This is a small and short preview of a Metroidvania. You play as Haiku, uhh, a robot. If you didn’t grasp that by the name then, well, I’m not sure how you found this cause you aren’t the brightest crayon in the tool shed, but you are probably the only one in it so, good on you? You just start in the middle of a room in a set of ruins, you have no idea what you’re doing but you have a nice shiny golden sword of fuck bad guys. It’s a glorious sword and it fucks up bad guys.

Well, you fall in a giant fuck off hole, immediate even amusingly. In this hole is just more of the ruins, filled with robots to kick the shit out of, they drop nuts and bolts to collect, for something, no idea what, it doesn’t seem like they’ve implemented that in the demo. There’s various types of robot enemies: robots that kind of look like hamburgers that have bat wings, balls with a skull on them, giant bolts, giant nuts, roombas, weird porcupine-like enemies without the spines, and a boss.

You have ruins to check with areas not accessible just being listed as under construction. Enemies you fight give you nuts and bolts, and sometimes you find bundles of nuts and bolts to attack to loose and then collect them. You also find three upgrades in the demo, a bomb move that explodes around you and recharges over time, a roll move which helps you find hidden areas which sometimes have the nut and bolt bundles and, at least in the demo, random characters that will give you a line or two of dialogue, and lastly a double jump ability that I’m not going to explain because you’re not a toddler.

Exploration is a little annoying because the demo doesn’t have a map in it, not sure if one is planned either but I would hope so. The exploring is fun, however, it’d be significantly better with a map that filled out as you entered rooms. Combat is okay, enemies have to touch you to hurt you and most of them, in the demo, don’t go running at you, they just kinda exist and move back and forth, cannon fodder if you will. It’s pretty easy to get touched by enemies even though they don’t attack you though because your sword has next to no range. There’s only really 3 enemies that try to attack you and one of them just barely functions to try. The balls can sometimes bounce towards you, usually they don’t though, or maybe another enemy touches it and causes it to move towards you by pure luck. When the nuts are walking towards you and get close enough they’ll blindly charge you which you can use to your advantage by making them run right off drop-offs. The last enemy that will attack you is the boss, which I’m not going to talk about because, go play the demo.

Graphically it’s both cute and drab at the same time, your robot is cute, the enemies look interesting, The drab bit is the color palette it’s fairly limited. The majority of the backgrounds colors are mostly black, red, orange, and a shade of brown. There is another shade of brown for the characters, and some white for character faces. That’s all the colors, they’re fairly muted. The designs though are fairly cute for robots though so I’m kinda torn on the graphics.

Haiku, the Robot is being developed by Mister Morris Games.

Point of Sale: Steam.

Price: Unknown release is sometime in 2021.

A preview copy of the demo was provided by the devs from their kickstarter where the game is already one hundred percent funded and is working towards stretch goals, and by the time of this publication it should hopefully have a little bit of time left for people to support it, if they want to.

darkmikasonfire thinks you should keep an eye on Haiku, the Robot and should go to their kickstarter and try to demo.