Haste Review

I seem to gravitate towards roguelite games (regular readers: shocked face). The repetitive nature is my gaming comfort food. While I can appreciate a good challenge, my favorite thing about roguelites is their ability to trigger that “one more run” sensation. I need the gameplay loop to be equally satisfying but also tease enough of what is to come for me to want to jump right back in and try again. Dead Cells is easily my favorite roguelite (and metroidvania!) of all time. If you have played, you know that in the early goings, the run generally ends in death. As you unlock new abilities, you progress further and further. To this day, even after completing the game on the hardest difficulty, I still like to jump in for “one more run.” Other roguelites put less focus on the “one more run” for the traditional, play until death, upgrade, progress further before dying, upgrade, rinse, and repeat (relax, it is a generalization to get to my point). Guess what? I FOUND A GAME THAT IS LITERALLY JUST ONE MORE RUN. Like, the entirety of the game. All you do is run and run and run AND run.

Developed by Landfall, Haste is a game about outrunning the end of the universe. You play as Zoe, an otherworldly mail carrier. Take that USPS - “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…” What about black holes? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Fun fact, the phrase comes from Greek historian Herodotus and is not the official motto of the USPS; there is none. Zoe wants to deliver letters, but when worlds start collapsing, curiosity overwhelms her and she must discover why.

Once you gain control of Zoe, your sole task is to run, and run as fast as you can. Technically, the game runs for you and you just steer/control your descent, but semantics. If you reach the portal at the end of the path, for lack of a better term, you move on to a new level. Assuming you have reached the portal, you have some control over the next destination.

Choose your own adventure!

The main objective is to reach the boss fight at the end of the path you have chosen. Each one of these shards contains approximately 10-15 levels you must clear. Along the trek, Zoe can stop off to heal, purchase items using sparks collected in each stage, and try challenge levels. The items purchased only remain for the current run. Items available are random and more are unlocked at the end of each run, win or lose. They range from restoring health after running a certain distance to providing speed boosts after close calls (aka coming close but not crashing into a tree) to gaining brief windows of invulnerability following perfect landings.

And the award for the best named power-up goes to…

So you really just run? Yes. I mean, there is a bit more but if you stop running you die so…As I said, the game propels Zoe forward and then you take over. While you can stop, that would be ill-advised as your health will drain and you lose a life. This sends you back to the beginning of the current stage. Losing all your lives ends the run completely. Anyway, once Zoe is moving at Mach 5…

No reason this should not work, right?

You control Zoe’s steering and descent. Players have complete 360-degree control over Zoe’s movement, but forward with little deviation is recommended at all times. Running at such high speeds (100 meters per second/200+ miles per hour) tends to send one into the air, so you also control when and how fast Zoe comes back down to the ground. This is where the challenge comes into play. The game grades Zoe’s return to the ground as either OK, Good, or Perfect. A perfect landing has you meeting the ground on a downward slope, allowing you to continue picking up speed. An OK landing is meeting an upward slope at a downward angle. Zoe will lose significant speed and risk getting caught. It doesn't seem very easy at first, but you easily get into a groove. At this point, the game throws in obstacles to completely wreck your rhythm. Now, hitting a tree, rock, and/or random structure will not end your run, but you better hope for a chain of perfect landings to make up the distance between you and the universe collapsing behind you. You do lose some health both when colliding with objects and when the collapse behind you creeps up.

If Zoe were blue, this could easily be a new Sonic the Hedgehog game. Well, the sparks are kind of like coins, except you do not lose them when taking damage, but some rings provide speed boosts when passing through them. In some of the later stages, there were rails above the ground that Zoe could run along, and this felt very Sonic-like. The biggest Sonic similarity, though, is the boss fights. Unlike the rest of the game, you do not just run forward and reach the portal. You do run forward until you find the boss, and like Sonic tucking himself into a ball and smashing Robotnik, Zoe needs to run right into the boss to cause damage. At this point, the boss moves to the opposite end of the stage, and Zoe needs to run the other way, all the while dodging whatever projectiles and pitfalls the boss throws her way. After enough hits, Zoe is victorious and is ready to start a new shard.

Haste is akin to a one-hit wonder. What it does, it does extremely well, but also, what you see is what you get. The actual gameplay loop of running through each shard is fantastic. Zoe controls wonderfully, and there is a significant challenge (completely adjustable for those who want a more relaxing experience). The art style is a pleasure to look at as you jam along to a sweet soundtrack. Unfortunately, if you are looking for more than the running aspect, you will surely be disappointed. Personally, I keep going back for “one more run” long after finishing the story. Haste has become somewhat of a comfort food game for me. Is it life-changing? No. Is it something you can pick up for a quick session and have an absolute blast? Without a doubt.