Alwa's Awakening

Alwa's Awakening is pretty good as just a little, NES-inspired metroidvania game. The controls are simple and tight, swing with the staff to hit enemies, use spells you find in the game's world to help you get to inaccessible areas. Really, the only problem at this point is that the main character, Zoe, doesn't run that fast. The plot is also simple: Vicar took over the land of Alwa, stole its holy artifacts and handed them over to the Protectors. Nearly 200 years later, Zoe gets summoned into the land to defeat the bad guys. This is not the game if you want deep lore, backstory, character development and the likes, but pretty neat due to its NES-like brevity. The horizontal middle of the map is Alwa's plains, while everything above and below are dungeons, which are progressively more difficult than the last. You'll be able to traverse most of them without problem, but some rooms use killer spikes which can send you back to the nearest checkpoint - not much of a big problem... until you show up to the final dungeon, which is mercilessly brutal and a major difficulty spike. The map is pretty huge when combined with Zoe's slow walking speed, so there are warps in most locations, and even then, expect to walk a bit if you have a specific room in mind. The slow travel is mostly why I took a star off. Oh, not only is the music catchy and actually made in FamiTracker (which is a program that produces NES sounds and music), but also it's available as a NES ROM, for free, from Elden Pixel's website. What a banger. Finally, the game has a few secrets to investigate! They include cryptic hints, hidden rooms, items that (seemingly) do nothing, and mysterious stuff. They don't actually add to the gameplay, but it's fun to learn about or do the tremendous task of making sense out of them. Check your GOG library, chances are you already got the game for free. If you haven't, the game goes on sale for very cheap and worth a try if you're into NES-style metroidvanias.

Baby metroidvania is better than it looks, don't let the retro aestethic fool you, this game is tough, and not so much on account of the enemies, but the platforming, as you progress through the game you unlock 3 spell that are almost exclusively tools to traverse the world and find its secrets, you will be using those spells in tandem to best the most tricky challenges and to top it allrun the majority of the game with only 3 hit points, if you lose them or get hit by an instakill trap you go back to the last checkpoint you activated, this is pretty punishing, specially in the last dungeon, this game gave me a run for my money and finished adn finished dying a little shy from 250 times, and honestly,, I had to activate quick respawn in the last dungeon because I couldn't handle it, one of the rooms took me like 20 attempts.

Enjoyed it very much.

I tried to play Cathedral I got to one area and gave up I feel like I will actually be able to beat this one it helps that this game has an assist mode for people that just want to see the story and don't want to die on the same screen over and over and have to backtrack from a save point. I feel like more of these types of games should have an assist mode or at least difficulty settings which Cathedral did not. Now even though Elden Pixels did not develop Cathedral they did publish it. The thing I did enjoy about both this game and Cathedral was the beautiful 8 bit style music and art. I see from reading reviews that Alwa's Legacy is easier than this one maybe I should have started with it but I didn't know if the game was part of a series and didn't want to start on the second game on the off chance that some story elements happened in the first game and I didn't see them. Anyway enough rambling great game you should play it especially if you love 8 bit action adventure platformers

I really enjoyed playing through this game, but there were a few flaws that I did not enjoy. First and foremost I should note that the gameplay, storyline and atmosphere were very well done. The controls felt very tight, the levels were [mostly] well designed. The parts that I did not enjoy were the following: #1. There could have been a wider variety of enemies. After a while the game got a little repetitive with the enemy selection. #2. The warp zones were great to have, but I felt like they were poorly executed. You end up spending A LOT of time not knowing where to go, so you end up doing a fair bit of backtracking in order to get from point A to point B. #3. Getting the extra health was great, but you almost never get to use it because the wells (filling stations) were so far apart that it the game made you backtrack REALLY far in order to refill your extra health. It made me think that this was a last minute decision to add this feature. This was especially annoying when you were facing a difficult boss. Which brings me to my last complaint. #4. The bosses were a bit unbalanced. You generally went from beating a relatively simple boss to an impossibly difficult boss. I'm not saying that it was unfair ... it was just frustrating. That being said, this game is well worth the price.