#NeverAwake

[alexandriaisburning]

040: Neverawake

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Neverawake shakes up the usual STG* conventions with a playful approach to both its world and structure. Sporting a spooky cute aesthetic, it takes the STG convention of "loops"--repeated playthroughs that shake up previous patterns--and builds its core around it. Stages are short and repeatable, and the goal is not to survive them, but to efficiently collect a certain amount of Souls, dropped by destroying enemies or completing objectives within the stage. Stages will loop until the Soul counter is filled, giving you a chance for higher scoring, but making it more difficult to survive each time. Stages are laid out in the format of a horizontal shooter, with an emphasis on environmental interactions that direct the flow of the stage.

Initially confusing, or even alienating, it moves the focus from simple survival to learning each stage. Narrative threads, weapons, and modifiers unlock steadily, smartly bridging the gap between the casual shooter fan and the score chasing veterans. The twin stick controls complement this goal, being familiar to many outside the STG diehards. Loops tie into the narrative too--as your character works to wake up a hospitalized girl, working through worlds constructed of her traumas, warped through the viewpoint of a scared child. Unraveling each world brings you closer to the final confrontation, which reveals the next layer of the narrative--in a second playthrough. 

The story reaches a conclusion after the first playthrough, but opens up a new set of Omoide, or Memory, challenges that unlock new story tidbits and ask you to play through stages with new conditions. Often these will ask you to complete a stage within the first loop, seek out secret items or avoid souls so you can avoid finishing a boss stage prematurely and achieve the alternative win condition of destroying the boss, something completely optional on the first go. 

Aside from the novelty of this approach, it works as a second narrative incentive to continue playing the game, tying into the themes of Neverawake, and giving you a formal reward for continuing to replay stages, and attempting to master them. It’s something that even the best games in the genre struggle with, often assuming dedicated players will come in self-motivated to replay the game and aim for higher scores, without communicating the appeal of doing so to more casual fans. 

The steady stream of unlockable weapons and badges keeps things from becoming immediately overwhelming, giving you basic tools to start with, then opening to an entire sandbox of different approaches by the end of the game. Badges can be equipped to make your character more durable, assist you in collecting Souls, give you reliable refills on health and special weapon ammo, or power up your main weapon when not firing or point blanking the enemy. 

The loadout limit is generous enough that you’ll be able to take plenty of bonuses into battle, with more available as you unlock later stages, but you’ll always be limited enough that you’ll always have to keep a balance between defensive and aggressive play. Daring players can use this to complete stages fast and score high, with more casual players able to slowly accumulate more advantages through perseverance, giving them slight power boosts and different approaches to experiment with until they can complete the more difficult stages. 

This system makes Neverawake’s difficulty highly variable and customizable, equally appealing as a serious playthrough or casual session. The short stages and loops give you many natural stopping points, making it equally as easy to go for one more stage or to call the session. Focusing on these small details might seem absurd, but these are the kinds of design decisions that have kept me constantly returning to Neverawake, and at the top of my favorites of the year, for two years running. 

And as much as I’ve focused on the broader structural details of Neverawake, it cannot be overstated how much the game’s creepy cute style sells the game. The character and stage designs give life to a child’s warped view of the mundane world, with fears like foods she doesn’t like, or barking dogs mutating into overgrown, pulsating monsters that give insight to the trauma each of the various emotional worlds have inflicted on her. You can see the way that fear turns everyday situations into stifling, painful experiences, with stage layouts and hazards mirroring that stress.  Dogs chase you relentlessly, classmates’ hands reach out suddenly from the background, and teeth open and close around you as the dentist stalks you. 

Bullets and souls cut through the dark backgrounds with brilliant colors, enemies eject hitsparks and puffs of smoke upon taking damage, with screen shake and hitstop emphasizing the real big hits. Picking off enemy formations and environmental growths gives a satisfying chain of feedback, and bosses shake, glow and even have parts of them explode as you inflict damage. Each has a unique pattern, or gimmick, with one notable one having you activate an x-ray to reveal the boss’ weak point as it moves around its body. 

Seeing what new environment or creature would receive a nightmare interpretation kept me as motivated to go through Neverawake as the steady stream of new toys to tackle stages with.  The actual writing, presented in snippets between levels, ranges from charming to melodramatic, and is largely unnecessary compared to the narrative throughline presented through the visuals. Even without the story, it’s easy to piece together the sense of this girl’s life, fears and the eventual incident that drove her to the hospital through the stage themes and boss battles. The final boss is suitably climatic, and drives home the physical and emotional struggle of the story. 

Neverawake reveals more of itself the more you return to it. Both in the sense of the formal rewards given to you, but also in the way its design melds. It’s cohesive to the point where it feels almost obvious, and it’s only when you take a step back can you realize how carefully each element has been aligned to construct the whole. It’s the stuff of nightmares, presented as a sweet dream. 

---

*STG: community abbreviation for shooting game, alternatively known as shoot-em-ups, or SHMUPs, to differentiate them from modern first and third person shooters.

[satoshi-mochida]

The PS4, PS5 and Switch version of NeverAwake releases today digitally. It is also available on Steam.

[thesplintering]

Twin-Stick Shooter “NeverAwake” Coming to Xbox June 29

Twin-Stick Shooter “NeverAwake” Coming to Xbox June 29 | #gaming #Xbox #videogames #horror #fantasy

Game publisher Phoenixx recently announced that twin-stick shooter NeverAwake will be released on 29 June for SeXbox. The game is already available via PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch and Steam PC. Developed by Neotro Inc, NeverAwake is set in the psychological horror world of a young girl’s nightmares, including evil dentists, vegetables, dogs (whah?) and other “adolescent annoyances.” Here’s the…

[sequentialplanet]

Mini Video Game Review: NeverAwake

  There is no shortage of shoot ’em ups on the Switch, and most of them fit into one of three categories. There are the cute ’em-ups like the Cotton franchise. There are the anime games that typically run vertically, and then there are the typical space shooters like R-Type or Andro Dunos. Still, every now and again, a visually unique shooter hits the genre. It’s happening again, this time…

[wigc]

Nightmarish Twin-stick Shooter 'NeverAwake' is an Unending Dream

Do you love twin-stick shooters but hate nightmares? Because then you just might love and hate NeverAwake, a nightmarish twin-stick shooter "set in a world of a little girl’s fears and horrors", and honestly, it looks like a blast. Quite literally. Death to those pesky monsters!

Continue reading

[answertolifeis42]

Other Games You Should Play That Aren’t ...you know. That.

- Signalis

- Yuppie Psycho

- Monster Prom

- Hades

- The Count Lucanor

- Gunvolt

- NeverAwake

- Death Mark

- The Calculator on your phone

- Literally anything else

Feel free to add more suggestions

[easternmind]

Independent Games Incubator - Phase 3 selections announced

For the last three years, the Independent Games Incubator initiative has been offering training, development skill building and mentorship to small independent game studios or creators in Japan. Organised by Marvelous Inc., it has garnered the support and collaboration from brands as reputable as Playstation, XBOX, Epic Games, Steam, CRI Middleware or Unity. Each year the program selects five from among dozens of submissions, assisting their developers on improving workflows, knowledge of tools and game engines, promoting relationships with publishers and game promotion events, as well as improving their ability to market their products in the English language.

This year's selection covers a range of genres from action to adventure, strategy and puzzle. Some games exist in their very early stages of development as is the case of Tactics Greed. Strange Shadow, on the other hand, had already been showcased in last year’s BitSummit conference. More details on each of the games and their authors can be found in this week’s press release.

In the previous two phases, this program has sponsored ten games.Among those already available is the sensational twin-stick shooter NeverAwake. Others remain works in progress, as is the case of the unique 34EVERLAST, whose concept focuses on providing an intensive ten minute action game experience for busy workers who have little time to play; or CALME, a classic RPG adventure with hand-drawn aesthetics and singular atmosphere 

The development projects can be followed via Twitter through the links below: Death The Guitar - @toroyakun KALEIDOLA - @8810skie prj-Re:mnant - @pigoris_ Stange Shadow - @NOTOKEKE Tactics Greed - @browser_land

[hksddr]

N. SWITCH NeverAwake PLAY READY GO!

[bigporras]

NeverAwake 🎮 #2: Dog Park 🇪🇸 Xbox Series X

NeverAwake by Neotro with Phoenixx via Stride PR

https://www.xbox.com/es-es/games/store/neverawake/9plvk4q0ppqk #NeverAwake

VOD https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1864198190 #XboxSeriesX https://fb.watch/lCdcJg4y8r/

[alexandriaisburning]

041: What makes Zeroranger special, anyway?

CANON FIRE is made possible by the generous contributions of readers like you. Support more writing like this on Patreon. Thank you!

Developed over a decade and layered in mysteries, Zeroranger is a shooter that’s received acclaim from both STG* fanatics and first-timers for the ways it bends genres. But for all its talk about the ways it pays homage to the genre, and the insistence that it’s something special, Zeroranger almost never gets talked about in plain terms, out of fear of spoiling the surprises that await first time players. That level of caution from its fans is almost admirable, but it leaves what makes the game special undiscussed, and makes it hard for both curious players wondering what the big deal is, and leaves Zeroranger’s best ideas unappreciated. 

With that in mind I’ll be doing a deep dive into Zeroranger’s design, with no limitations on what I talk about or spoil. 

On a basic level, Zeroranger is a vertically scrolling STG that borrows ideas from a variety of genre classics, paying homage to them through bosses, stage layouts and game mechanics. After each stage you’re given a choice between one of two weapons, each which will become useful in the next stage, but in different ways, with variations between the two playable ships. After the first stage you get a choice between back and side firing weapons, the second unlocks a lock on laser or chargeable shot, and the penultimate boss fight--against Grapefruit, the ship previously thought to be destroyed during the first attack on the enemy--unlocks a mech transformation with a powerful melee weapon that stacks damage and protects you from enemy attacks. 

Each weapon allows varied interactions with the level design, covering different areas of the screen and allowing you to approach enemy patterns in a new way. Since you can’t have both weapons of each tier, you’ll have to choose which weakness you’ll accept, and pair it with other weapons that can cover that weakness. It encourages repeat playthroughs to try different strategies and learn the stage layouts, which is good, because Zeroranger will demand repetition. 

At the core of Zeroranger is the theme of karmic cycles, repackaging long standing genre concepts in a way that ties them to the ongoing narrative. Like Neverawake, Zeroranger plays with the concepts of Loops--second playthroughs that remix the original stages--but here it acts closer to something out of the Nier series. The initial playthrough is only setup, with a repeat playthrough being the de facto second act, with altered context that builds on your original understanding, followed by a third and final act that brings a proper conclusion. 

The karmic themes even affect the meta progression of Zeroranger. Score contributes towards earning the next of nine total continues, used to retry a stage from a checkpoint after death. Continues are represented by the nine orbs that fill out a wheel at the end of the run, which itself resembles the Wheel of Samsara, often used by Buddhists to describe the cycle of existence that mortal beings are subject to. 

By framing each attempt as another cycle or reincarnation, it implies that each death has in fact happened, and the only way to escape the cycle is with enough perseverance and knowledge. It blows up the scale to a cosmic degree, and makes your journey to the end of the game, and the knowledge you build of its world, into a form of mechanical and narrative progression. 

This knowledge of the world becomes integral to the second loop, which introduces major changes to the patterns and layouts of the first loop, but allows you to return with all your weapons. With these previously unavailable weapons you can easily dispatch enemies that were hard to deal with, and details that seemed mysterious on the first loop fall into place. One of my favorite examples of this are the enemies who appear in the background, before flying into the foreground to attack. On the first loop they seem like a cool, decorative detail, but on the second loop, with the lock-on laser available, suddenly they’re targets you can pick off before they get a chance to attack.

The final act begins when you meet the Grapefruit for the second time and reveal your mech form, allowing you to have a proper duel where they’ll whip out several abilities, including more powerful versions of your own weapons, revealing why they were the first choice in dealing with the enemy. 

After defeating Grapefruit you’ll once again face the final boss, but this time instead of the boss rush of the first loop, they’ll give up and offer you another power up. 

Here Zeroranger shifts into its final act, requiring you to solve a series of puzzles before gaining access to the true ending. Grabbing the powerup shows you the “ending” and puts you into a loop where you’ll replay the first stage in Final Boss mode, leaning harder into Zeroranger’s CAVE** influences by changing out your default weapons for a Dodonpachi style barrage of bullets and bombs. Completing the stage and grabbing the powerup puts you into another brief minigame before glitching out and returning you to the title. 

To escape this you’ll need to reject that final powerup, either within the Final Boss stage or before, during the boss room where the boss rush takes place. By rejecting the offering you gain access to Despair, the real final boss hidden beneath the facility, who naturally has several phases to complete. The first phase is a puzzle itself, requiring you to carefully observe the orbs emitting the attacks, and time your own attacks to destroy them close to simultaneously, or otherwise be stuck helpless in yet another looping trap. 

Completing the first phase reveals the true form of the final boss, Despair, a suitably terrifying challenge with a massive suite of attacks whose design could inspire its own essay. Compared to the cerebral challenges preceding it, this final form is more straightforward, but learning the complexities of the patterns often felt as hard as the combined challenge of every obstacle met on the way here. 

Defeating Despair reveals the true final boss challenge--a sequence that reveals the origins of Zeroranger’s world, and connects several unresolved narrative threads. Not only must you complete it completely stripped of your previous arsenal, but you’re given a single chance to do so. 

Not quite understanding the gravity of what the game was implying there, I took on the final challenge after an exhausting struggle with Despair, desperate to finally see the ending--only to have my save deleted after I failed. 

Not only do you need to scale the mountainous challenge of defeating Despair, but you need to complete it with continues to spare, as each continue orb becomes a health point for your final confrontation. In addition, you have to quickly adapt to playing without any of the weapons you’ve built familiarity with during your playtime, and learn the new boss patterns on the fly while unraveling how exactly you can damage the boss. Practice runs are impractical, as you’ll have to complete the whole game at least once before returning, making the minimum time between attempts nearly an hour, if you’ve complete mastery of the rest of the game. 

So I cheated. I downloaded my save from the cloud, backed it up, then went back and completed it on my third try, after restoring my save twice. As I finished the final challenge, Zeroranger left me with the same message it began with:

May you attain enlightenment. 

By circumventing the challenge, by failing to persevere in the face of disaster, I’d arguably failed this goal. I’d given in to my material desires and skipped the suffering necessary to achieve the knowledge needed to break free of the cycle. Fitting then, that Zeroranger’s conclusion is one that’s hopeful, but open ended, implying that this current cycle has been broken, but the events that caused it may one day repeat themselves. 

Then Zeroranger deletes your save. 

Records carry over, and the color palette and story change to reflect your achievement, but progress unlocking stages is once again reset. You’re free of the meta trappings of the story, but are given one more reminder of how temporary progress is, and challenged one more time to complete a run to get the complete credits sequence. 

It’s a novel approach to player progression in a STG that not only reframes common genre ideas with a thematic approach, but slowly pushes players towards goals that the genre diehards naturally shoot for. By visually indicating the progress towards extra lives and continues through its score counter, it alerts players towards the importance of scoring for continued survival as well as the leaderboards, and encourages them to look for opportunities to maximize score. 

The harsh requirements to witness the ending almost guarantee that a player will be forced to start over, and unless they cheat (guilty), forces them to learn the stages and scoring systems to quickly earn back their progress. That process, and the need to hold onto as many continues as possible for the finale, pushes them closer to attempting the 1-credit clear, what most STG players consider the first major milestone in learning a game. Simply put, it’s a run where you complete all the stages in the game without using up a continue, and often denotes mastery. 

The parade of secrets and homages, alongside the narrative driven recontextualization of game mechanics and premise shifting final acts create  a novel approach for both genre veterans and newcomers, upending expectations with each new twist. Zeroranger’s revelations mark it as equal parts mystery and action game, and asks you to dig deeper, coming to an appreciation of its layered design in the process. 

Personally, as much as I respect the final act’s commitment to delivering on Zeroranger’s themes of struggle, persistence and reincarnation, the harsh penalty of deleting your save was demotivating to a degree that I didn’t feel was worth the tension it imparted. I can only imagine how a less experienced player might feel, struggling for hours to reach that point, and possibly being unsure if they could reach it again. Zeroranger’s patterns and stage design are often less demanding than most of its contemporaries, but they come with harsher penalties for failure. 

Even given that, it’s not hard to see why Zeroranger captured the imagination of so many. Designed intentionally to be approachable, with enough mystery to satisfy the lore hungry theorycrafters, Zeroranger provides many entry points. Paired with its striking two color palette and memorable soundtrack, it paints the picture of a greater world beyond its borders. The drawn out finale demands you engage Zeroranger with your entire attention, and its dramatic set pieces and score bring an emotional climax that the more traditional arcade style titles often can’t spend the runtime on. 

Even after the credits roll, Zeroranger leaves plenty to discover, both within its boundaries and outside. Its themes of karmic cycles and open-ended conclusion invite you to explore it further, and its homages and secrets point to other games and worlds whose influence helped bring it to life. It’s an introduction to the mindset of a genre fanatic, an homage for all those who’ve already journeyed through the genre to arrive here, and an invitation for those who haven’t to share in that same passion. 

--- Zeroranger is availble on PC. Homebrew ports are availble for the Switch and Linux based handhelds via Portmaster.

--- *STG: ShooTing Game, aka SHMUP or Shoot-Em-Up. A community term for the genre of arcade style shooters used to differentiate them from the more common first and third person shooters.

**CAVE: Developer of several major entries in the genre, and credited with popularizing the danmaku (bullet curtain) or bullet hell sub-genre. Their games are often marked by complex enemy bullet patterns, with a powerful player arsenal that can hit many parts of the screen at the same time.

[satoshi-mochida]

NeverAwake releases today on Steam. It releases on the PS5, PS4 and Switch on January 19th, 2023.

[thesplintering]

Twin-Stick Shooter “NeverAwake” Coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation in January

Twin-Stick Shooter “NeverAwake” Coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation in January | #gaming #PlayStation #NintendoSwitch #horror #Nintendo

Game publisher Phoenixx recently announced that twin-stick shooter NeverAwake will be released on 19 January for PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch. A PC version is already available via Steam. Developed by Neotro Inc, NeverAwake is set in the psychological horror world of a young girl’s nightmares. I wish I could turn my dreams into twin-stick shooters… I’d shoot so many peop- Anyway, here’s the…

[worthplaying]

'NeverAwake' Comes to Xbox Series X|S In Q2 2023

http://dlvr.it/SlFp7V

[lunaprincessninjato]

Trying out Tiny Thor and NeverAwake demo

This game was directed towards me by blogger : https://hayastantzi92.wordpress.com/ I also watch videos from this best of indie games channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ClemmyGames _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In this game you play as a kid version of Thor on his Birthday First thing that happens when we start….We…

[sakekangame]

2023年1月19日発売【NeverAwake】 #パッケージゲーム #サイトＤＥチェック #ゲームコレクター・酒缶