This is a game Prfsnl recommended to me a couple weeks back, and it also happened to be cheap enough in the eShop at the time that I had enough existing funds to just buy it outright without needing to go buy a cash card or anything. A fair few other friends also recommended it, so I moved it up my priority list a fair bit, because I'm nothing if not a sucker for a good Metroidvania. I really needed SOMETHING to take the edge off from my attempts at trying to beat the last level of Drakengard 3, and this was the first thing that came to mind, so I beat the English version of the game over around 5 or so hours over two sittings (before and after my last attempts at Drakengard XP).

Alwa's Awakening is a game made to be reminiscent of old, 8-bit Metroid-style game (to the point they've even gone as far as to actually port the game to the NES), and it has a story to match. The land was peaceful until a big bad guy came to heck it up, he's been hecking things up along with his four big bad guy friends for quite some time now, and the heroine Zoe (you) have been summoned in a last-ditch effort to save the land. It's a very text-light story for a game released only a couple years ago, but it fits very well with the style they're going for, so I don't really begrudge the game for that. It certainly made the narrative of the game far more boring for me because it's just a total non-entity, but the lack of narrative itself isn't inherently a negative aspect of the game.

The game itself is a fairly simple Metroidvania with four dungeons before a final dungeon and boss. You go around the world in a very familiar side-scrolling way, and your main method of attack is your staff that you swing at enemies. You can eventually unlock gems to equip into the staff (which can be cycled through with a shoulder button and used via Up + Attack), and they're your movement abilities throughout the game, giving you abilities such as summoning blocks or bubble to push or climb on.

The game overall has a very "fine" quality to it. Combat is a bit unforgiving, given that you only have 3 hits (6 if you make the long trek back to a healing fountain to fill up your bottle) between you and death, healing drops are rare, and there are many bottomless pits. However, the enemies and bosses themselves generally have quite simple patterns (or a pretty easy cheese strat), and the game is generally fairly good about checkpoints. The bosses aren't anything terribly special, and just about all of them fall into the camp of either "too hard" or "too easy", especially once you figure out their one trick, but this game is overall very simple in that regard.

The bigger bugbear in the room is the platforming, which especially in final areas gets way too merciless for its own good. Even the save rooms in the final dungeon have death traps in them, so even if you make it there you aren't guaranteed to actually live to touch that save point. The game has a weird juxtaposition of pretty easy combat alongside some pretty merciless instant-death-packed platforming for most of its runtime, and it makes the pacing pretty rough as a result. It peppers an already fairly lukewarm experience with dashes of being needlessly frustrating, and despite the main character's quite slow movement and reliable jumping, I really didn't care for a lot of the platforming elements in the game.

The presentation is also very adequate. It makes a lot of sense that the company that developed this game also published Cathedral, since that's another pretty rough Metroidvania with just a bit too much difficulty and a very unmemorable art style. The art is colorful and nice for what it is, but it's aiming mostly for homage, and that means it comes off as feeling generic by design. It isn't poorly done, and it actually all looks quite nice, but it's also most certainly generic and unmemorable. The music is all fine, but I wouldn't call any of it particularly special. It's pretty good on a technical level, but the hitbox on your staff can be quite temperamental at times, especially if you're not standing on an unmoving floor.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Perhaps I went in with my expectations too high based on what other people told me about this game, or perhaps I'm just spoiled for Metroidvanias, but I really didn't enjoy my time with this game terribly much. It isn't a badly made game and it's more than adequately put together for the low price it goes for, but it's just so rough around the edges and overall unmemorable that I have a pretty hard time recommending it. You likely won't dislike your time with this game, and you might even enjoy it quite a bit, but as far as indie Metroidvanias on the Switch go, it is not hard to find a similarly priced and far better game to put your time and money into instead.

Alwa's Awakening feels like a game I would've rented on a whim some weekend in 1988 only for it to become a beloved favorite. While Elden Pixels' trip back to a time before we started calling these types of games "Metroidvanias" brings some frustrations of the early days of the genre along for the ride, it never feels as oppressive or downright mean as some of the older NES games did. Instead, it's satisfyingly fun, even as the death counter climbs higher and higher. The game also feels very casual due to its player character's slowish pace, a relatively short play time, and bosses that aren't exactly very challenging. Definitely worth a look in its original form or the nearly identical 8-bit NES ROM version.