Phoenotopia: Awakening

Lots of care has gone into the creation of this game, and it shows with the gorgeous graphics and atmospheric soundtrack. It's a game that feels vast, and a slow burn experience for the patient gamer. It's possible that its difficulty will take some time to get used to, but it's worth persevering with this truly rewarding and excellent game. Phoenotopia: Awakening is a thoughtful, coherent game which, if you click with it, doesn't lose a step. A marvellous surprise.

Overall Phoenotopia is a very beautiful looking game that does well at hiding its punishing difficulty, whilst people who are looking for a Zelda 2 style game may be attracted to this title, the more causal amongst us will find it very difficult to enjoy the later aspects of the game where in truth the game gets easier.

I found myself largely enamored with Phoenotopia Awakening. Its often humorous and sometimes sentimental dialogue got through to me, and its challenging but tight platforming action really appealed. I’m a little bit weary from my trek through its expansive campaign, but I’m satisfied all the same. It’s an aesthetically pleasing, unforgivingly mean, but an altogether lovingly assembled experience.

Phoenotopia: Awakening aspires to be a retro 2D action adventure, and it succeeds in many ways. The cute sprites and soundtrack are appealing, and there’s lots of great exploration and puzzle gameplay. That being said, some elements bring along unnecessary stress, making the experience as a whole feel like a juicy durian that can only be cracked open with your bare hands.

Phoenotopia Awakening is filled with a lot of potential from its wonderfully-charming presentation to utterly-delightful characters, but it just falls short of being something iconic and memorable with systems that often work against the player and can feel almost unfair like many retro video games most people don’t tend to pick up and play anymore. With a few tweaks it could make for a much more balanced experience, but Phoenotopia Awakening would be hard to recommend to those not looking for a steep challenge.

By the time you get anywhere in this game, you’re too exhausted to really celebrate it. The pleasant music is a strength, and the pixel-art environments are colorful and detailed, but the art style can also obscure important background elements. Too many NPCs, too many doors, and not enough direction may not dissuade you from giving it a try; achievements and a lengthy campaign provide lots of content for those who want it, but at least give us a map screen. All told, Phoenotopia: Awakening could probably use a little more REM sleep to get some much-needed editing in.

Phoenotopia: Awakening has the ingredients for an excellent experience, but poorly balanced combat mechanics and incredibly steep difficulty get in the way of a good time. With no adjustable difficulty settings in the game, be prepared for a slog.

Phoenotopia: Awakening is the single greatest modern adventure game. Its world is incredibly vibrant and unparalleled in terms of life and atmosphere. The mechanics that this game has to offer are unique and incredibly well-polished. The movement, combat, puzzles, NPC dialogue, and even fishing all fit together nicely to create such a cohesive world.

An incredible remake of the flash game Phoenotopia. This game sets you on an adventure of immense scale, over 50 hours of incredibly well designed combat that rewards patience, smarts and strategy rather than mechanical skill or brute force, puzzles that truly test your lateral thinking, wonderful music that will stay stuck in your head for hours, and a world unbelievably full of colour, depth, meticulously detailed lore and sheer heart. Cosplaying itself as a cosy, light-hearted fairy-tale game, yet the more you go down the rabbit hole, the more it surprises you with its sheer complexity, the darker sides of its lore, philosophical implications and starkly contrasting history. One could argue that its scale and complexity can take a lot of effort to get the ball rolling, or for one to click with/understand its progression mechanics. There are a lot of sections that involve piecing together bits of information by talking to NPCs, and learning about all the important locations in a new area, and doing some light detective work to find out where you need to go next for part of the story or any given mini-quest. There is definitely an initial learning process to all this, however it also makes the game so incredibly immersive, making it important for you to have to really learn about the areas you uncover and indulge in the NPCs wonderfully enjoyable, humorous and informative dialogue. The more you sink yourself into its world, the more it rewards you with story and lore. This method of progression even ties into the combat. By engaging in the worlds sources of information, they can lead you to combat abilities/upgrades, and even strategic information on how to outsmart certain enemies, making attacks that would have seemed impossible or extremely difficult to deal with before, now suddenly completely trivial and in some cases can now give you a huge advantage. More often than not your character is far more limited in movement and much smaller and weaker compared to the enemies you're up against, getting hit will send you flying, while hitting them wont budge them a bit. I compare this combat style to a less in-depth version of Monster Hunters combat. Where you're fighting a monster, or monsters, that far out power or out number you. This meaning strategy, information on the enemy/enemies, positioning, using your toolkit to its maximum effect, or using an enemies behaviour/mechanics against them is of utmost import as you cannot contend with them in a fair fight. This is opposed to many other games revolving around allowing you to run in with no plan or strategy and be able to dodge, outmanoeuvre, out-skill or face tank every enemies attack. This placing emphasis on enemies having immediately clear and fair ways to deal with them, whether its to do with getting a certain stat up, or learning the enemies attack patterns. This instead of needing to stop, go to the drawing board and analyse the enemies mechanics and interactions with your player or the environment to overcome. It's different from the norm and definitely not for everyone, but I love it for that. All of these different things tie together to bring many aspects of the game together under the rule of preparation, information, strategy and smarts being the primary ways to progress. Not to mention that the games tutorial, context clues and NPC dialogue all help smooth this out. It's a very complex game, and that comes at the cost of being harder to immediately grasp what you should be doing, requiring some time to figure out its subtleties. It's story also promises enough good things to come, and fulfils said promises, making it worth learning and making an effort to be curious and explore every avenue, detail and interaction of the games systems. Whether this be its world, its many secrets and mini-quest eluded to by its NPC interactions for you to go and hunt down, its tool based weapon system where each tool has its own unique interactions/properties for you to discover and scheme about how to use them to exploit enemy behaviour, or its deep, incredibly meticulous lore where even the most insignificant of details are fleshed out, have a reason to exist in its world and to connect it to it's gameplay and story. Although Phoenotopia is heavily inspired by many other bits of media, from Zelda to Dragon Ball Z to Cave Story and many others, it never once crutches those inspirations and manages to set up its own unique individual aspects that all connect and blend together into one seamless, unique and beautiful adventure. It's a game that reminds me of why I love games so much. The child-like awe, wonder and feeling of true adventure, combined with its down-the-rabbit-hole style of story-telling and lore where everything isn't quite what it first appears as, hiding many layers of depth and while being unexpected, is definitely welcome. I couldn't ask for a better game, only for more of the same.

Phoenotopia: Awaking is disappointing remake to start, it doesn't offers a wild variety of items and quest to play, each area offers a unique gameplay experience (little differences between areas but not very unique), the game deliver some of music and characters ever seen in a game, aside from its original flash version, Phoenotopia: Awaking includes brand new stuff.

I wanted so bad to like this game. I have 10 hours logged. In that 10 hours I have played one dungeon that had a hard but fun boss. I thought, cool I like this game. That was the first hour. Since then I have been wandering from town to town talking to NPC's. Im not being sarcastic. That has taken 9 hours. That is the way the game is designed. I'm now at a point i had to buy something to continue but don't have the money. I have been trying to grind for the money for about an hour and im still no where close. I decided to give you guys a heads up. Im not saying I'm giving up but the game has been extremely hard and boring up until now.

Do not buy until developers release a patch to improve gameplay. Do not be fooled by the games charming retro presentation this game is a **** of fustrating game design **** have a stamina bar that runs out too quick and drags out fights with even the most basic enemies, Then there is the fact that money is so hard to come by and you need a lot of it to progress , theres the lack of invincibility frames where you can find yourself being smacked around like a pinball between enemies. This is another retro styled game that doesnt undesrtand how videogames have evolved and become more accessible since the nintendo years we need to stop milking the past and stary looking forward.