NeverAwake Review

Neotro Inc.’s twin-stick gothic shooter, NeverAwake, came out last year on Steam to rave reviews and is now making the jump to consoles. The release is timed with a content patch, which adds new gear and a speed run mode to extend the game’s life. As a fairly straightforward game NeverAwake ports over nicely to the Xbox, and I presume Switch and PlayStation as well. If you are not a PC gamer but have been wanting to try this game out then you can do so confidently on the consoles.

NeverAwake is a side-scrolling twin-stick shooter torn down to its basics and then covered in a gothic aesthetic. In terms of gameplay, NeverAwake doesn’t take many risks, but it does execute tried-and-true concepts fairly well. Unfortunately, trimming back also means that difficulty is often a result of quantity over quality. As you progress through the game it ramps things up frequently by throwing everything it can at you and filling your screen with monsters and bullets. Since you and the bad guys are much larger than most characters in the genre the screen fills up quickly. I found this to be frustrating at times since many of my deaths felt like they weren’t a skill issue — though I definitely had plenty of those deaths, too.

One of the interesting aspects of NeverAwake is the gear system incorporated into it. As you play the levels you accumulate currency, but you also unlock things to buy. What is nice is that new items unlock even if you fail your mission, so you never truly feel like you hit a wall that fully stops your progress — until the end of the game, anyway. On the other hand, these items can be combined in some over-powered ways, and it is entirely possible to simply brute force your way through later levels.

The narrative of NeverAwake is what holds the game together and keeps you coming back. I say “narrative” instead of “story” because NeverAwake focuses more on conveying feelings than on a cohesive tale. After each level, you get a short diary entry from a young girl which slowly reveals details of her life leading up to her entering a coma. There are twists and turns to the story, and it is engaging, but it is also told non-linearly. In the end, it relies mostly on you knowing roughly where the story is going to end to tug on your heartstrings. Otherwise innocuous, innocent diary entries have a darker undertone to them since we know the girl’s current state. It takes an otherwise rote story and gives it weight, but it also can feel like a gimmick.

NeverAwake Review Final Thoughts:

NeverAwake is a solid port of a beloved game that didn’t quite click with me. I can definitely see how fans of bullet-hell games will love its refined mechanics, and people looking for a darker, more mature story will feel fulfilled. But for me, it just missed by a little bit. The controls didn’t feel quite tight enough for the level of precision needed, and many deaths felt like they weren’t my fault. Additionally, I found the slight gloss overlay to the graphics off-putting, and not in the way the creators intended. Yes, it’s goth and it’s supposed to be creepy, but that’s not the issue I had with it. The shininess of the creatures and levels just felt off. Judging by the Steam reviews of the original release, I am very much in the minority here, though. Twin-stick shooter fans should absolutely disregard my personal qualms about the game and give it a try.