Awita: Journey of Hope

A cute, 2-4 hour mini metroidvania that can be beaten in a single sitting. Absolutely gorgeous art and animations, and a streamlined map that doesn't feel daunting to explore if all you want is a short game to chill out with. Ran well and most elements felt polished, but sometimes feels like my inputs weren't registering when they should be. Difficulty might feel steep at first, but it turns out to be quite forgiving.

As beautiful as this microvania is, and genuinely interesting the combat system is at face value, I cannot recommend you play this versus the dozens of other microvanias available on STEAM. I'll have several points listed below, but the biggest thing is time. The experience was extremely short, but not in the sweet kind of way, and somehow I feel that was for the best. I have no doubts that multiple people beat this game and were able to refund it, and then chose to afterwards... The World: It is very linear with minimal secrets, and yet somehow most of those secrets are all cluttered in the same general location. The background parallaxing is slightly off which makes certain room literally nausea inducing to walk through. There are some rooms to the right of the map that have background elements that are easily to mistake as foreground, causing you to end up in a bottomless pit instead. And the layout of the map is not nice to the player, considering you have to backtrack from the rightside to the leftside towards the end with no shortcuts. In fact, most of the map will not connect back to other places, nor will you have to make decisions on which area to traverse in order to p…

It's a fine piece, I GUESS, where the combat is barebone simple, with an attack and block, where the block only works for 30% of enemies attacks, with no clear sign that it will work. Also, the block must be timed, So you will be using the dodge/dash, which fortunately CANNOT be spamed, since you're limited by your stamina. Thus, the game did start hard for but once I got the hang of its pretty simple combat, I've found it easy enough. The kinestetic and feeling of movement feels great, but let's be honest, if a 2d game published in the 2020s fails to have good movement, it doesn't deserve to be published. The story and art style is gloomed and ver implicit, hidden in notes, which I know works for a lot people, specially since the souls-like craze, just not my cup of tea and I know I'm not alone. There are no markers, but the map is small enough that I didn't find them encessary. SOme annoying bugs that skips the bosses and moments where the character sprite freezes almost make me want to make this review negative, they weren't game breaking. So you , if you like platforming and explorig, I guess this will work fine.

I can't get throught the first four rooms. Incredible. You are killed pretty much immediately. I've never played a platformer this brutal.

Awita: Journey of Hope is a focused 2D metroidvania that combines traditional exploration, platforming, sword combat, character progression, and a melancholy fantasy story built around perseverance. Developed and published by ant_game_projects, it follows a seemingly ordinary young girl whose remote village is devastated by an epidemic. Rather than accepting the hopelessness surrounding her, Awita takes up a sword and armor and ventures into the wider kingdom in search of a remedy. It is a simple motivation, but an effective one because it gives the adventure an immediate emotional purpose. The protagonist is not exploring simply because there is a mysterious world waiting for her. Every dangerous step potentially brings her closer to saving the people she left behind. Exploration is one of the central attractions. The kingdom is designed as an expansive collection of locations, landscapes, and settlements, with the developer emphasizing that individual places have stories of their own. This approach complements the metroidvania format nicely because curiosity becomes an important part of progression. Traveling away from familiar surroundings introduces new allies, hostile inhabit…

Really nice short soulslite game; I really wish there was more of it tho - it was quite enjoyable to finish in one evening The best of luck to the developer with future projects, hopefully, we will see something more substantial eventually