I am still trying to finish this game. I first played the game on android before but ended up deleting it due to boredom. 5hen a few years later, I came back to this game, but this time I played it on my laptop. It's good, I still don't get much of the story though, but the whole Metroidvania thing is just great. I've played a few games that fell into the same genre and this game is overall giving me both Dandara and Hollow Knight moveset somehow. Anyways, still finishing the game. Might log again soon.

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.

HAAK is yet another game I put off for far too long, and regret doing so because this game is fantastic! This is a metroidvania game by and for true metroidvania nuts and the love for the genre is so palpable that you can't help but to be infected by it if you didn't already have the bug. The reason I put it off is honestly because I don't like how the main character looks and I still don't, but the actual game is an absolute must for genre fans.

This game is just a joy and I don't even know where to begin! A big deal in MV type games is, of course, the movement scheme and the abilities you unlock, and HAAK delivers in spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. This has to be one of the most generous movement schemes I've ever seen even though you actually never find a double jump. Instead, you have triple dashes in all directions, a super cool "hacking tool" that completely changes how you view rooms and puzzles once you obtain it and one of the most glorious nods to MV fans I've ever seen - the infinite slide. What MV player hasn't spammed the backwards dodge button to make Alucard awkwardly run backwards to hurry up the backtracking? The developers of HAAK have done that themselves and saw fit to grant us an infinite dash manouver that lets us just hold the button to quickly slide through to our next objective. Love to see it. Another cool thing about the movement is that there are "hidden" manouvers that you the game very nicely encourages you to use, allowing little revelations that let the players feel clever, like how I realized that, wait a minute, the upwards air attack gives you a little bit of extra air, which is just enough to make you reach that one ledge I initially thought required a double jump. Very refreshing to see since both players and designers of MV have gotten quite lazy with the double jump crutch.

The other big genre thing that HAAK does excellently is exploration and level design. This game is filled to the brim, and then some, with quirky little secrets and puzzles, and very rarely do they feel annoying or obtuse. They feel like they're a laundry list of various types of secrets that have been present in this genre for a long time. You've got walls to smash, walls to just walk through, hidden buttons to find, and the game constantly switches it up between having them be just a secret little stash of cash and having them be a required part of the exploration, always keeping the player on their toes and making us analyze every room and every situation to the fullest, while also constantly rewarding and making us feel clever for figuring this or that secret out. And to top that all of with a cherry and cream, they do also have endgame unlockables that reveal secrets you've missed on the map, which most if not all players will appreciate since this game is so packed with little bits of hidden content that even the most observant sleuth is going to miss a few and end up feeling stumped as to how anyone was ever supposed to find this or that thing without a map marker once they obtain said markers. This constant stream of surprised also mixes up the rewards and while they're mostly hidden stashes of money, you might also follow a very hidden path to an extremely helpful ability upgrade that is great but isn't required for completion, like the upgrade that allows your infinite dash to also break blocks, which both opens up previously inaccessible paths and helps significantly in zipping through certain rooms quickly.

Combat, however, is perhaps not quite as good as everything else. It's just kind of fine. Basic sword swing in all direction, complete with pogo jumping because of course these devs managed to include as many classic MV elements as they could think of. Thankfully, the devs seem to understand and while there are monsters everywhere, both you and the character become better and better at just running past enemies as you expand your skill set, and there are only a few bosses. This is not a combat-centric game, even though there's lots of combat opportunity available in every room for those who want to take it, but it strikes a solid balance where you can kill tons of beasts if you want to, or just dash past if you prefer. While the game doesn't have XP, they do offer incentives for combat in how you refill your healing and rage meters by hitting enemies, so that it doesn't feel like the enemies are just in the way for no reason.

Another detail I quite enjoyed was the discovery that the map screen isn't just a static animation. When you first leave an area to go to the overworld, it just looks like a visual representation, because your character is an arrow and you pick a location from a menu. About halfway through, I was like, wait a minute, can I actually make the little cursor go where I want it to by just clicking on the map...? I can! And I found a hidden area! I'm not going to spoil and list all of them, and I can't remember half of them since my memory's getting worse by the year, but the game is equally as packed with attention to detail like this as it is packed with hidden rooms. Everywhere you look, there's a clever little thought present.

With all that praise, however, I do have to levy some complaints that hold this back from a perfect review score. First of all, the big one, the huge one, is the performance on Switch. It's OK at best, kind of bad somewhat often and in a few rare occasions it's the worst performance I've seen in a decade or even more. We're talking like 5fps and the game running in slow motion, dropping so many frames that other mechanics (like "sucking in" energy crystals after defeating an enemy) break down and stop working. It's catastrophic. However, and very thankfully, the disastrous framerate is in exactly two areas, both of which are very low-intensity and small. One has zero enemies and the other has like five pointless enemies you can just run past. The mediocre framerate happens here and there, but is only present at all times in the mountain area, but the frames can dip at more or less any moment. Thankfully, again, this never happens during intense moments, or at least not for me. Well, there is one kind of intense platforming challenge that is made a hundred times harder because of the diastrous framerate, but turns out you don't actually have to do that challenge and you can just enter that room (to add the room for your 100%) from the other direction. To be perfectly clear and honest, I'm making excuse for a game I really liked and people who aren't able to be as forgiving of poor performance, or who just don't like the game design as much as I do, should stay far away from the Switch version and should probably triple-check their PC specs to make sure the game will run fine, because this truly is some of the worst performance I've seen in a long time.

Two other major complaints are the script and the endgame. This game talks kind of a lot, and the english script is often as disastrous as the performance. The game is prettty wordy, at least in the first half, and it's filled with that kind of asian dialogue that I find grating. For example, there's a character that rings you up with dialogue boxes when you die, which is an annoying design decision in and of itself, but the game spends three text boxes on her saying that she should probably shut up and stop bothering you. How about you actually shut up and stop bothering me instead of talking about doing it? Babbling about how you shouldn't babble is the most asian thing I can think of and it's just kind of annoying to my western sensibilities, to be honest. There's lots of dialogue like that, and the game uses many words to say few things, but the worst part is that sometimes it just breaks down completely. I wrote down an exact quote, but I don't have it with me as I'm typing this, but there were a couple of instances in the game where the english breaks down to, like, "hello sir you are be goings highway road city towards?" Much worse than Google Translate level. At first, I thought it was supposed to be like that since the character who speaks with extremely broken english lives in the sewers and kind of looks like a mutant, but no, he speaks perfectly clear english in other situations. You can also tell which lines were translated by someone with internet brain rot, and that a different person translated some lines and thinks they're hip with the western slang but is using some very dated phrases. Examples of brain rot being that your character at one point says "NVM" instead of nevermind, and during an important cutscene, there's a stupid "^_^" in there for no reason. Brain rot. The dated slang is things like how your character at one point says "True that". When did people stop saying that, like 2012? The fact that separate people with completely different interpretations of english translated the script makes it kind of schizophrenic and the game can't decide if it wants to have internet brain rot meme humor, random "cool guy slang" that isn't actually cool anymore, or serious dialogue for what's a pretty serious story about a world in disrepair and decay.

As for the endgame, it kind of falls apart a little and I can't tell if it's because the endgame puzzles are too obtuse or if it's because they didn't have time to fix things before they had to stop working on the game, but I was forced to give up on the 99% mark because I just cannot progress in the few things I have left to do. The wiki for the game just says "This article needs more text" on every page and has no solutions. I simply have no clue where the final energy upgrade I need is, as I have all maps but one (and I know I need the energy for that last bit in that map) to 100%, have cleared all quests, but I have no idea where it is. My best guess is that you're supposed to be given the final upgrade I need by the girl who calls you up whenever you die, but the devs were told by people how annoying it is to be badgered by someone when you fail, so they patched in an option where you can shut her up, which I did at the first opportunity because of course I did. Now I find out, during endgame clean-up, that I was actually supposed to let her babble on until she eventually gives me some upgrades. I tried to force myself to die a bunch of times, with her re-activated, until I stopped and asked myself what I'm doing with my life if I'm constantly running into spikes to try to get a stupid NPC to talk to me to give me some upgrades. Demajen's maps don't help, nor do the in-game unlockables that add markers for all collectibles. I'm forced to give up right before the finish line, because neither the game nor the internet offers a hint on what I'm supposed to do or where I'm supposed to look and I hate it. I even started another game, played it for an hour, but was so bothered by the fact that I couldn't take HAAK to true 100% that I had to load it back up and spend two hours trying everything I could think of and find on Google to see if I could succeed, but I couldn't and now I feel forced to move on because I have other games to get to, which does leave me with a sour final impression.

I feel like this is probably my most-balanced review on this site and that it should be clear that I think this game is fantastic despite a few serious flaws. I still don't like how the main character looks, but I ended up liking more or less everything about the game (obviously except for the above problems). This is an MV for the true fanatics, and should not be missed by anyone who loves the genre. Don't be fooled by the dull main character design like I was! The very moment this game started, as soon as you assume control after a line or dialogue or two, I knew I was in for a quality time, and the quality only trended upwards from there. Again, this game is an absolute must for all genre fans. It's just a secret-finding, triple air-dashing, infinite-sliding, puzzle-solving great time.

Five stars if you don't count the Black & White DLC, even if it's supposed to give a definitive ending to the game. I 100%ed all the maps other than the DLC one and beat Chuka in the DLC, couldn't figure out how to progress and peaced out on it with 80% map completion.

I think it's my kind of platforming and exploration-based Metroidvania and I appreciate the potential levels of nonlinearity in it that are tied specifically to your ability to understand your mechanics fully (some of these skill sets can be learned via found notes in some areas).

There were a few minor issues, such as the camera not going back to center when doing the down-dash ability and the lack of ability to have quest markers in case you're looking for someone or something in particular -- this is especially a pain in the case of finding all the robots (which I had already found before I got the quest started, so I just skipped that whole deal), as well as the Subway Depot quest and a generator quest for a particular region -- it asks you to turn on generators and you can 100% the map without finding all of the generators if you're like me and simply didn't look in a particular direction in one room.

I think my only other gripe was very minor and involved a particular ability you eventually get that is really fun, but can make some of your other abilities become a bit more finicky, without going into spoiler territory for some of the cool stuff you get.

Ended up dropping 24 hours on it for 100% map completion for everywhere other than the DLC and gathered all relevant items in the game but didn't finish a couple side quests. Absolutely worth it at full price and I'd say it's worth a look for any Metroidvania player -- if you see a sale, snatch it up!

Also, shout-outs to the dev for being cool in the Steam discussions when a Dutch person called his game "cringe" because in Dutch, "haak" means "hook" and you have a hook weapon, even though the dev speaks Cantonese and "haak" means "black" because your brother (the main quest point of the game has you seeking him out) is "baak", which means "white". The very polite correction followed by dead silence from the Dutch user was golden.