226. Aaru's Awakening (Lumenox Games, Playstation 4, 2015)

Aaru's Awakening is a platformer game that boasts a hand drawn 2D art style. Originally started as a student project, it was eventually completed by a small team based in Iceland. Its claim to fame is the hand drawn art, and while the animation is nice and smooth, the art style doe snot jive with me at all. It looks like a comic book from a publisher I've never heard of. The story of the game is also pretty forgettable, it deals with a bunch of deities vying for power, and you control Aaru, a kind of buff chicken-bear who is the soldier of one of the gods. I will say it's nice to play a platformer as a non-bipedal character.

Thankfully, the gameplay is at least not exactly like anything I've played before. The very first thing the game shows you after an intro cutscene is that L1 is jump, and I don't think I was ready for that, though you get used to it, as this is a rare platformer that is meant to be played with 2 sticks and 4 shoulder buttons instead of a d-pad and some buttons.

Pretty early on, Aaru's Awakening shows you your 2 main abilities. The first is a dash that can break certain walls. You dash in whatever direction you are moving, and it feels pretty good. There's also a ball you can shoot out at any direction with R1 (there is a arrow around you at all times that you can aim with the right stick to help with aiming). While this ability is cool as an idea, it feels very unwieldy in gameplay, and made me long for a stick with grooves like the N64 or GameCube.After you get the hang of both dashing and using the orb to teleport yourself around, you're basically flying, and it doesn't quite feel like any other platfomer I've played. I just wish the right stick aiming felt a little better.

Each level has bronze, silver and gold medals that you can earn based on your clear times. After playing a level once I could reliably get within about 1 second of the time needed for a gold medal, but never actually make it to gold, which was frustrating. But the biggest frustration was the first boss, which requires a pretty high level of skill using the teleporting technique, and I gave up after about 30 or so deaths. Aaru's Awakening is at least very merciful, and you lose basically no time respawning after a failure.

4/5, a challenging speed-focused platfomer where you control a teleporting bear