Video Game / Haiku, the Robot

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Haiku, the Robot is a Metroidvania game by Estonian developer Mister Morris Games released in 2022 for Nintendo Switch and Steam.

Two hundred years ago, the world was destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Now, in a land inhabited by sentient machines, a little robot named Haiku wakes up inside a capsule. With most of the other robots having been corrupted by a strange virus, Haiku must travel the world of Arcadia to find the cause of the corruption, collecting new abilities and meeting other robots, both friend and foe, along the way.

Check out the game's official website here and its Steam page here.

Haiku, the Robot contains examples of:

• After the End: The game takes place in a world that was ravaged by a nuclear explosion 200 years ago and is now inhabited by machines. Additionally, most of these machines have become corrupted by a virus and are now hostile.
• Androids and Detectives: Limerick is the unusual case of being both a robot and a detective. He came to Arcadia to investigate what happened to the place.
• Bear Trap: One of the ground-laid traps resembles a bear trap, activating as Haiku steps on it.
• Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: The final shot in the game's true ending is of a butterfly perched on the remains of an old computer in the forest, indicating that the world may now be on the way to recovering. In the end, Atom's wish happened regardless if they lived or not, as they believed, nature always made way eventually.
• Call to Agriculture: After ending the Three Creators' life and freeing Arcadia from the Virus, Haiku and several of their friends go to help Rusty settle in a comfy farm life where they sell vegetables to people in Rustys Retirement
• Conspicuous Electric Obstacle: Some areas have orange electric surfaces constantly emitting sparks to know it's dangerous to touch them. Central power core also has two nodes that periodically emit electrical charges.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Averted in the Incinerator Burner and Blazing Furnace areas; before getting the Heat Treatment upgrade, Haiku will gradually take damage there due to the extreme heat. Even with the upgrade, Haiku's heat gauge will always be at maximum while in those areas (unless the player has the Heat Drive chip equipped), which leaves them unable to use abilities that generate heat such as Power Bombs or the Dash/Space Disruptor, and direct contact with fire still results in death.
• Cool Train: The Traveling Town is a sentient train^note Granted, most of the machines you meet in the game are sentient, but none are quite as big as this one that serves as the game's shortcut mechanic by instantly taking you to specific points on the map. It's also home to Rondel the welder and Sonnet the book-obsessed shopkeeper.
• Cute Machines: Haiku is a rather adorable robot, with their round body, feet that resemble sneakers, and a face with a perpetual Luminescent Blush.
• Digital Abomination: The Virus, a monstrous digital virus that infects all the robots of Arcadia. It manifests as a mass of darkness that shuts down robots and turn them hostile to each other, causing them to gain a ghoulish and skeletal face where their faces used to be.
• Double Jump: The Jump Booster upgrade gives Haiku the ability to jump once while in midair.
• Eternal Engine: The Factory Facility, where the Arcadians used to manufacture the components and spare parts they needed to work correctly, now overrun with buzz saw throwing and other industrial robots.
• Evil All Along: In the true ending, the three Creators who Haiku frees from the virus along the course of the story are revealed to have been the ones behind the Virus all along. When Atom proposed to bring humans back through Project: Rebirth and give them a second chance in life, the Three Creators betrayed Atom and unleashed the Virus on him. As soon as you learn the truth by checking the Lost Archives, they appear and attack Haiku — this time clearly in control of themselves, unlike in the previous boss battles — and serve as the game's True Final Boss.
• Fantastic Racism: The Arcadian robots thought very highly of themselves, seeing their human predecessors as inferior in every single way who killed themselves in what they perceived as foolish things. The Creators ironically had a very humane form of arrogance as they demanded statues in their name and likeness to be built all over Arcadia, potentially their behavior coming from the fact they were humans themselves at one point.
• Flame Spewer Obstacle: In Incinirator Burner, there are three types of flame spewers. There is floor where flames are constantly vented out via holes, there is a rotating square that shoots out flames in cross pattern. Finally, there are flame traps that activate when Haiku steps on them.
• Flash of Pain: Damaging enemies cause them to briefly flash white.
• Flash Step: The upgrade of the Dash move turns it into this, giving you the ability to teleport through enemies and even walls, allowing you to reach rooms that were inaccessible before.
• Foreshadowing: Inside the First Tree, there are the remains of Atom, who looks like the three Creators you meet in the game. The description for the achievement you get for reaching this location is "Find the betrayed Creator". The fact that there is a "betrayed Creator" is a hint that the three other ones aren't as benevolent as the player is led to believe.
• Gentle Giant: Mundo, the elevator in the Factory Facility, is one of the largest machines you'll meet in the game, but it's completely harmless and has some words of support for Haiku if you talk to it. Apparently, it's too large to be affected by the virus.
• Good Morning, Crono: The game begins with Haiku waking up inside a capsule.
• Gotta Catch Them All: There are several types of collectibles to be found:
  • Power Cells can be given to Quatern for a sidequest. You get a reward for each one you give him (usually a large amount of Spare Parts, but at some points you will get a Capsule Fragment).
  • Capsule Fragments increase your health by one hitpoint for every three you find.
  • Chips can be equipped in order to customize Haiku's abilities, and chip sockets increase how many of them you can have equipped at once. Each chip does something different — generally, red ones enhance your offense in some way, blue ones are for defense, and green ones are for support.
  • Liquid Coolant reduces overheating, giving you more chances to do abilities.
• Having a Blast: Haiku can obtain an upgrade that allows them to cause an explosion at will to cause huge amounts of damage on enemies. This also overheats them so use it wisely. The blast can also be used to blast through walls that blocked a part of the zone.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: A heartbeat sound plays when Haiku's health is down to one hitpoint, which is rather curious since they are a robot. It can be potentially explained that they use organic components thanks to Atom had dabbled on bio-engineering.
• Heart Container: Capsule Fragments can be bought from shops or found hidden in areas around the game world. Collecting three grants Haiku an extra hitpoint, although you need to take the fragments to Rondel to have them welded first.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Unusually for a robot, Haiku fights using a sword called the Kill Switch Sword — although technically, while it's called a sword in the game, it's actually a large metal chip with sharp edges. Despite being just a metal chip who happens to be sharp, the sword later becomes the key to the Lost Archives that holds the truth of the Virus.
• Heroic Mime: Haiku never speaks in the game. Yet they are the Big Good of the game.
• Humanity's Wake: The game takes place 200 years after all humans died and humanity was rendered extinct. Atom's wish and plans was to subvert this, planning to bring back humanity once more after discovering organic life growing once more under Arcadia.
• Immune to Fire: There is an upgrade that allows you to survive the heat of the Smelter and Incinerator without getting overheated. This is obtained by a robot that gives Haiku the upgrade for some Spare Parts.
• Killed Offscreen: Upon reloading your game after defeating the virus, you'll find Limerick's remains in the room with the door to the Mainframe Vault. It's never explained what happened to him, and no text box pops up if you try to examine his body, but it's likely that he was either infected by the virus or killed by one of the infected robots.
• Lost Woods: The Forgotten Ruins are a forest-like area that seems to be one of the few places in the world where plants somehow still grow, despite being underground like most of the game's setting. There's even an enormous tree there named the First Tree.
• My Greatest Failure: Atom feels terribly guilty for not being able to finish their project, begging Haiku, their creation for forgiveness for not being there when the little robot would need them..
• Nature-Loving Robot: Atom, the 4th Creator discovered that flora flourished in the deepest parts of the ground and wanted to repopulate Earth with organic beings and give a newly revived humanity a second chance. This did not sit well for the other Creators, as they believed that the time of organic life was over and that the Gran Calculus should only concern for the machines.
• No Waterproofing in the Future: Haiku will get hurt over time by the dampness and the water streams of the Water Ducts unless they get the Water Treatment upgrade from a robot in exchange for spare parts.
• Overheating: A mechanic of the game. Haiku has a heat gauge that indicates when they will overheat. Haiku will overheat if they use an ability such as dashing, and won't be able to use an ability again if they reach the maximum of the meter, needing to wait until it cools down enough to do a dash again. This also happens when entering the Incinerator Burner and Blazing Furnace, disabling the abilities you normally would use in those zones. Overheating can be also be reduced if you obtain a Liquid Coolant, allowing you to do more abilities until overheating. It's basically an analogue to Soul in Hollow Knight.
• Practical Currency: Spare Parts (shown in the game as bolts and gears of various sizes) are the currency used in Arcadia. They're stated to be valuable because they're needed to repair machines and are hard to come by given the state of the world. Haiku can even use them to repair themself, essentially giving the player the ability to recover HP in exchange for some money no matter where they are, although this requires standing still for a few seconds, leaving you vulnerable to enemy attacks.
• Retraux: The game uses a retro pixel art style for the characters and backgrounds, although it also mixes it with a more modern and fluid look for things like the menus and dialogue boxes as well as some of the animations.
• Robot Religion: The Gran Calculus, more an equation and their philosophy rather than a religion, but the robots of Arcadia believed that there is an equation that checked the balance of all things, where everything changed to balance out a thing when one over weighted another of the equation was going to an extreme. The Creators wanted a world only of machines, tilting the balance into one favor, with Atom wanting to balance it via the creation of organic life.
• Robot Republic: What Arcadia used to be, after the human extinction, robots soon began to develop sentience and later sapience, and under the guide of a group of robots known as the Creators, they built a civilization underground. That is until the Virus barged in. Beyond Arcadia, there are more robot nations built but Arcadia was the most prominent of them.
• Robots Enslaving Robots: Despite thinking they were superior to their human creators, which included morally and ethically speaking, they were just as flawed as humanity. Namely, some of Arcadian's disdain for other robots like the Helm-Crawlers who were forced to live in the depths of the Water Ducts and the Annelidrills who were seen as parasites for eating the wastes of Arcadia despite all of them being robots too.
• Saw Blades of Death: Certain pits have buzzsaws. Later they come in multiple shapes and sizes. Not recommended to touch them. Several enemies also use saw blades to attack. There is even a boss that uses buzzsaws.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Body Modifier ability, which allows Haiku to roll into a ball to get into small spaces, is a clear reference to Samus' Morph Ball ability in the Metroid games, with Haiku's ball form looking almost identical.
  • Splunk is one for the The Brave Little Toaster, since they are both toasters who are going through an adventure around the world.
  • There is a robot amongst the hidden community of robots living in the Sunken Wastes that resemble WALL•E, he even asks for Eva.
• Speaking Simlish: Subverted — while the sounds the robots make when talking appear to be electronic-sounding gibberish, if you listen closely, you'll notice that they're actually reading out the first few words of their text boxes in English, albeit run through a filter to sound heavily digitized.
• Steampunk: Steam Town is a village of robots that uses steam to work. Pinion's Expanse however, seems to work on this technology.
• Steam Vent Obstacle: In Steam Town, there are pipes that shoot out damaging steam at regular intervals.
• Super Drowning Skills: Initially, Haiku lacks the ability to swim and dies instantly upon falling in water or touching a waterfall. After getting the Sealant Treatment upgrade, however, this is no longer the case.
• Theme Naming:
  • Many of the robots are named after types of poems: Haiku, Limerick, Quatern, Sonnet and Rondel, to name a few.
  • The three Creators are named after subatomic particles: Electron, Proton and Neutron. The 4th Creator is named Atom.
• Token Good Teammate: Atom, the 4th Creator wasn't as arrogant nor malicious like their 3 siblings were. When they discovered nature flourishing under Arcadia, they thought that maybe they could use it to revive mankind back and give them a second chance. They also loved Haiku as their child as well, asking forgiveness for not being there when they needed them after being killed by the Virus.
• Travel to Projectile: Haiku can obtain a hook that gives them the ability to travel an entire room with a hook that they can jump mid-air with. This is especially useful when traveling Arcadia.
• True Final Boss: After defeating the virus inside the Mainframe Vault, a brief ending sequence will be shown. Upon reloading the game, however, Verse reveals to the player that they found out that the virus was brought about by something greater and the true cause of the corruption hasn't been dealt with yet. The player then has to head to the Lost Archives at the lowest point of the world map to face the three Creators as the real final boss.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: It's possible to destroy the little house that Splunk builds at one point, for no real reason other than to get an achievement. At least Splunk isn't around there to see this by the time you have the option of doing it.
• Video Game Sliding: A sliding move allows Haiku to get a quick forward burst.
• Wall Jump: After getting the Electro-Magnetism upgrade, Haiku can attach themself to walls and jump off of them.