Alwa’s Awakening from Elden Pixels is an NES-inspired adventure game that is sure to make gamers of a certain age feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The game stars Zoe, a Mage-like heroine from another world that has been pulled into the land of Alwa to save it from an ultimate evil baddie and their four arch-mages.
The game is truly gorgeous with some fantastic animation that is silky smooth and will make you want to bust out that NES gathering dust in the attic. Alwa’s Awakening plays off nostalgia in the best possible way, but it might not quite be the game you think it is from the screenshots you see, much like games of yesteryear. This isn’t Shovel Knight, or even the Mega Man like game it calls to mind, instead Alwa’s Awakening is a weird mix of genres that don’t always play well with each other.
“There was never a time where I felt like the game cheated me even during the most intense moments”
Your goal in the game is simple: collect four pendants from the four bosses so that you can access the magical warp to the final boss. It’s an easy enough concept, but the layout is a bit weird and may turn a few people away. The game isn’t set up with stages but instead it relies on the Metroidvania style of play. This would be fine in and of itself, but the game isn’t anywhere as deep or lengthy as either of those titles, so you’re going to be backtracking the same few rooms dozens upon dozens of times in very short order.
This gets really frustrating as traveling from one end of the world map to the other doesn’t take all that long. I can’t tell you how many times I saw the same passageways during my adventure to the point of frustration. Alwa’s Awakening is more than happy to send you to the leftmost part of the world to grab a key for a door on the rightmost part of the map. This happens with a few other items as well. This also leads you to getting lost quite a bit (at least it did to me), not because the map isn’t good, it works great in fact, but because everything just sort of looks the same after a while.
The gameplay is simple much like most NES games it emulates, but it works well enough. Zoe is equipped with a magic staff that can be used to attack enemies much like Link wields his sword. You can also upgrade this staff along the way to make it more powerful with these blue orbs that are scattered throughout the world. This won’t be easy as there is usually some sort of basic puzzle involved in reaching these blue orbs and more often than not, you’ll be forced to backtrack to gain access to them after you earn an upgrade from later in the game.
Where the staff really shines is in the magic abilities you need to collect. There are three in total and each will help open up new areas on the map much like an upgrade would in Metroid. The green gem lets you create green block that you can use to get height to reach new areas, a blue gem will allow you to create a temorary bubble that you can ride up vertically and a yellow gem will give you a neat lighting bolt projectile that can kill enemies from a distance and unlock special doors.
While there is combat like most NES games of this nature, you won’t be doing all that much of it. Most rooms (the game says there are 400, but most are extremely small) won’t even have any enemies in them, and the one that do usually only have one or two slow-moving ones. And after you earn the lighting bolt staff upgrade even the strongest enemies can be felled with ease from a distance. There where very few times in the game where a basic enemy of any variety killed me outright without me screwing up a jump or puzzle first.
That said my screwups were entirely my fault as the controls are incredibly tight and responsive. There was never a time where I felt like the game cheated me, and even during the most intense moments of bullshit it throws at you, when you die you’ll probably see what you did wrong within a death or two. I used an Xbox One controller for this review and I recommend that layout, but as this is a NES-inspired side-scrolling game that only makes sense.
And puzzle is the name of the game in Alwa’s Awakening. Well, not so much puzzle in the traditional sense, but more in the Super Meat Boy sense. The game is extremely easy for a majority of the adventure. There is an order to the boss fights, but none of them were that much of a challenge, and if you know your Metroidvania you are going to blast through most of the game with ease.
The problem comes in the very late game where Alwa’s Awakening changes gears and adds these spitting bullet blocks that can’t be killed or easily avoided. Things often turn into a SHMUP and you’ll find yourself not only avoiding enemies, managing tight jumps and using your magic abilities to reach areas all within a single room. This comes out of nowhere and really kills the pacing of the game. Add in instant spike and water deaths and you have a recipe for frustration.
It would be one thing if Alwa’s Awakening built to this, but it doesn’t. The boss fights are pretty fun, if easy, but nothing you learn during them comes into play anywhere else in the game. It almost feels like the developers built this really pretty looking game and realized it was too easy and decided to just make the end game a frustrating 1001 Spikes-like experience. It’s a shame really because a game being easy doesn’t make it any less fun or great. I point to Kirby for an example of that.
“You end up hitting this late game wall where the difficulty spike makes the game almost a maddening experience”
The soundtrack and audio are standouts in the whole project, but even then I had to cut the soundtrack only because I heard the same 8-bit tunes over and over that they lost its magic. Still, what is there is fantastic and if you don’t spend 10 hours on the game finding every little thing like I did for this review, it probably won’t get stale. The audio is all mixed really well and helps build this really amazing world that the team has built, so props on that.
Alwa’s Awakening is really great up to a point and that is sort of a shame. You end up hitting this late game wall where the difficulty spike makes the game almost a maddening experience that you don’t expect. I don’t mind hard games, but Alwa’s Awakening never builds you up for these sections. Pacing in games is vital for someone like myself and things needs to make sense, and I just couldn’t make the connection or find a justification for the weird spike.
Alwa’s Awakening could have been to Metroid and Castlevania what Shovel Knight was to Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man 2 if only it had stuck to the things that made it special. I can imagine there are going to be a lot of Steam reviews praising the game, and rightfully so to a point, but I have a feeling a lot of them do so before hitting the last leg of the game.
All that said, I still do like Alwa’s Awakening and at under $10 you are getting a really solid title. You just need to be aware of what sort of title you are getting in order to get the most enjoyment out of it. I tend to be a tad bit harder on good games and that only makes sense as their flaws shine all the brighter when there are less of them. I say give Alwa’s Awakening a shot, you’ll probably dig this neat NES-inspired title.
Final Score
3.5/5
“Quite Good”
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