Honestly, what a game. Randomly stumbled upon it, I don't even remember where I saw it from. Tried the demo, seemed promising. Bought it a few days later and my god, what a game. What a game. What more can I say? Binged the hell out of it in like 3 or 4 days I think? Just keeps getting better the more and more you play. I asked myself a few times "Just how much better is this game gonna get?" You'd be surprised.

The feeling of satisfaction and euphoria each time you get a major upgrade, when you see that black cube just floating in the air, you break it open and you're surprised with an ability you'd never even have imagined would be in the game... Of course the classics are here: dashing, stomping etc... But there is so much more. The movement in this game is just amazing when you get all the upgrades.

Back-tracking wasn't a problem at all. I very much enjoyed returning to older areas with each new upgrade I got and trying to find out what new areas I could now access. The DLC was absolutely brilliant, the story had some nice themes and the characters portraits are very, very pretty. I'm impressed how much love and effort went into this game.

Tutle, I personally thank you. This game is a hidden gem and an amazing one at that. As a huge Metroid and Hollow Knight fan, when I say that I get Metroid feelings from this game, that's the highest praise I can give it because now I'm just comparing you with Nintendo.

Would've loved it if it were a tad longer. Even with the DLC, it left me wanting more... Yes, it's that much fun to play. I got it on sale but if I knew what I was going into, I would've gladly given it full price.

Just, thank you. Very heartwarming but bittersweet secret ending as well. I can speak of nothing but praise for this game.

Starting with the positives, this game has great abilities. Some metroidvanias, the abilities you get are sort of just keys, like "oh yeah you can push blocks now that'll just be used to get through like 5 spots and then never touched", in this game every ability not only gets you to new stuff in intriguing ways but they help you with traversal and fighting enemies in new ways, you are really a speed demon unstoppable killing force by the end, it feels great to play, you are a real ninja, sliding around, dashing through lasers, etc.

The atmosphere is quite nice, taking place in a ruined future world and stuff, music is very moody, some very catchy little jingles too sometimes, the videos in the film shop were kinda hypnotic I'd just watch them over and over. Character portraits have a really unique and beautiful style. Story kind of gets in the way because you just wanna continue playing and there's some long flashback sequences but it's mostly unintrusive and it's trying to do some neat ideas. It's very poorly translated to english, unfortunately, but whatever.

Exploration is good, lots of quick-travel spots so there's never any tiresome backtracking, lots of secrets to find, many of them clever, never too obscure to the point of frustration though.

Sadly there is no real sense of danger - not only is the game pretty easy, but save points are everywhere so you won't ever be set back more than a couple of rooms. Dying to insta-kill spikes/lasers just brings you back to the start of the room or the last platform you were on (it's inconsistent!) and you can use this to cheese through obstacles by triggering switches/killing enemies and then respawning and going through, even if you didn't actually figure out how to do the obstacle without getting hit. It's funny because this game's aesthetic and smooth gameplay would make you assume it's gonna be a pretty tough game but it just isn't. If you're collecting upgrades, most enemies will die in 1-2 hits and you can just get hit a bunch anyway with no real risk of dying.

Already touched on above, the translation and inconsistent death mechanics are just some of the many buggy or unpolished spots. Quests not updating properly, menus not working, achievement text popping up covering dialogue and making it unreadable, getting a +Crit% upgrade when all 6 crit slots in my character sheet had been filled in and there was no room for a 7th... You find text logs that tell you info you already know because a later patch made the questgiver tell you the info from the start. A character tells you the west side of the world map was cut due to budget reasons. Characters reference previous conversations that you never had. U.I. elements stay on-screen when they should be gone. I could list more but there were so many I've forgotten. Hell the game is straight up unfinished, they launched it with some character's plots not done and sidequests will continue to be added in patches. Pretty unsatisfying that some sidequests go nowhere and give you no reward!

This all sounds pretty bad, like, you don't wanna buy an unfinished unpolished game, right? But Haak is still a complete product with its main story and it's totally playable, these issues are noticeable but didn't really prevent me from enjoying the game. Also, you can sequence break a decent amount of stuff as a result - I think they genuinely didn't realize some of the ways you can use abilities to get through things you're not supposed to be able to. Normally I'd feel proud of finding sequence breaks but when the game is so messy it just feels like I'm finding more of the dev's mistakes, not outwitting the game.

The atmosphere of the game is nice but the areas are all the same. City ruins, subway station ruins, factory ruins... a second subway station, a second factory, a second city ruins... And then one mountain! The mountain is beautiful and has super zen music, almost a spiritual experience to be there, I really loved it. And it was a fresh change of pace. Anyway, after the mountain you're back to city ruins. It's a good atmosphere but yeah it gets to be a bit too much.