To teach himself the rhythm and structure of a great novel, legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson once re-typed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby word for word. Playing Haiku, The Robot made me think something similar was going on, because the game’s resemblance to Hollow Knight is so overt that you could almost call it a replica—or, to put it more generously, a Hollow Knight expansion with a robot skin. The sense is that the game’s solo developer, James Morris, AKA Mister Morris Games, had no intention of hiding his influence. You play as a little robot named Haiku, and as you explore the robotic world of Arcadia, divided up into branching paths like in any Metroid-vania, the echoes of Hollow Knight are frequent. The tech-based enemies have a direct insectoid parallel in Hollow ...