Aaru's Awakening Review (PC)

poor
key review info
  • Game: Aaru's Awakening
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: Yes  
  • Reviewed on:
Aaru's Awakening review on PC

Puzzle platformers are a dime a dozen nowadays and most new titles try to break out from the mainstream using things like uncommon visual styles, intriguing gameplay mechanics, or interesting controls.

Aaru's Awakening, from developer Lumenox Games, tries to do all these things, offering a breathtaking visual style that seems like a moving sketch taken from an art school student's notebook, while combining it with a tough difficulty and an interesting teleportation system.

Does Aaru deserve to be awaken for this new title or should the game remain dormant? Let's find out.

Story

Aaru's Awakening offers a pretty interesting premise for its story, with a mythical world that's ruled over by four deities: Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night. After a bitter war, they now take turns governing the world, but as you find out from the opening cut scene, Dawn has a fiendish plan and makes his servant Aaru, a special type of beast, travel through the domains of his rivals and take them down.

The story has this alluring premise and explores ideas of blindly serving your masters, growing a conscience, and doing different things. Unfortunately, the narrator's child-like voice doesn't exactly complement the rather heavy philosophical aspects of the narrative and weighs it down a fair bit.

What's more, the fact that the plot is relayed through motion artwork also fails to get people involved all that much in the general story, which is a shame since the universe has a lot of potential.

Deal with platforms in Aaru's Awakening
Deal with platforms in Aaru's Awakening

Gameplay

Aaru's Awakening tasks players with controlling Aaru, a beast that can move in the side-scrolling experience left or right, jump, and execute a dash into the direction of the mouse cursor. The game can be controlled using either mouse and keyboard or a controller, but even if most platformers are easier with a gamepad, this title is an exception. It's quite hard to control the cursor with the analog sticks, and while you can change the charge system to go into the direction you're facing with Aaru, it doesn't have the same great response.

As such, you're more or less stuck with the mouse and keyboard input. Jump is bound to the W key and the charge to Space, and it takes quite a long time to get used to it, seeing as how most games bind the jump action to Space by default.

Throw in the teleport system that sees Aaru throw a ball into the direction of the cursor with the left mouse button and then teleport to it using the right button, and your brain and reflexes will be tested quite severely by the game.

What's worse, Aaru's Awakening is extremely difficult both by design and through its rather cluttered visual style. First up, there are many areas that require trial and error to first understand what it throws at you, and then to find an effective way through them. There are quite a lot of situations where you need to constantly stay in the air by jumping, charging, throwing the ball and then teleporting to it, and then repeating the whole process.

Throw in the visual style that, while certainly appealing, makes it tough to spot actual impassable walls or platforms that are dangerous and you're in for quite a few deaths.

There are also walls that can be broken using Aaru's charge, but there are a few situations where it's unclear if they're present or they're just part of the background art.

The teleport system is also used as an offensive mechanic, as Aaru can teleport into enemies and dismember them. While it certainly seems fun at first, when you're faced with flying foes or opponents that charge at you, it becomes very hard to approximate the ball's trajectory or to time things just right.

Another aspect that makes Aaru's Awakening even more difficult is the pretty tight camera zoom. It stays centered on Aaru and makes getting on upper or lower levels, or in exact places to the right much more tedious. As such, you're once again forced to use a trial and error approach, hoping to score a lucky jump or a good trajectory for your teleport ball.

Boss battles are also a bit weird, as they consist of giant monsters and multiple warp circles, so to say, into which you can teleport and face off against specific challenges. Once you complete all the circles, you're taken to another challenge room that must be complete in order to defeat the enemy.

While the game does amp up its replay factor by offering your time, the number of deaths, and the target silver or gold medal times at the end of each level, it's often quite disappointing to see that, while others finished a level in under a minute, you needed 10 or more, not to mention many, many deaths to just go through it.

Great visuals in Aaru's Awakening
Great visuals in Aaru's Awakening

Visuals and Sound

Aaru's Awakening has some of the most interesting visuals seen in a puzzle platformer since Braid. The colors are great, the general tone is unique, and some of the elements, like the level select screen, are works of art. Unfortunately, like I mentioned above, it's tough to separate what's a gameplay element from what's a background item. The game also suffers from collision errors as you're often killed by coming into contact with spikes despite staying clear of them or reaching the edge of a safe zone.

The soundtrack is supposed to be soothing, but after a while and quite a few deaths, it can wear on your nerves, as well as the relatively annoying death sounds that you'll get to hear a lot, especially in the latter levels.


The Good

  • Interesting visual design
  • Novel premise for its world
  • Intriguing teleport system

The Bad

  • Grueling difficulty
  • Cluttered levels
  • Repetitive soundtrack
  • Relies too much on trial-and-error
  • Story isn't relayed all that well
  • Camera zoom causes more deaths

Conclusion

Aaru's Awakening has a serious difficulty curve, but when you combine the twitch-based controls, the confusing art style or the camera zoom, you end up with an experience that, once completed, doesn't offer a feeling of joy or accomplishment. You just feel like you've finally completed a tedious task.
story 6
gameplay 5
concept 5
graphics 7
audio 6
multiplayer 0
final rating 5.5
Editor's review
poor
 

Aaru's Awakening screenshots (16 Images)

Aaru's Awakening review on PCLearn the story in Aaru's AwakeningGreat visuals in Aaru's AwakeningCross environments in Aaru's AwakeningLearn to teleport in Aaru's Awakening
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