Let me just check the clock over here and... yep, it's Explormer O'Clock. Actually, we went ahead an hour in March so it's supposed to be Explormer O'Clock +1 right now. When was the last time I set this thing? Regardless and/or irrespective of all that, our non-linear jumpy-slashy game for this week is Phoenotopia Awakening from Cape Cosmic: a game that's a little (or a lot) more involved than simply jotting down where to come back to with the double-jump and where to find the occasional health upgrade. Set in the distant future of a post-apocalyptic version of Earth where everything has mostly gone back to normal, albeit to a pre-industrial level of technology, Phoenotopia Awakening has its protagonist Gail witness almost everyone in her quiet farming village of Panselo get abducted by a UFO, leaving only a handful of orphans behind (don't worry; they were orphans even before the UFO showed up). As the eldest of said urchins, and having as many clues to go on between them as they do parents, Gail sets off to look for either answers or help across the hard-to-spell world of Phoenotopia, facing all sorts of dangers and enemies along the way as she digs into the mysteries of ancient Earth and these equally enigmatic kidnappers.

The game's scope is impressive given its relatively rudimentary pixel look (which, to its credit, animates very well). Built to resemble something like a Zelda II—the connection being at its most overt when you cross over a world map and little slime icons representing encounters start spawning—Gail spends her time exploring this overworld for locations to visit, peaceful towns full of NPCs and other secrets for the resources and gear she needs, dungeons full of traps, monsters, and platforming challenges to overcome, and little corners of the world where nothing seems to be happening but there's probably some well-hidden upgrade or collectible to be found, possibly only when you have the right item or foreknowledge. Combat is mostly melee-focused at first with a bat that has limited range but two swing speeds—a fast and weak combo, and a stronger charge attack with a satisfying amount of knockback—before you quickly find a catapult and crossbow (two different attack trajectories giving both their conditional applications) to deter ranged and flying foes or else to keep some distance if an enemy proves too challenging to deal with up close. The game doesn't skimp on the trap half of the equation either: there's some real nasty areas to cautiously pick your way through, and the devious level design would almost be something to admire if it wasn't so painful.

While not an RPG by most standards, it's about as dense as one: the world is huge with the number of places to visit numbering well beyond the dozens, there's a massive number of NPCs to talk to with their own little sidequests or jokes or game mechanic hints, there's whole cooking and fishing systems in place (be sure to upgrade your inventory space early and often to account for all the edible bounties; coming off of Tears of the Kingdom, I'm keenly aware of how much some extra pocket room can be beneficial), and I recently got my hands on a flute that has allowed me to take on various Fez-style cryptic music note puzzles needed to open some monumental-looking doors. I've only explored two regions of the game so far—the idyllic starting town of Panselo with its nearby Doki Forest and the ranine Amuri Ruins deep within, and the desert region of Atai with its large Arabian-themed trading town and the local Ouroboros bandit organization laying low in the Sand Drift Ruins to the south—but I'm becoming aware of a great many others as I continue to meet tourists, traders, and globetrotting scientists seeking to uncover the secrets of the old world for academic or financial gain. That I've poured over 10 hours into this game so far and still feel like I'm in the early stages is a testament to its ambition, though it doesn't help my case much to say that at least three of those hours were spent backtracking with new traversal-enabling items (I've found quite a few so far: ranged weapons, bombs, a fishing rod, the flute, a lamp, and so on. Might have to dual-class this as a Zeldersatz once I'm through, I think).

Not all is well though, and it pains me to say this because I really appreciate when my beloved explormers push the envelope like Phoenotopia and try to surpass their forebears one way or another, but the game has a spate of mechanical quirks that I've taken issue with. Most of them are the usual kind: the controls for the protagonist are a bit stiff and unresponsive, especially with regard to air control and momentum when performing a running jump, and the enemy attack hitboxes are some truly wild takes on what constitutes the game's observable physical reality. It's easy to get sent flying and bounced off foes multiple times for an unfortunate amount of wombo-combo damage, though healing items are at least plentiful enough to mitigate that, and while there is a recovery move for after you're sent flying it's usually accompanied by a roll that might put you in even more trouble. The UI consistently makes some genuinely bizarre decisions: to use bombs means selecting the item from either a menu or a faster tool wheel and hitting the active button to summon one into your hands, and then you have about three seconds to either throw it or place it down, both of which require different buttons than the "make bomb appear" one which is never super intuitive. Another case involves how to cook: you have to go into your menu, select the raw food you want to cook and equip it, and then use the fireplace (do not use the active item button, or you'll just eat the raw food instead; yum, parasites) and complete the timing-based cooking minigame. This is opposed to, say, just clicking on the fire and choosing the right food item from a pop-up menu. If you ever go fishing, stand some ways back from the edge because otherwise any fished up items will just drop directly into the water where you'll need to take drowning damage to retrieve them. By the way, falling into the water might reset you to the water's edge or it might just dump you all the way back to where you entered the current area: it's maddeningly inconsistent. These quirks suggest either a developer who struggled to make their ambitious project coalesce correctly in time and had to accept a bunch of "good enough" compromises, or has never played a video game before and is unable to anticipate what sort of quality-of-life conveniences a player might want. I'm not petty enough to suggest the latter is correct but the absolute lack of an auto-save feature, just as an example, is really playing devil's advocate right now.

I do think by almost every metric that matters that Phoenotopia is a phoe-nominal game that expands severalfold the modest attempts to create a modernized Zelda II type of action-adventure game that the original Flash game was aiming for and in the end presents something with a substantial amount of depth that I may end up spending a week or more to fully decrypt, but the occasionally iffy combat and platforming and the way the game frequently feels like it's fighting any attempts you make to try to enjoy the game on its level with its mystifying lack of player-friendliness—and not necessarily in the deliberate "fuck you, player" manner that the La-Mulana or Cave Story types gleefully pursued for the sake of nostalgia for the torturous, oblique, masochism-awakening games of old, though I've definitely been feeling the grim specter of the latter as I've played due largely to many graphical similarities—where I'm not sure if my curiosity about the ongoing story and my oft-deleterious drive to backtrack for hundreds of useless baubles will necessarily win out against a miniscule tolerance for horseshit that is only getting smaller still with age. Should come down to the wire, I suspect. Consider this rating a very tentative one for now, and I'll be sure to update this review once I come to a decision either way.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: I'll admit, with a game as idiosyncratic as this, you can eventually get used to any surface-level foibles and start appreciating the deeper waters within. Phoenotopia Awakening is a truly expansive game punching way above its weight category and that, plus an excellent presentation that includes one of the catchiest chiptune soundtracks I've heard since Undertale/Deltarune and some pretty decent comedic writing (neither of which I got around to mentioning in the review), did much to endear the game to me. It's like having a friend with some annoying habits that made it initially difficult to like them but then later become something you'd shrug about with a smile as just being part of who this wonderful person is. I didn't think the TimeToBeat of 50 hours was all that realistic but Steam says my own duration was 57 (I'm about to start playing IGotW 379, to give you some idea of how long I've been at it) so I stand corrected. Absolutely worth looking into despite the name, its awkward difficulty spikes, and its general user-unfriendliness. (Oh, and that ending was kinda weird too. Like, dropping a sequel hook cliffhanger while giving you no idea where they'll take it.)

Some of this stuff definitely seems intentional or even referential. I think that the cooking stuff sounds like someone who played Breath of the Wild decided that what that game's cooking needed was more difficulty.

This review was good but you know what's bad? This game's name. It's TERRIBLE. It manages to tick all the bad name boxes:

1) Tells you absolutely nothing about what the game is. It could be almost anything. Granted that's true for a lot of game names (What is a Metal Gear Solid?) but good names give you some kind of hint as to what the game is trying to do.

2) Long, awkward, hard to spell.

3) Not even a little bit memorable.

4) Derivative. How many Awakenings do we have? Someone should do a list on the Giantbomb.com

Just a horrible naming job all around. No notes.

@bigsocrates: Yeah, the name's a mouthful. The game's intro suggested that humanity was able to recover from the collapse due to a phoenix so the new world is named after it but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Given it's a remake of a Flash game "Reawakening" would've probably fit better as a subtitle.

Maybe they planned this to be the first episode of a series? Like Ep 1 would be "Awakening", Ep 2 would be "I Hit the Snooze Button, Since it's the Weekend", and the final arc of the trilogy would be "Fine, Fine, I'm Getting Up".

@mento: I just think that when you're making a game with no real marketing budget having a name that evokes SOMETHING is very important for discoverability and discussion. You think about a lot of the big hits and their names say something about the game.

Shovel Knight tells you a lot. It's not going to take itself too seriously, there's going to be digging and combat. It doesn't tell you genre but it at least evokes something. Minecraft is even better. Even Cuphead is at least short, memorable, and reminds you of the character, who is very important in a game meant to evoke cartoons.

This name is just a giant mouthful, hard to spell (as I said) and doesn't evoke anything except the reminder of other games like Thea: The Awakening.

The reason I thought of this while reading the review is that sometimes I make a mental note to passively watch for sales on some of the stuff you write about if it sounds interesting to me. So like Islets is on my mental watchlist. This? No chance. I'll have no idea what it's called within a couple weeks, let alone how to spell it.