HAAK

I absolutely LOVE this game! The story is compelling. The art style is great. The exploration is top notch, as well as the combat. There are multiple endings, so it will definitely keep you busy for a long time if you want to get them all. I was scrolling Steam, looking for something to play, and I stumbled upon this masterpiece of a game. I play metroidvanias more than any other genre, so I can't believe I'd never heard of this game before. If you love the Metroid franchise, or MV's like Hollow Knight and Guacamelee!, then this will be an excellent choice for you.

Can't believe I forgot to review this game when I played it. This is seriously my favorite metroidvania-you've-never-heard-of. Loved every minute of it. The movement and level design are the highlights.

It has a few flaws, most notably the pacing in the second half. Kind of forces you to re-explore old areas but in a way that doesn't feel organic. Overall I'd recommend it but I'd understand if you didn't finish it.

Haak: a game that manages to be great despite some major flaws My favourite thing about this game is how fun exploring is. It feels so rewarding, every time I thought "so let's do this and then I'll stop for the day" but then my dopamine addicted brain got a hit and I just wanted to continue. I really liked the platforming puzzles and figuring out how to get somewhere, and I'd say mostly the secrets are easy to find but hard to get. Like there's almost always a clear indicator that there's a secret somewhere. There were only a few things I had to Google, which I only do after I thoroughly explored and know I'm missing some things. The world was really immersive, everything helped in the environmental storytelling. The music, the art work, the tiny details and the npc's. Even though the world feels abandoned at times it felt never dead. At times the game broke the fourth wall and I always like that if it's done good. It made me giggle at times, Haak is such a sassy character and I loved him for that. The combat is simple but good and I liked the fast travel system - being able to only fast travel to other points in the same area. I found the bosses a bit on the easier side, most I beat in 1 or 2 tries. But even the bosses I struggled with initially I beat in 5-10 tries. That may seem like a lot but I'm not a great gamer, so that's not much for me. The regular enemies and platforming killed me more often so it isn't an easy game by any means - for me at least. There's so much to do in this game and while I really liked it, I also often found myself not knowing what I needed to do. I never really mind that, I love getting the agency to do whatever the hell I please, but at times I accidentally continued a (side)quest without really meaning to and/or understanding what I did, haha. The map has markers - something I feel like every Metroidvania should have - however I only found out in the second or third area, and at times I found them counterintuitive to use. But the game also has some major flaws and even though I loved it, this definitely soured my experience a lot. That I still recommend it is testament to how good the rest of the game is, however I often felt frustrated while playing and decided not to ever replay it. The biggest thing I struggled with is that the controller inputs (playing on Linux with a steam controller) don't always register, especially when I have to do a lot of these in quick succession. There's one move in particular [spoiler]the continuous slide[/spoiler] that only worked around half the time, the other times the game just made me do [spoiler]a "normal" slide[/spoiler] Since this is a move that is often needed for platforming puzzles, that you sometimes have to do a few of them in quick succession, sometimes with time limits or sometimes with no room for any error, this became frustrating really quick. I don't know why it did what it did, and maybe it's just a problem with my set up, but even my tech-savvy partner didn't know how to fix it. Like I said I'm not a great gamer and I am not too proud to admit it when I mess up. It just sucks when I know I did everything right but the game just doesn't register it. I also wasn't a fan of the last boss, apparantly I needed to do something very specific to even damage him and I didn't realize it. So the first few times I was fighting him I just tried to dodge his attack and counter attack in between, like a normal bossfight haha. But it took forever and in the end I always died, so I wondered if I was even expected to fight him at this point and that's when I found out the specific thing I needed to do. I don't feel like this was made obvious, there were a few small things during the boss fight that were clues, but first of all I'm not very good at details, and second of all I was fighting and dodging so not paying attention to small numbers by the boss indicating that I damaged him. If you want to spare yourself the trouble of finding this out the hard way, here's what you need to do to continue the fight: [spoiler]so you can shoot back projectiles, something I rarely did in this game - that's on me - and this boss gets invulnerable after certain attacks, something you can only counter with shooting back his projectiles back at him[/spoiler] Anyhow when I found out what I needed to do I beat him really quickly so that was at least something. While I talked about loving the exploration at a certain point it got a bit tedious to try to get every area 100%. Sometimes I had to do hard platforming challenges only to find... Nothing. It seems like it was meant as a different way to get to the same place, but if you've already been in that place it was just doing it for the sake of getting the whole map. The map also is divided into areas, and if you're in one area you can't look up the map of different areas. While I understood and even appreciated why they did that, I would've liked a way to scroll through maps, like every area has its own map and you can scroll through these in your menu. Last but not least (also not most) there was a side quest that I got really late in the game that asked me to find 12 things. While I was exploring I already found a lot of these, but I couldn't do anything at that point and I didn't realise it was important, so I never marked it up my map. And then I got this quest with no indicator of where I could find these things, and that frustrated me because I had already found most of these through my thorough exploration. At least I would've liked a marker that pointed out the ones I already found, I don't mind needing to find things but like I said, I already found these, just wasn't aware I needed to come back to them later. The things in question are [spoiler]robots, the ones you can interact with and say "pathfinding error"[/spoiler] so if you want to 100% this game and don't want to try to find it again by yourself, make sure to mark it on your map. All in all the game could have been so much worse if the positive points were not so good. I'm not a completionist but I always try to get as much of achievements, ingame percentage, collectables etc as possible as long as I'm having fun. Because the controller jank I decided against trying this, and honestly it's such a shame because I really liked the game and would've loved to keep exploring this world.

This game just left me disappointed :(. The last boss was infuriating, and after searching for why it was so frustrating, I was even more frustrated. The boss appears to take damage, but cannot be defeated with damage. Normally I would consider this information a spoiler, but it's information that would have vastly improved my experience if I was told beforehand. So be warned, the last boss cannot be defeated with just your attacks, despite how much it looks like that's true. But even after winning, I got the worst ending of any game I've played. Bad endings exist, but they should still be endings. This was a game over screen with more steps. I'm finding it very difficult to muster the energy to even bother pushing through to complete anything else, so I doubt I'll be getting other endings. Also, why do you literally judge people for using your in-game difficulty tools? Baby icon, grade letters, etc. There's no reason for that, and it leads to people trying to avoid those tools *to the detriment of their own fun* Most of the rest of the game was middling. I found some things to be unnecessarily tedious, but most of the moment-to-moment gameplay was fine. It was just that fucking ending that turned my opinion negative.

pretty good, but after playing about 20 hours i have learned that the decisions made locked me out of the true ending so yeah..

I really wish I had refunded this before crossing over the 2 hour mark. This is just an extremely derivative take on Hollow Knight. If you pick a mechanic from Hollow Knight, there's probably a worse version of it present here. The environments have been mostly indistinguishable. There's an obscene amount of dialogue, none of which is worth reading. If it had any unique ideas of its own, I'd maybe be a little more lenient with it. As it stands, it's just a bad collection of things taken from much better games.

The game never tells you where to go. I only saw 50% of the map then got to final boss. The rest of the map just look unreachable. very bad level design. The game feels like you need more traversal abilities but does not tell you where or how to find them. just feels like every door is locked.

Fun game, I like the movement in it. Quick and a good play for an MVania!