Awaria (2024)

Awaria gives a lot for you to do at the same time, and its randomness can make the whole thing feel overwhelming. Once you get into a good flow though, it can still be a really fun challenge.

The player is a maintenance worker in a haunted tunnel - as ghosts threaten to destroy the player said player must also generate needed parts and fix constantly breaking generators. Often each part is on a cooldown, causing the player to move rapidly from station to station and ensure that a part is being made at all times for efficient moves. Staying still means death, though in the more chaotic cases it's not as clear where and how to move amongst the hordes. A dash ability is introduced later which helps, though the chaos increases exponentially from that point.

The game is marginally bigger than Helltaker, with a story of a handful of kissable ghosts for our protagonist to win over and three difficulty levels. Gamers that thought Helltaker was too simple will find no lack of challenge (and frustration) here - the part needed for each generator is totally random, which may make or break runs. It's also very easy to get caught up in an unwinnable pattern, and movement is not as readable in this slightly top-down look. If the player moves quick enough they just might be able to manage enough fixes to win.

The music and environs help that focus - with the same high energy magnetizing feel from the Helltaker OST's creator, ghostly greens clash against dingy yet thoroughly active scenery. It's as if the whole screen is a distraction to keep the player from focusing but being able to focus through all the madness is an incredible skill.

Awaria isn't as tightly designed as Helltaker, even if all the extra difficulty levels and movement make this feel like a more realized game. The characters aren't as memorable but the lesbian romances are absolutely adorable and Awaria should be struggled through for that at least.

I recently found out about Awaria, and I immediately downloaded it and completed it 100%. I had fun! It's a pretty interesting game that mixes resource and task management with bullet hell patterns, and while it does start to lose the thread and get slightly worse towards the end, it's overall a pretty good game. It's especially good if you like to see girls kissing.

When it originally released in 2020, it feels like Helltaker was an immediate success. Although it had really simple and forgettable gameplay, the demons' characterization and design was an immediate hit with its audience, and social media was full of fanart and posts about every white-haired girl in the game (also a lot of porn). Awaria tries to recreate the success of the first title, and while it definitely doesn't get close, I think it results in a much better game (still got a lot of porn tho).

In Awaria, you play as Ula Usterka, a young woman who recently joined the Tunnel Dogs, a group in charge of providing maintenance to a series haunted tunnels in order to keep the ghosts inside at bay. Every time a generator fails, it's your job to get down there as quickly as possible and fix it before anything bad can happen.

In each level, you'll be placed inside a new tunnel, and will have to fix the generators inside while being chased by cute ghost women. Over time, the generators in the stage will break, and you'll need to bring specific materials to them, which all take time to prepare and fix. In a sense, it's kind of like Overcooked if it was a bullet hell. It's so much fun to manage all your resources while looking for the best fixing order for each map, all while trying to avoid ghosts and hazards around the map.

Although I really like the concept of adding a Bullet Hell on top of a resource management game, I don't think it's executed very well. The ghosts that chase you around all have their own history and personality, with attack patterns to match. At first it's fun to learn all of these attacks and obstacles, but they'll soon start to get upgraded and team up on you, making the game slowly start to feel more and more unfair and overwhelming as you go, especially in hard mode. The levels' designs and layouts are pretty bad too, and aside from two or three stages, most of them felt either unremarkable, or featured dumb obstacles that only added to the frustration.

Sadly, the developer doesn't do much to address this frustration, as all the "fixes" feel more like temporary bandaids than actually trying to balance the game and solve the problem. Because it's ok to send you a hundred unavoidable attacks if we also give you a spammable, invulnerable dash, right?

I think the game's story is pretty good, especially when compared to Helltaker. The characters get a little bit more development this time around, and while the story still boils down to "Main character wants to make out with as many cute girls as possible", it feels a lot more personal and romantic.

Awaria still runs into the same problem as Helltaker where a lot of the characterization for the girls does exist, but not in the main game. You don't have to look through Vanripper's twitter feed looking for comics detailing the character's likes and dislikes this time around, but having to go through the development journal in the gallery to know why there's two characters with the same name is still probably not ideal.

As for the presentation, yeah it's obviously peak like it's Vanripper art with music by Mittsies like why are you even asking come on man

Honestly I don't like comparing this game to Helltaker this much, but I feel like the concept of the game itself invites these types of comparisons. Not only were both games made by the same people, but they're both about very similar themes and with similar characters. Out of both games, I feel like Awaria treats its story a lot more seriously, and tries to actually do something interesting with its gameplay. They're both good in its own right, but I prefer this one.

In conclusion: While its difficulty and level design feel a little rushed and poorly thought out, overall, Awaria is a pretty fun game with a nice little story. The presentation is incredible, and the gameplay concept is very original and cool enough to carry the entire game on its own, despite the many flaws it has. I definitely recommend trying it out, just maybe not on hard difficulty. 8/10

I also really like when the cute women kiss, that was pretty good :)