A nice throwback to the 80s
Alwa's Awakening is a action-platformer game, with some metroidvania elements, made in a 8-bit style graphics. It highly resembles an NES game, with modern days polish and resolution. The game is pretty simple, but at the same time clever. It doesn't try anything that different from the games it gets inspiration from, having very familiar level designs and controls. It takes around 8 hours to complete a very traditional story of exploring the world and fighting enemies to get 4 items that look like badges. Each time you learn a new spell you can backtrack to find new available paths that you can take, or open new ways to the previous checkpoints.
The game is very friendly with the amount of save points, it has a really nice curve to it, it starts really easy and keeps increasing the diversity in difficulty with time. It also has an fast travel system between the most important areas of the game and some cool sense of the world being connect with some passages that you went by at the first time and didn't realize it.
My favorite thing tho, is the soundtrack, it's simply a very well done 8-bit style soundtrack, what else needs to be said? I would recommend this game for people that have nostalgia from that time, or for people that just like the genre. It's the tipical 8/10 game that does everything well but doesn't invent anything new and keeps itself simple.