Haste is a game I’ve been following for a while, ever since I saw early footage of its development on TikTok. If it wasn’t for copyright infringement, I’d say the best way to sum Haste up was “Gotta Go Fast”.
Haste has such a Sonic mentality to it. You enter a “Shard” and have to get to the end as fast as possibly. Each shard is a “run”, consisting of multiple fragments. Unlike other platformers though, you don’t have a jump button. You run up a hill, you get launched into the air, you use your descend button to try and land on a good patch of ground (i.e. at the right angle) and this fills your boost meter. Boost to make it over bigger jumps and generally shave milliseconds from your time. Rinse, repeat, and try to collect the little sparks littering each level on the optimum paths. There are other abilities you unlock later, and other types of missions (catch X number of creatures, boss battles, etc.), but you get the general idea.
In a Shard run, you’ll also encounter other fragments. They could be extra difficult voids, helpful outposts, maybe even a rest stop or two. During each shard you can select items to help you during that run. If you select a spot not directly next to your current location, the game will chain each of these encounters together. Remember, speed is the aim of the game here.
It feels a bit counterintuitive then that the game is so gosh darn gorgeous. Environments are full of variety, the 3D animation and models are beautiful and charming, and the 2D portraits used during cutscenes are also phenomenal. Major props to Landfall here as the team have done astounding work. Part of me just wants to stand still and appreciate the visuals, but luckily that’s where the soundtrack comes in. Energising beats make every cell in your body want to just embody speed and be faster. As a multimedia experience, Haste is truly a treat.
There are four biomes, and four abilities to master, which eventually culminated in you unlocking an endless mode. The main story involves you running away from the dark, trying to find out why the universe is collapsing behind you. The writing is a touch twee, but I honestly find it quite delightful. The characters are emotive and endearing, and the whole setting is interesting.
Just a brief negative, I got hit with glitches/bugs fairly early on. In the tutorial, whenever I failed I’d often respond back in a permanently slowed, blurry state. This was around the time you get the speed boost ability, and the only thing that would fix it was a reset, which of course starts the whole game for you again, which soured the experience a bit for me.
It’s a good job I had to keep resetting though, because even at this early stage, I had a lot of trouble figuring out which way to go. You’d think a game about running forward quickly would have obvious direction, but sometimes the path twists and bends too fast, and without obvious markers in the landscape I found myself just assuming I wasn’t making a jump quite right, and the game kept rewinding me back to the checkpoint and I’d throw myself off the cliff again.
Those are my only gripes with Haste though. As I said before, I’d been waiting for this one for a while, and as someone who loves to occasionally just switch off and let the monkey brain run through the pretty colours and test his reflexes, I couldn’t ask for something better.
Haste was reviewed on Xbox Series X, but is also available on PC, Mac, Linux, Playstation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2.