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The food system is not that dissimilar to what The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did with cooking. Getting damaged becomes failure allowance since sometimes these battles can be pretty fast and using healing items leaves Gail wide open to be smacked down.
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Every first encounter is usually the learning phase where users get accustomed to patterns and how to be most efficient with windows of opportunity to land some hits. Patience and a calm mind win out in the most brutal difficulty spikes that lie with every boss battle. With so many tiny nuances to make fighting off threats more of a challenge, Phoenotopia: Awakening ends up being a really hard game. Even the ranged attacks are affected by gravity and Gail will have to compensate her shots to be able to strike true. Doing air-attacks are especially risky and not easy to land since the animations to do these are a few nano-seconds longer than expected. This is compounded by the stamina system that will leave Gail unable to attack, dash, or effectively flee for safety. Gail does have an unusually slow and delayed melee and an even slower charge attack, which does make the experience feel harder than it really is. There is no need for a map screen either, since the level design has carefully designed layouts and landmarks that make it easy to craft a mental map.Īnother pillar of retro game design is challenging action and Phoenotopia: Awakening honours this tenet admirably. What Phoenotopia: Awakening does well is stay true to the ethos of retro games by easing off on hand-holding, allowing players to discover at their own pace. Like a proper adventure game, she will acquire an assortment of accoutrements to help her overcome gear gates. She gets winded very quickly, can barely swing a club and hits like a sleepy grandmother. Gail begins her quest fairly out of shape. The most distinguishing characteristic of Phoenotopia: Awakening is its stamina system. The bulk of the experience is platforming and fighting a wide range of monsters, using any means necessary to survive. The overhead sections mostly serve to connect areas to each other and give the world a sense of place, while also having monster encounters that utilise the action platforming in a separate screen.
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Phoenotopia: Awakening alternates between two modules of play the overhead world-map and 2D action-platforming. Every trick in the book is used very effectively to enrich the world and add layers of authenticity. Other unobtrusive and clever means to explain some story details are the overall design of items or how they work like the crank lamp. What makes the iterative narrative work is the subtle cues of information and lore that is drip-fed in the background or in incidental text. The premise is simple (and admittedly tired) the hero's journey is in a fantasy world that is set in a post-advanced technological civilisation. The result is a game wrought with so much care and effort that it becomes infectious.
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More than just being fans, it seems like the designers also understand what worked and what did not.
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Phoenotopia: Awakening is made by passionate developers who truly loved The Adventure of Link.
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