Mage: the Awakening is the new World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness installment that replaced Mage: the Ascension. The old World of Darkness was a mish-mash of different perspectives and traditions with Abrahamic history for the vampiric spawn of Cain, Animism for the werewolves, Irish mythology for the changelings, and coptic mummies. Mage: the Ascension had the unenviable job of trying to be the most things to the most people as magic users by their natures have to cover all cultures. The natural fit for this is that magic just works however wizards think it works and in fact how everybody thinks it works. Since most people think that magic doesn't work (or exist) that means that it doesn't work in public and is self censoring. Helping this along in the old World of Darkness is the Technocracy who act to make sure that people believe that the world runs on physics so that the world keeps running on physics. While this is overtly killing magic it is also a major part of why science and technology really started advancing in the modern era which is the reason child mortality dropped ninety three percent in the past two centuries. This makes the Technocracy the good guys and the Hermetic Traditions the deluded reactionary faction. Yes, they are a zealot techno-fetishist oligarchy but it wouldn't be the world of Darkness if there were good choices. Mage: the Awakening had a full plate trying to fix Mage while staying true to some kind of essence. Whether they succeeded is open to debate but at a minimum they made different mistakes.
At some point in the hazy past some collection of mages pushed hard into the arts and managed to create something like a ladder to the supernal realm. Having achieved apotheosis the Exarchs, as they would be called, kicked said ladder down and created the abyss. The abyss not only separates people from the supernal realm but obscures its very existence. Every so often one of five structures in the supernal called Watch Towers chooses a person to awaken and become a mage. At this point the question becomes what to do about the whole Exarch situation. The five Orders choose to oppose the Exarchs. The Seers of the Throne collaborate in return for boons from on high. The Abyss infests human souls and makes it dangerous to do magic in view of normies. All Mages are in a cold war that goes back millennia and has no plausible resolution.
Totally worth it for cool powers though, right? Mages have access to ten spheres of magic divided into two sets of five. The more earthly gross arcana are time, space, matter, life, and forces while the more supernal subtle arcana are fate, spirit, death, mind, and prime. Competence in the spheres ranges from one to five dots and start in the range of impressive tricks which scale to creating whole new species or pocket dimensions. Each of the watch towers is associated with a gross and a subtle arcana which must receive at least one dot at character creation. Taken together this means that even starting mages can be power houses or super natural Swiss army knives. But with great power comes great responsibility or at least a sense of it. All mages have a wisdom score which tracks how detached from consequences the character has become. Commit an indiscretion and make a hubris roll. Fail too many hubris rolls and the magic might just be wielding you.
Mage: The Awakening is a game of contrasts. You play a demigod trapped in purgatory; able to see heaven with no way to reach it. Life's cheat codes are enabled. What will you do in the pursuit of your goals? Who will you sacrifice? Who will sacrifice you? The Exarchs empower the Seers of the Throne and yet the Orders persist, why? Are they less omnipotent than they portray themselves or is this all just a game to them? Awakening is a very different Mage from Ascension. There is no ambiguity about the sides and history has no march for mages; just a cosmic betrayal and its aftermath. You live in a world of ruins and it is infinitely more beautiful than anything you could have hoped for as a normal person. Like I said: contrasts.
A word of caution: they went all in on fully mechanizing the magic and while I've only read it once I feel confident in saying that spell casting is very complicated if you choose to implement it as written. The core book has a quick reference in the back of the book for building spells. Expect this game to ask as much as it gives. For those with an eye to construction and optimization this will be a draw but understand that for fast and easy magic you may want a different urban supernatural game.