Lo-Fi Haiku: Coffee and Chill

Genre: Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Lo-Fi Haiku, released in 2024 on Nintendo Switch with a port to PC in 2025, is not a game so much as it is an App designed for relaxation and playing around with words where players try to piece together a short poem consisting of three lines with five, seven, and five syllables using a random assortment of words they’re given. It bears mention that this is a very Westernized interpretation of what a haiku is, lacking the morae or on, as well as the kireji, kigo… look, I’m not a Japanese expert, but suffice it to say that I do at least know that English and Japanese don’t always have direct translations of ideas.

Getting back to the “game”, players are provided a list of words separated by the number of syllables that word has. Players drag and drop these words onto the left side of the screen where three lines have four spaces each for words, with the aim being to get the proper number of syllables in each line. Players can opt to cycle out the current batch of words for others by selecting the coffee cup in the lower-left corner.

You’re not solving puzzles or trying to complete goals here. There’s not any specific “right” answer, you’re not being graded or timed, and even nonsensical haikus are accepted if the syllable count is correct – this is purely a creative word exercise, nothing more. And when you successfully create a haiku… well, there’s nothing more to do than to remove the words and start over, making a new one. That’s pretty much it.

The presentation here is nice, with a lovely hand-drawn 2D visual presentation that gently animates as you go about putting words together, backed by the titular lo-fi hip hop soundtrack this release’s title alludes to. Overall, the presentation makes for a wonderfully soothing experience.

However, even if you’re not expecting a game here, there are problems. There’s no way to seek out a specific word, no way to repeat a word, and each line can have no more than four words each, a frustrating limitation if you have a bunch of smaller words you want to use together on one line. What’s more, there doesn’t appear to be any way to skip a song or create a soundtrack so you can pick favorites here.

As a result, even for its own unambitious premise, Lo-Fi Haiku is too frustratingly limited, lacking the features that you’d want to exercise your creativity or skip to a song you vibe with more. As a result, I can’t help but feel you might be better off putting on some chill tunes of your own and just relaxing with a pencil and paper instead.

tl;dr – Lo-Fi Haiku isn’t a game so much as an app designed to give players a relaxed setting to piece together makeshift “haikus”. While the presentation here is lovely, this title’s more restrictive mechanics and lack of control over the soundtrack mean that even the low bar it sets for itself is one it doesn’t quite surpass. This isn’t a terrible title, and I appreciate how unique it is, but I can’t see much use for it when you can just put on your own music at home and have more freedom to create with a pencil and paper.

Grade: C-

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