Haiku, the Robot
Haiku (name unexplained) is a metroidvania with many similarities / references to Hollow Knight and Metroid. You gain new abilities and explore a large room based map, backtracking to new areas once you can do new things like explode or double jump. It has a great pixel art style, and the atmosphere and music are really well done. I believe it's made by a single person too, and it's extremely polished for that. Similarities to Hollow Knight don't end at the gameplay; there's also the combat, sockets (Charms), platforming and also the story / location (descending into a world of machines driven mad by a virus). A solid, short experience for fans of the genre.
Pros
- Excellent atmosphere
- Nice pixel art
- Combat is pretty good once you get the hang of it
- You can bank currency
- You can repair yourself with currency
- Some good dialogue lines with all the robots you meet
Cons
- Collecting spare parts from dead enemies is annoying. There's no magnet (unless you use a charm) and they bounce quite a lot
- 8 hours long (1 hour trying to kill the last boss). Could be good or bad if you're enjoying it.
- You lose half your coins when you die. I guess because there are coin banks, there is no mechanic for going to retrieve your dropped coins when you die
- Abilities like the air dash and the ground dash generate heat. It's an interesting mechanic, designed to stop you from overusing it during boss fights, but it would be nice if it didn't have a cooldown for when you're backtracking or exploring
- Once I killed the final boss, that was it - BAM cutscene. No explanation of what happened, no dialogue, no NPCs to talk to, just game over. I was rather disappointed
- The final boss is a HUGE difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game. I killed all the other bosses pretty much on my first attempt, but took nearly an hour to kill the last one
- I got an achievement for killing the last boss at the exact same moment as dying and had to do it again