Alisa sandwich

Deliberately broken for the sake of "retro,' which is infuriatingly cheap design to begin with. Then it heaps on a bunch of *new* bad ideas that even in the 90s we often thought better of. No game with a combat system so intentionally unfair has any business making you do this much of it, and the massively unforgiving windows between saves (the saves that you pay resources to use, and have only one slot,) completely ruin all the wonderful details and inspiration. There's a lot to love here, and clearly the people behind it love what they do, and they love video games--I don't think anyone likes to give negative reviews to small teams.

But do we really tolerate this stuff when it's this cheap? Gauche nostalgia-bait and recycled aesthetics every five seconds? I don't think "what if alice in wonderland was creepy" is an untapped vein in this market, and even the charmingly bad translation can't save me from rolling my eyes at the dialogue callbacks to AITD and RE. The confusing voice acting kinda does, though, because that ♥♥♥♥ is funny.

Regardless, I think this is a very badly designed system at its core with no idea what it's aiming at besides "making references," and that's not really a vision to build a game on. By the time I made to the second boss and saw how long it was gonna take to drop it, I realized how much time I had spent in this game hating every second of it, and how I'd completely fallen out of love with the atmosphere before I had even really started. It's gigantic, and the moment-to-moment moving around, even sans the awful combat, still feels like a root canal with this ridiculous camera and this slow, clunky movement. We needed a whole animation for every single staircase, guys? Even if you're a hardcore survival horror type, this will probably just disappoint you more than anything

Contains a sliding puzzle.