Haneda Girl is a furiously retro breach-and-clear murderbox starring one girl and her mecha
Demo out now
The tastiest thing you can currently do in Haneda Girl is eject yourself from your mech straight into a streaking katana blow that carries you though a door and two torsos before teleport-summoning your mech as though inflating a lifejacket to gun down three other mooks in a giddy gout of purple gore. OK, that’s more than one thing. It is, according to local experts, a combo. What are combos good for? Score multipliers, that’s what. Here is a trailer. Ware the techno.
In this action-platform stealth me-do from Studio Koba, you’re a juvenile coin-op junkie who has been piped Tron-style into an arcade game to “save Data Empire from the frightening (and intense) Hackernauts.” Each level is a tidy 2D breach-and-clear puzzlebox in which you can stomp around in your M.O.T.H.E.R mecha, or platform on foot like a sucker. While inside the mecha you have Gatling guns and shields, but you’re too hefty to fit through doors. While on foot, meanwhile, you can run up walls and backstab people, but you can also be slain in one hit.
Fortunately, Haneda Girl can teleport-summon the mecha without penalty, so there’s no need to commit to either style, save for when you’re constrained by an obstacle such as an inconsiderately human-sized passage or a katana-proof fractured surface. The Steam blurb has some helpful, slightly insulting advice: “I am fearful and conservative = use M.O.T.H.E.R”; “Some days I get the nerve = Swap between M.O.T.H.E.R and Haneda”; “I am very forward = Haneda Girl (no doubts)”.
To put all that another way, you will “move like in Celeste”, “destroy like in Bro Force”, “slash like in Katana Zero”, and “die like in Hotline Miami”. Woah, save some touchstones for the rest of us, Studio Koba! There’s wearing your influences on your sleeve, and then there’s bulletpointing them as verbs.
Thankfully, Haneda Girl has a few fresh ideas of its own. The dual character setup harbours a nifty symbiotic resourcing element. When Haneda Girl ejects from the cockpit, the mecha’s shields are restored; when she summons the mecha, it also replenishes her superdash attacks. So the more you switch, the more capable you’ll be, and the more you’ll feel like weaving the mech and pilot elements into a gratifying techno pretzel.
Given some appropriately devious level design, I think these fundamentals could really sing. There's a demo on Steam. The full game releases on 23rd May.