I must admit I was awful at Haste: Broken Worlds in the beginning. Before getting my hands on a demo of the game at the Day of the Devs event during GDC 2025, I watched the two players in line ahead of me fall over and over again into the same pit. They struggled to figure out how to get the main character, Zoe, over a gap in the opening tutorial level and became so frustrated with the controls that they quit. I managed, after ten minutes of trying, to push past that obstacle, only to fall into another ditch. I was obviously missing something important, so knowing that this demo was also available on Steam, I gave it another shot. And now I finally get it.
Speed running
SOURCE: Landfall
Created by Landfall, the developer behind Cluster Truck and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Haste is all about maintaining speed. What I didn’t understand at the event was the importance of Zoe’s landings, which are executed well only when she falls on a downhill slope. Getting good or perfect landings allows Zoe to build momentum and reach the portal at the end of a level before the world collapses behind her. If she runs into too many obstacles or makes too many poor landings, her speed plummets and Zoe becomes vulnerable to losing one of her lives. But when everything goes smoothly, it’s easy to get into the groove, especially with the headbangers in the soundtrack.
Avoiding objects and figuring out where to go next are the main challenges throughout a run. Like a bullet hell shmup, Zoe needs to weave around trees, avoid motion-sensitive bombs, and find gaps within giant metal extractors, all of which are randomly generated. In the boss fight named Jumper in the last stage, she has to avoid mortars that spread fire along the ground. Sometimes players get lucky with the placement of obstacles, and sometimes a downslope goes right into a cliff. Getting unlucky doesn’t happen often, though stages marked with a skull on the roguelite map are significantly harder than most.
That said, I found that much of the difficulty came from just navigating a level, since some of them are wide and have a lot of objects occluding the rest of the stage. An arrow or indicator pointing toward the center of the path would have been helpful. I also found a lot of the stages to be shorter than expected, and I hope there’s an option to extend their length in the full game.
Wrong place, wrong time
As Zoe discovers through the demo, the worlds around her are crumbling, and she has no idea why. The other characters she meets along the way, like tutorial host Riza, don’t explain why this is happening. But given that the item trader, Gan, says he pulled his stock from hypothetical alternate timelines, that’s looking like the source of the cataclysm.
At any rate, there are many ways for Zoe to improve her odds of survival. The first is her board, which builds energy as she makes solid landings, and is used to give her a slight boost while in the air. Another is a currency called sparks that are found on the course and also given as a bonus for running through a level quickly, with an S rank awarding the most. These are spent at the shop to earn items that improve speed, restore health, extend the pickup range for sparks, and bestow many other benefits. Some points on the map will have a campfire where Zoe can recover health and lives, but this means not potentially earning sparks in other levels. With enough experience, players can skip these campfires altogether and earn a better set of passive abilities.
The release date for Haste: Broken Worlds is slated for 2025 on PC via Steam. A demo for the game is available on Steam as well.
This preview is based on a demo provided by the publisher at the Day of the Devs: San Francisco Edition event at GDC 2025.
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replyNick Tan posted a new article, Haste: Broken Worlds is an exhilarating mad dash through collapsing timelines
