Alwa's Awakening Review Alwas Awakeningis a Metroidvania with NES-era presentation which is something akin to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. In amongst all the side-on exploration sections, which have you leaping between platforms, slashing away at enemies and using power-ups to traverse wide gaps, there are also calmer sections set within a village, complete with NPCs. These arent in abundance though; this one is more about the gameplay and exploration than it is about story.
Hunt around in the dungeons to find key items like this book, and see what they do. Starting the game with just a magic wand, orbs located across the map will bless the main character Zoe with new abilities, and create new elements in the increasingly puzzling experience. The first is the ability to conjure a green block, used either as a platform for getting to higher ground or to block enemy attacks. Others include the bubble, floating upwards and allowing you to bounce on it to scale steeper walls, and the fireball, handy for lighting torches at the other side of a room. Much like in a 2D Metroid game, as you move from screen to screen your map automatically updates with a new square filled in. This map function does hark back to the NES era a little too much, with its limited amount of detail leading to frustrating guesswork as to where you need to go. Yes, exploration is of the essence here, but youll really need to inspect the map closely to figure out the rooms which are a dead end, indicated by a steady border on the map square. The map does point you in the direction of nearby save points, which is a plus, but their locations arent always great, and getting one-hit-killed by a mine after successfully negotiating what seemed like an eternity of difficult drops can make the game more infuriating than itneeds to be. That the game counts your number of deaths adds a further insult to injury, but its fortunate that any collected items like keys and orbs remain collected with your death but if you died just short of collecting one, its often a difficult path back to the same position.