New Awakening is a full hack of Links 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.