since the last frame (which is normally 1 / 60, or ~0.01667 seconds). It pauses during loads, but never resets unless the game closes.
Certain actions in the game, such as firing your beam, firing a missile, performing a melee, etc. will track the last time that you performed that action. (Called LastActionTime here). Each action has a specific cooldown time, and it compares GameTime with LastActionTime to see if enough time has passed for you to perform the action again.
These counters all store time in seconds as a 32-bit floating point number. Due to the limitations of floating point numbers, larger values can have fewer digits after the decimal point, which means they are less precise.
When GameTime gets too big, it starts to lose the ability to represent the game time in a precise manner. This means that it won't actually increase by 1/60th of a second every frame, but might get rounded to the nearest number it can represent.
Changes in timer precision occur when GameTime hits certain times: