Indie Game of the Week 465: Haiku, the Robot

Anyone who has been following this feature for a while knows I frequently cover exploraction games—this week being no exception, spoilers—and that I've long since abandoned the term "metroidvania" due in large part to how I've observed this genre expand and evolve over the decades since early Indie exemplars like Cave Story or Aquaria. At the time of its coining, somewhere in the early to mid-aughts, the term "metroidvania" made sense as almost all of those types of game had either the Metroid or Castlevania brand, so it tracked then in much the way "Doom Clone" tracked for those FPSes that immediately followed 1993's Doom and played (un)surprisingly like it—though the term may have sounded derisive it was more often than not accurate, at least until we got into the eras of Halo and Half-Life and Call of Duty et al and it became impractical for a simple ancestor to be the genre namesake of such a numerous, complex, and varied group. The exploraction genre has since reached that juncture as well, in part evinced by this week's game, the Estonian-developed Haiku, the Robot, which owes a much bigger debt to an exploraction game that has perhaps eclipsed both Metroid and Castlevania in popularity and may well go on to influence just as many games (if it hasn't already): Team Cherry's Hollow Knight. Unless we start calling this genre "metroidhollowvania" instead (or maybe "metroidorihollowvaniaenderverges") it's going to continue moving further from relevancy.

So what exactly do I mean by drawing a direct line between Haiku and Hollow Knight? Well, for one, Haiku's health gauge is simply a matter of hits you can take rather than something more abstract like a bar or a vitality stat: you start with three bulbs of some sort of engine fluid (you are a robot after all) and until you upgrade it that's all the blows you can take before you perish. Death causes some of your currency to go away, though there are means to hang onto more of it or create a recoverable cache where you died, as well as a game-wide system of "banking" cash with a helpful bird friend whose roosts can be found in various places. You have a limited number of slots for passive upgrades, requiring some judgement as to which would be the most useful and when (like, for instance, preparing for a boss fight rather than general exploration). The world is a dour place, clearly on the outs, with many former citizens now transformed by some manner of corruption (in Hollow Knight it was mental interference by a malevolent godlike entity from another dimension, here it's more a malignant virus) and the few sane NPCs that you might bump into are typically saturnine about the scenario and doing the best they can to keep on trucking though there's at least one oddly cheerful tourist who invites you to relax with him on occasion. All of this grimness is juxtaposed by a rather cute visual design for the characters, not least of which is the protagonist itself whom tends to be at least a foot shorter than everything it meets. Despite the strong comparison, Haiku still has some tricks of its own, like an internal heat gauge—you literally need to cool down after using your dodge and other abilities too frequently—and this almost-monochrome Game Boy-like filter that switches palettes whenever you pass into a new zone, in case the changed level design and music wasn't indication enough.

There aren't actually that many things to buy and it's not like you use this currency to level up, so your bird friend actually makes out like a bandit towards the end of the game once it's holding onto thousands of these things.

Haiku's also going for a sort of age of machines vibe similar to some post-apocalyptic scenarios where humans are no-shows, though we certainly left our mark on the world before we left, and society such as it is are a bunch of aging automatons that must find new purpose without humans to serve. In this case, it feels like humans died out so long ago that the robot citizenry scarcely remembers them and were doing just fine without us until this virus came along and quickly spread to almost everyone. Part of the game's mystery is figuring out where this virus originated and what involvement, if any, the humans of old may have had (I'm not suspecting a NieR: Replicant/Gestalt type of twist, but I'm not not anticipating it either). Beyond that, though, the game is relatively free of concrete directions. Rather, for much of its run it pulls off the old Hobson's choice trick of supposedly "open" exploraction games in that your options are always strictly limited by the upgrades you may or may not have. This changes towards the end of the game where it's generous enough to give you the "resist high temperatures" and "survive underwater" upgrades simultaneously, which unlocks most of the remaining map, and from there it's a matter of finding the remaining upgrades and taking down any remaining story-critical bosses between you and the answers you seek. Boss fights are challenging but not overly so, with most bosses possessed of at least two "phases", the second of which adds a new attack to the pattern and intensifies the others: there's an achievement that offers the additional challenge of never picking up the item that allows you to heal manually, and I've found the game strikes the perfect difficulty balance without it—if I had to guess, this was the developers' way of offering either a specifically Hollow Knight level of challenge (which was already a tough game, and it sounds like Silksong is even more so) or a more accessible one for players of a broader skill range.

While it hits the same highs as Hollow Knight for the most part (as well as some of its lows: a lot of your map is irritatingly invisible until you find and destroy the jamming machines that are disrupting your internal cartography systems) what helps set it apart is that aesthetic, which switches bugs for bots and vast nests for ancient large-scale machinery has that since grown quiet. This also gives the game the opportunity to create situations where you might restore power to the local vicinity only for that to turn on all the traps in addition to the moving platforms you need to explore more of the area. There's some "ghost in the machine" vibes you get early on, pretty much the moment Haiku wakes up, and you'll notice a shadowy specter abandoning the carcasses of the bosses you just defeated. (That, honestly, is when I'm hit by the Nier vibes hardest.) The visual design has a nice clean look to it, with well-defined contours and evident signs of walls you might be able to destroy or otherwise move past with the right upgrades. It won't necessarily track those telltale secrets for you but there is an in-game tool that'll drop question marks on the map if it's an obvious barrier you cannot overcome until you've found the right upgrade(s): having this tool active does mean depriving yourself of a slot you could use on a different passive that might be more useful for survival, however. Given even small details like the fast-travel system (a subway train you can summon) and how map markers for things like save points are doled out incrementally are inescapably Hollow Knight-inspired, it makes that comparison difficult to ignore for the sake of reviewing this game agnostically. Still, "it's a heck of a lot like Hollow Knight" isn't exactly a detriment, even if it doesn't quite measure up to it in many regards (the combat is disappointingly basic, for one; what happening to the pogo-ing? Or even a charge attack?).

Most exploraction games treat the map as a freebie, but a rare few like Haiku makes you work to get the most utility out of them.

So that's Haiku the Robot, for the most part. As new exploraction champions come to replace the old (if perhaps only temporarily if that upcoming new Castlevania can walk the walk) so too will we continue to see those inspired more directly by those same rising stars. There is no game industry without imitation, and likewise there's a lot of "standing on the shoulders of giants" that have made today's Indie games so much more competitive in quality than they used to be (along with there just being way more of them coming out on the regular). Even as a "Hollowclone" however, Haiku has plenty of unique charms going for it between its clean look, its mechanical vibes and worldbuilding, its subtle but effective ambient BGM and clunk-clacky sound design, some well-tended fundamentals between the enhanced platforming flow the traversal upgrades provide and a decently balanced difficulty curve throughout, and a simplicity to its presentation and mechanics that belies some deeper waters for those that care to delve them. Or deeper engine oils, I dunno. Lubricants. At any rate, I look forward to being a witness to the way this genre continues to reshape itself through modern trends well into the future, especially as it produces even more excellent if familiar instances like Haiku, the Robot.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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