Aaru's Awakening

I went into this one because the screenshots looked unlike anything else on the platform shelf: pencil lines still visible in the linework, four mythological realms painted in the kind of saturated palette you associate with 1970s animated films. That aesthetic curiosity pulled me in. What it didn't prepare me for was how ferociously the gameplay would push back. Aaru's Awakening is a side-scrolling precision platformer built around two core abilities: a charge dash and a soul-propelled teleportation orb. You fire the orb in the direction of your cursor, then blink your physical body to wherever it lands. On paper that sounds elegant, and in its best moments it genuinely is. Threading Aaru through a narrow gap, chaining two mid-air teleports, and landing on a crumbling platform before it disappears produces a brief rush that keeps you coming back. The game spans four domains, Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night, each with its own visual identity, enemy types, and boss encounter. The bosses are multi-stage affairs that include their own internal checkpoints, which is a small mercy given how long it takes to reach them. Here is where honesty requires a gear change. The charge dash fires toward your mouse cursor rather than in the direction Aaru is running, which cuts against thirty years of platformer muscle memory. Foreground and background blur together in a way that makes it genuinely difficult to know whether a branch is a platform or painted scenery, and the death screen triggers so quickly that you often cannot diagnose what killed you. Checkpoints are unevenly spaced, collision detection has documented inconsistencies, and the game ends each level with a timer and death-count summary that creates an identity crisis: is this a meditative myth-soaked adventure, or a speedrun challenge? It tries to be both and lands awkwardly between them. The soundtrack is soothing and original, but prolonged sessions of dying will eventually turn even a pleasant ambient loop into an irritant. The story frames four divine siblings, Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night, in a power struggle, with Aaru sent out as Dawn's champion before beginning to question his orders. It is a genuinely interesting mythological premise, but it is delivered almost entirely through narrated storybook screens between worlds, and the connective tissue between those moments and what you actually play is thin. The world-building earns your curiosity; the execution does not quite pay it off. There is also a Hardcore mode that asks you to complete all twenty-three levels in a single sitting without dying, which the game was not designed to support and which most players will sensibly ignore. For a small Icelandic studio's debut release, the artistic ambition here is real and visible in every frame. If you have the patience for opaque controls and unfair deaths, and you genuinely love wringing mastery out of an unconventional movement system, there is something to find here. But go in clear-eyed: the art and the gameplay are in constant tension, and the gameplay does not always win.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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