Haste

I've found myself in a similar position to most regarding Haste, which unfortunately reinforces my opinion. The short of it? [h3] Haste is half of a game. [/h3] Haste as a concept was really enticing [i] to me. [/i] I really enjoy fast-paced "platforming" with the idea of maintaining your speed as your primary goal. I also really like roguelikes. Combining the 2 was something I kind of didn't expect to work. How could you make a speed focused platformer with unique generation and enough items varying in ability to make your runs feel unique from each other? I will start by giving credit to the game where it is due. The gameplay and game-feel is great, bordering phenomenal. The game has progressive difficulty that I feel works quite well for the most part, even if a few items can potentially trivialize things. The soundtrack compliments the gameplay remarkably. It's very good and doesn't really miss especially with how it contributes to the atmosphere of the game. The sound effects and overall flow of the sound design is great. Transitioning between levels is smooth and there was clearly a lot of well placed effort in making the down time between levels keep you immersed and focused even while not actively playing. It's a point that I feel doesn't get mentioned a lot when reviewing the game, and contributes greatly to its ability to keep you in flow state. The game is really, really good at keeping you in that flow state. However that's about where I find my praise of the game ending. It's great to have your game feel great to play, but I feel like Haste is trying to bite off more than it can chew. Haste has a story, and I really cannot say it was too gripping. I don't find the characters to be interesting or fleshed out. I can't sing its writing much praise, it feels cliche at almost every moment. The character designs are fine and I like the style of the game a lot, but I really don't like Zoey that much. I don't like her portrayal and voice direction and all having her being all stumbly and amateur. It really quite annoys me and it holds me back from feeling like piloting her is cool, which to be honest, I think is a huge selling point to the genre. There's smaller issues as well, the game has some strange issues with crashing and compatibility, the items range from barely useful to entirely gamebreaking, and the hub world is at a bad point of being both too big to get from place to place quickly and too barren to be fun to really run around for a while. I do think that Haste suffers most due to its insistence on having a story though. It feels extremely forced in its presentation and absolutely tears me out of the flow state the game is otherwise really really good at keeping me in. I think either the story presentation needed to be way different with more developed characters and themes, or it needed to be severely back-seated in favor of focusing heavily on the gameplay. This game has extremely high potential but fails to stick the landing in a way that ultimately takes away from the experience. I like playing the game, but I can't recommend the game for any other reason than that.