Indietail – Haydee

In celebration of the #LoveYourBacklog-Week, I was browsing through my library and trying to revive games that I’ve played in the past and review those. Really Big Sky, The Plan, Among Ripples, Relic Hunters Zero, SpaceChem, Ori and the Blind Forest, and NeuroVoider are some games that I wanted to review and while I’ve finished reviews on a few of these games, a lot of them are still sitting in the drafts-section, waiting to get polished and to get wrapped up eventually (not today! But eventually for sure!). And then I stumbled across some other games that somehow (probably through free giveaways, random steam keys or Humble Bundles) have made it into my library, so I decided to play some of them without taking a look at screenshots and without looking at the Steam Store page of these titles. One of these titles was Haydee.

So, that’s how it came to be that today’s Indietail review is about Haydee, a game in which you’re playing as an overly sexualized female robot and where you essentially try to not tilt too much and where you want to know what the fuck is going.

Developer: Haydee Interactive
Publisher: Haydee Interactive
Genre: Metroidvania, NSFW, Platforming, Mature, Indie
Release Date: September 26, 2016
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC
Copy was purchased.

After starting this game up, I immediately thought that I’d regret it. I guess I was somewhat biased when I saw this protagonist’s model and realised that the Steam Store tags probably included „Mature“ or „Female Protagonist“ or „Nudity“ (and yeah, they do). We’re playing as a „thick“ robot who’s walking through maze-like rooms and solving puzzles. The game is accompanied by some futuristic and rather enigmatic tunes that got on my nerves rather quickly and the game is overly frustrating as it never tells you what you’re supposed to do nor how you perform certain actions nor how you save the game. Instead, you’ll have to figure out yourself that you can hang off cliffs by pressing crouch twice or that you’ve got to find certain (rather rare) terminals to save the game with (also rather rare) save chips. Hence, you’ll die over and over again.

The game expects you to die a lot, which is why I rather quickly got the achievement „Welcome to… Haydee!“ (Find your death in Haydee.) and „Moron“ (Die three times in a row in the same room.).

When performing certain actions, like jumping up, you’ll see that everything is jiggling in the most unnatural way and that everything about this game is rather oversexualized, which I personally didn’t really like. It’s not that I’m a prude or anything like that – it’s more that it seemed to be something that the game relied on too much. After all, NieR: Automata features rather sexualized characters as well… but it also has an interesting story, a great soundtrack, nice combat, an open world, a very creative customization-system, multiple endings and a lot more features that I can’t possibly list in this post.

But why did I keep on playing?

Mostly, because I’m stubborn. I don’t like Haydee at all and if it weren’t for a review (that I really wanted to write), I would have stopped playing this game immediately after my fifth death or so. But over time I got better at getting through the tutorial. Suddenly, there has been something nice about the game. A certain twist happened, as we unlocked a screwdriver that allows us to crawl through vents while we ignore the moon that is shining into the camera. There’s some exploration in the game happening which I wouldn’t have expected from what looked like a rather bad game. You’ll have to press buttons in some rooms, then go back and unlock other doors to proceed to the next rooms until you eventually can save again, wipe off the sweat off your forehead and rest assured that you won’t have to start over from the beginning again, as you’re dying over and over again.

There are some interesting platforming parts and while I really hate how the protagonist, Haydee, has to spread their legs and stretch out their butt and crawl over the ledge to perform a simple task as jumping onto a block, I really liked the idea of having these mixed elements in this game. A game that makes you hate it so much until you ragequit and a game that rewards those that stay for longer and play the game more than just twenty minutes. I personally took part in a few Drama projects and really liked the idea of performing something weird and experimental with a message so abstract that it either makes people hate it or love it. I’ve been to a performance one of a solo-actor and was fascinated by the fact that there’s been people prematurely leaving the room while others were confused and while I was just staring at that half-naked man performing one of my favourite plays, Woyzek, all on his own – a play with about fourteen and more roles in it played by one single man, with such a passion that it made people either hate it or love it (and I loved it absolutely).

Haydee is similar. Once you get past the hard bits, it gets rather enjoyable. You’ll be able to look past the over-sexualization, I think, and you’ll want to find out what Haydee is and what these strange robots are that aren’t like Haydee and why there are so many disposed Haydees on the pit of the cliffs you’ve already fallen into. There’s some sort of story that isn’t explained to you at all and I felt like I wanted to know what’s happening. I was intrigued by the mute character and the game that didn’t give a shit about me understanding it or not. There is no handholding when it comes to tutorials and even less when it comes to storytelling.

At some point, I found a gun and I knew that I’ll have to fight something, I guess. Maybe I’ll have to defend myself or maybe even hunt something down. Sometime later, I encountered some robots that apparently took down other Haydees and that have it out for me. Hence, I’ll have to make use of the gun and ammunition, I have to fight them off and survive the next levels and eventually… I stopped playing. I didn’t play through the whole game and honestly, I didn’t really want to as the frustration was outweighing the good sides by a ton, resulting in more or less of a rage-quit, I guess.

Question is, do I like Haydee?
Well, absolutely not.

I don’t like certain aspects of it, like the clunky controls, the missing handholding, the fucking jump scares that I encountered, the steep difficulty curve at the beginning and the unjustified difficulty of the game in general. You’re getting punished for messing up and you’re getting punished when the game doesn’t register the jump you did properly. There are no checkpoints in the game and you’ll have to manually save but you’re not able to if you don’t have to save chips. Eventually, you’ll fight against enemies but with no ammunition, you won’t last long, especially as stealth doesn’t seem to be an option. The aiming also feels rather off, the camera angles are weird and the third person only seems to be there so that the game can rub an ass into your face.

I think it’s just not my type of the game and hence, I don’t recommend it to people that value their time and money. If you want to try it out or if you think that everything I told you didn’t sound too bad, sure, go ahead, but I personally don’t think that I’ll play any more of it.

Anyways, I hope that you enjoyed this review. It turned to be kind of a rant in the beginning but then became a rather positive review before I eventually realised that the flaws don’t outweigh the good sides there are. The game turns good at some point but it continues with its flaws throughout the game and it just didn’t feel all that worth it, especially for the price you can get it at.

Until the next time, cheers!

Note: Since my screenshots didn’t get uploaded to the Steam Online Library (as planned), I wasn’t able to use them when I was editing this review on my laptop, resulting in me having to use the screenshots from the promo-material. Thought I’d let you know.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!