NeverAwake Flashback was originally designed as DLC for NeverAwake and, boy, does it show. The dev chose to instead sell it as a standalone game, but it’s been over three years since the original game’s release, so I understand the decision. Selling the game on its own as a shmup roguelite could have been quite promising, and this is a pretty fun little expansion that reuses most of the original game’s assets. However, it’s also extremely light on content, and most of its choices don’t make for a particularly compelling roguelite, which damages it quite a bit.
Whereas NeverAwake just saw players picking from levels to progress its story, NeverAwake Flashback is naturally played in runs. At the start of each, you pick three random letters to set the seed. Each seed has its own difficulty level, ranging from low to high difficulties. The lowest gives you four lives, making it very likely that you’ll win that run. Each difficulty increases in level as you play, but the lower difficulties typically stay pretty gentle no matter what, outside of when you want to completely defeat bosses.
Each run in NeverAwake Flashback is just nine levels, so they’ll typically only take about 15 minutes or so. It’s weird that there are so few levels in each run with no option for more. An infinite survival mode, especially, would have been terrific for replayability, in addition to being easy to implement, so I’m not sure why the dev decided on limiting the game so much. Each run’s first level is always the same, meaning that you’ll have to replay the identical level in every run. Considering that there are dozens of level variations, this was a terrible choice, and it only takes a few runs for this to get very old.
I can’t imagine why the initial level isn’t random, but it does only take about two-and-a-half minutes, at least. NeverAwake Flashback has you play as the avatar of Rem, a sleeping girl who imagines herself as a little character with a gun. She’s accompanied by a tiny version of her stuffed animal that acts as an option, firing alongside her, but he absorbs any enemy bullets that come into contact with him. When you start a run, you get to choose from one of three options for his bullets (although there are more than three in total), as well as an accessory set.
Accessory sets are pretty much the only thing you can unlock in the game, which is a bizarre choice for a roguelite. You unlock more simply by going on runs, and it takes about 20 to unlock them all. Each gives you between two and five starting accessories that do things like increase how many hits Rem can take, to making her gun more powerful. One of the early sets you unlock even makes the game substantially easier, as it has a lot more health and lowers the barrier needed to fight the game’s true boss. As in NeverAwake, levels are mostly short and based around gathering souls from defeating enemies. Get your soul meter to 100% and the level ends.
After completing each level here, you get to choose from two levels, one easier and one tougher. Each level grants you a new accessory or buff to make things easier (letting you take more hits, lowering the difficulty level, etc), plus you can give your stuffed animal a more powerful shot or swap out your trigger, which is Rem’s bomb. The controls and gameplay are just as responsive and enjoyable as they were before, plus you’ll even recognise some level types and bosses. I really like the gameplay here still, but I do wish there was a lot more to the roguelite nature, as what’s here feels like the bare minimum.
There are two final bosses in NeverAwake Flashback, one that you’ll fight just from hitting level nine, and the other which needs a few requirements to be met, including making it to the ninth level in under 20 minutes, completely defeating one of the bosses before you get your soul meter up all the way and move on, and maxing out your rate, which is the game’s score multiplier. The game has seven endings (short bits of text over a single piece of art), three of which you’ll get from the default boss and the other four from the true boss. All-in-all, it won’t take more than three or four hours to get all of these for most players.
And that’s just pretty much all there is to NeverAwake Flashback. Score chasers and anyone who just wants to practice and master the game at higher difficulty levels and experiment with accessory sets will be able to get their money’s worth here, but everyone else will likely find it a surprisingly barebones experience. It’s a fun game, but it’s disappointing considering that so much more could have easily been done with it. At the very least, we shouldn’t need to play the intro level in literally every run. If you’re going to make a roguelite, don’t stop short.
NeverAwake Flashback: Offering the same frenetic gameplay as its predecessor but with an odd, overly simplistic roguelite structure, NeverAwake Flashback is solid but could have been better. – Andrew Farrell
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