There is no denying that nostalgia sells. More than that, it inspires many creators. As many kids who played games grew up and became developers, they started to make games inspired by their favorite ones and to construct a whole new generation of retro games.

Unfortunately, many of these games are simply not very good. Sure, many games, in general, are not good, but some of them fail to understand how to use nostalgia to create a good game. This is why it is so refreshing to see games like Alwa’s Awakening. The secret of Alwa’s Awakening is understanding and mastering the connection between old-school gaming and the need for modernization.

Alwa’s Awakening is a Metroidvania platformer released in 2017 by Elden Pixels, a team composed by only four people: Mikael Forslind (designer), Kevin Andersson (programmer), Alexander Berggren (pixel artist) and Robert Kreese (music artist).

The game tells the story of Zoe, a sorcerer brought from another world to the land of Alwa with the mission to save the land from its oppressors. Her objective is pretty straightforward: to destroy the guardians that are protecting four jewels that she needs in order to save the kingdom. To do this, Alwa has to acquire new abilities and use her magic to crush or at least flee from her enemies.

While the story is pretty standard fare (and the whole game does not delve a lot into it, too), the gameplay is what makes this little game so incredible. Alwa’s Awakening is a very old school game that can also get the modern sensibilities right. To illustrate that, we’ll have to see how most games fail to understand how to understand nostalgia and how to make nostalgic games that work. There are two most common cases, each one of one extreme.

The first fatal error that many developers commit is to not understand what made the old-school games that inspired them so interesting. If you have read Angry Duck Gamer for some time, you probably know that I believe that both Fallout 3 and Pillars of Eternity are great examples of games who simply do not understand very well what made the games that inspired them interesting. Fallout 3’s case does not apply well here since Bethesda clearly does not care at all about what made the old Fallout games great, but Pillars of Eternity is an excellent example.

In Pillars of Eternity, you have many features that Obsidian believed that were what made the Baldur’s Gate games good back in the day. You got the whole package: isometric view, a large party of adventurers, D&D-inspired classes, lots of quests, “old-school RPG elements”, etc. When you look at how the game uses this aspect, though, you can perceive that it greatly lacks substance. The areas are way more uninteresting than in Baldur’s Gate and most of the encounters are trash mobs.

The game developers simply did not understand that part of what made Baldur’s Gate so special was the volume of great content that the game had, not only lengthy text boxes or stats. I’ll not get too in-depth about PoE’s problems here because you can just the whole review if you want, but the point is that many games try to look old-school and they only end up copying iconic elements instead of the design and the mechanics that made those games so great.

While the art style of the game may evoke some nostalgia, the content doesn’t. In fact, I’m pretty hyped for Pillars of Eternity 2 exactly because Obsidian decided to stop trying to emulate Baldur’s Gate and went to do its own thing instead. That’s better. A game should not only look old-school, those old games were great because they were great to play, not because they were isometric. On the other hand, you can also make a bad game if you go too far in the old-school direction.

This leads us to our second problem. Many game developers seem to think that “being old-school” is just being inaccessible and very hard because challenge is “good”. That’s not fun at all. While someone might enjoy playing Ultima IV even with its horrible clunky controls, they will do that because they know that game design was different in 1985. If a game tried to emulate that today it would only be obtuse for the sake of being obtuse. That’s bad game design.

What some of the developers seem to have forgotten is that those old games were tough but fair. They did not hold the hand of the player but they surely gave it the proper tools to figure things on his own. They were not about frustration, they were about the joy of the discovery. You had to learn how to play on your own and that was rewarding.

Alwa’s Awakening understands this and nails the difference marvelously. The game offers a very hardcore and old-school experience which is never unfair and also never holds your hand. It has all the feel and the aesthetics of the 8-bit era, but it is not is not happy with just this, it plays like an old-school game but with a decent interface and some features that make the game more accessible and less annoying.

You will die a lot in Alwa’s Awakening. The game even has a death counter (as if to mock you, really). Every death will have a clear reason, though, and many of them will be avoidable if you play well. Either you did not avoid the enemies very well (or did not understand how to do that yet), failed to complete a deadly puzzle or lacked the skills not to fall in the water, spikes, etc.

Alwa’s Awakening is all about exploration, precision and learning. You will be free to explore the world in a Metroidvania fashion to get new abilities (you can even sequence-break the game) and many of the areas that you will explore interconnect. In fact, exploring Alwa very thoroughly is necessary to finish the game because you need some power-ups that are not in obvious places. Paying attention to cryptic hints from the NPCs of the world and exploring well will really be rewarding. Nothing is handed to you easily.

You also need precise moves to navigate through the dungeons of the game. The last dungeon is full of deadly traps and it can almost get annoying if you are not paying attention and developing your precision through the whole game. This is a real hardcore platformer. Zoe’s movements might even be a little floatier as if she is gliding mid-air, but you will see that they are really precise as soon as you master them. Fortunately, the game has plenty of save points so you will not need to backtrack too much when you need. Also, all the keys and items that you get stay with you if you die, which makes all the difference between the game being challenging and punishing. This is a game that understands that you are in 2018 (or 2017 when it was released) and that you do not have time to lose. Alwa’s Awakening is tough but extremely fair.

Another masterful idea of the game is to give you power-ups like creating blocks or bubbles in which you can climb on. Zoe never feels too overpowered. You always have to be clever and precise if you want to survive and when you fight the later bosses, you have to observe them well and get creative.

These and many other characteristics are what makes Alwa’s Awakening so engaging. The game is as hard and interesting as any hardcore old-school game but it also feels modern and accessible. This is a perfect combination that unfortunately, many developers are unable to find. Alwa’s Awakening should be an example of what an old-school game should be.