Awaria ★★★★★

The generator needs a battery¹ to fix it. I run past the capacitor machine, double tap it to grab a capacitor and set the machine going again to make another one. I weave past a green, ghostly flame and skim against the edge of a mine to trigger it while avoiding the blast, clearing it from the floor. A second generator has blown. I tap the coolant machine to grab a case of coolant just in case I need it for something else. I reach the battery machine, tap it to drop the capacitor in and start it generating a battery. I tap the second generator to see what it needs: A heat sink. That’s good, there’s one ready to go. I dodge past more ghost fire and swing past the heat sink machine, tap it to grab the heat sink and tap it again to drop the coolant I was carrying in to set another one going. The generator next to me blows so I check what it needs to fix it as I move on: Coolant and a heat sink. The battery is ready so I grab another capacitor, set the machine going again, go to the battery machine, and grab the battery. I mistime my second tap and don’t put the capacitor in place to make a new battery. I don’t turn around, there’s three ghosts after me and I can get do it on the next loop around. I drop the battery into the first generator to fix it. Another generator blows. Eight seconds have passed.

Awaria is built around a series of tight loops. Generators that need constant repair on a countdown till they explode, machines that make parts on a five second timer and machines that need those parts to make secondary components, ghosts that constantly harass you as you weave through it all and a ten second regeneration timer on your one hitpoint. Everything exists in the moment-to-moment flow of these loops and the constant, small decisions that you have to make to react to everything. The levels are short, the restarts are quick and the music is pushing you forward, making dying and restarting just another that all the others reside in. Being allowed to take one hit every ten seconds means that there is some leeway but doesn’t mess with the momentum of the game, letting you recover from a single mistake but not making health a resource you have to manage across a level, just something else built into the rhythm of the game. Hard mode takes away that leeway, making any hit a failure and really driving you to prefect that state of flow that you need to sink in to survive.

This and Helltaker, with a degree of cheesecake art as a central point, are the kinds of things I might have turned my nose up at before, but I’ve gotten a bit less repressed about and lightened up about sex a lot. I think a lot of things that lean into that are still very steeped in misogyny, but Vanripper puts a lot of style and personality into his art that I appreciate and I think one of the women having a rusted, metal jaw² that makes her look like she has thick stubble is a wonderful choice that I did not expect and looks sick as hell.