Alwa's Awakening

There is a section in the Shrine of the Sea Monk where the game forces you to make short jumps through a spiked tunnel to progress. Spikes are insta-death. Cannot tap lightly enough with keyboard keys, just cannot be done.

It's not perfect, but neither were the games of yesteryear, so I consider this a solid Metroidvania. But, I'm actually only writing a review to give people a heads-up that the soundtrack—which is one of the highlights of the game.—is available to download on Bandcamp for "Name Your Price," which means potentially free, though if you pay $1+ it gets added to your Bandcamp library. Enjoy.

For those who don't prefer NES style games I would highly recommend Alwa's Legacy to be played first and then playing this game afterwards. Other than that works perfectly well on Linux. it has everything that NES style game needs. One of the best games in this genre and highly recommended.

I have that USB-Stick 8-Bit Edition and played it on my Mister / Anbernic. Now thanks to Gog i can see the "enhanced" Edition ;) The Game has a really nice Style to it, the Sprites are just lovable. Movement and Gameplay feel very good and spot on, nothing clunky here. You have enough Save Points, so even newer Methods as Save States aren't necessary.

I'm 39 years old and thought I just went back in time 3 decades. Other titles of that time don't feel as smooth and polished as this one does. It's obvious it really was made out of a labor of love. You can really get that feeling the developer really realllllly finessed the details and loved what they were doing. Keyboard works great but would recommend changing your layout for bigger hands in the menu. If you have a USB joystick from either a SNES or Genesis might be the absolute pinacle of play. Only recommendation I'd make would be play next to a clock. You may only intend on playing for 30 minutes but due to the quality of the game it will remove all concepts of time. Yup, THAT good!