The Legend of Zelda: New Awakening (2014)

The Legend of Zelda: New Awakening cover

Platforms: Game Boy Color
Genres: Adventure
Completionist: about 16 hours
Where to get it: Website

The 3D catalog: game boxes on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalog in 3D

The same catalog has a room you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real games from it when you tell them what you feel like playing. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this game is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

A heavily revised Link's Awakening hack with redesigned dungeons, harder puzzles, and a fresh dungeon order throughout.

challengingadventurefan-madezeldapuzzle-heavyexploration

About

New Awakening is a full hack of Link’s Awakening featuring broad revisions to all dungeons and textual edits, overworld edits, and sequence fixes to support a new dungeon order, as well as cosmetic edits to most dungeons and parts of the overworld. The difficulty is substantially increased, with new puzzles as well as new monster encounters, but backtracking is minimal, difficult puzzles offer subtle clues (the owl statues have been updated as well), extra resources are available where needed, and the challenges do not require save states or perfect gameplay. The game is balanced for those who have played the game once or twice, but the game is playable by newcomers as well, as the hack does not throw everything at the player at once. The difficulty begins fairly moderate and gradually increases over time. Necessary information is found in the readme. The patch is made with Lunar IPS.

More games like this

This page is from Underplayed Gems, a catalog of older and overlooked games. Not quite it? You can browse by platform and genre, or take this one into the 3D catalog and ask the Catbot for something closer.