I’ve mentioned in other reviews how throwbacks to retro horror — usually the early survival horror era of tank controls and fixed camera angles — often take the limitations or design elements and crank them up way rougher than they ever felt in their inspirations. Having played a lot more of the survival horror canon now… it’s a case where while there’s basis in these sorts of things being in the originators it feels way exaggerated, in a way that feels considerably worse to play when oftentimes the inspiration was rather simple in application. Like, there’s ‘you can only save with a specific item you must collect,’ and then there’s ‘you can only save at the shop using the in-game currency, which you can only get from killing enemies, but also this in-game currency is also used to get better weapons and medkits and ammo.’ Not to mention things such as mazes or stealth sections that… weren’t really in these old survival horror games and don’t mesh with their constraints (fixed camera, tank controls) at all. There’s credit where credit is due where impersonating the aesthetic of these old games is concerned — especially in Alisa’s case, given it allegedly can be played on period-accurate hardware — but frequently it’s the gameplay itself that betrays that it’s… not a perfect recreation, and in Alisa’s case is what primarily lets it down.
You play as the titular Alisa, a military officer in some western-European country around the 1920s. While chasing down a spy for the “blue prints” they’ve stolen, Alisa finds herself beset by doll-like creatures and taken to a mysterious mansion — one she is trapped inside, and one where everything is out to get her. With nothing on her except what she can scavenge, Alisa must enter the survival horror: explore the mysterious mansion and all its many areas, fight all its denizens, and hopefully uncover its mysteries and find a way out before it’s too late.
I think my favourite thing about this game is how it captures its aesthetic, both in graphical design and gameplay. The game nails the low-poly look of its inspirations, but not in a way that shoots itself in the foot: there’s enough of an eye towards both the graphical artstyle and the cinematography of the fixed-camera-angle that most locations you go through look rather distinct and striking. I’m especially into the gothic horror overtones: it’s a vibe I… haven’t really seen before in survival horror games like these, and I really love the way things such as dollhouses, puppets, and clockwork interweave through the mansion and provide a consistent throughline, even despite how hard each area can vary in look. I also like how this manages to extend into enemy design: there are a ton of different foes you brush up against throughout the game, and in addition to them all looking unique and varied they function as such as well — movesets and movements and special mechanics that make each fight (or flight) different than the one before. I’m a fan of when a nice artstyle manages to stretch into and improve other areas of the game, and here in particular I’m really into how the aesthetic makes each area feel distinct and different to play, in a way that then feeds into the survival horror: you solve puzzles and fight enemies to access new areas of the house, but you don’t quite know what you’re going to see until it’s right in front of you.
I was also super down for some of the ways the game iterates on the PS1-survival horror formula. While you’re still capable of finding supplies such as ammo or medkits through scavenging the mansion, most of what you get comes from a shop you find early on, the currency for which you get… coming exclusively from killing enemies. This introduces a new element of resource management, and works well as a sort of double-edged sword. Unlike, say, the first Resident Evil (or at least the remake) where the threat of resource drain or Crimsonheads encouraged you against fighting enemies, here it becomes a choice: do you want to get that shiny new weapon/want to try and save and find yourself too short on what you need to get it? What enemies are still around? Do you reckon you can kill one efficiently enough to actually get a return on your investment? This all adds a new layer to gameplay, and pairs really well with how varied enemies are. I’m also a fan of some of the other things you can buy in the shop, even if during my run I was often too poor to take advantage of them. Getting your pick of reward after killing a boss is a neat choice for the player, given that what they don’t pick is lost forever for that playthrough. Modifications seem neat — and even if I’m not generally a fan of “you can’t use these cool things if you want the good ending,” I like how it ties in lore-wise. Dresses are fun cosmetics, and the additional effects they give Alisa allow the player to finetune their stats to their playstyle. The shop, and the mechanics regarding money in general were a really cool addition to this type of game, both in terms of the mechanics surrounding them on their own and the additional cool things the shop gives the player access to.
Other iterations, however… fare less well. While the shop, in general, does a lot of cool things with the PS1 survival horror formula, some of the other things mostly just… don’t mesh and are super annoying to play around. It’s oftentimes a case where… the game will stop what it’s doing to become something else but that something else… really does not work well in a game such as this. There’s one part of the game which is flat-out a stealth section — one which comes down to “run to these specific points at this specific time or face instant death,” one which… has no room for experimentation or doing it faster than the game wants you to, and due to the fixed camera angles often results in you being unable to see where the things you’re meant to stealth past… even if the player character themselves wouldn’t have that problem. Right after this is a boss fight, which I’d prepared and stocked my items up for... only to find out that actually this specific boss was actually a rather clunky rail shooter, where you can’t heal, can only barely dodge certain attacks, and one where ‘aim’ and ‘move’ are bound to the same keys, which rather than seeming like a fair challenge just feels really annoying to deal with, where whatever skill you’ve picked up through playing the game is moved to the wayside in favour of trying to figure out this brand new style of play the game has just thrown on you.
Combat… also becomes rough once you start finding more advanced enemies. Some mechanics get attached to enemies, and while sometimes it works and makes them fairly fun to play around sometimes it… doesn’t. There are these mermen skeleton enemies which have a dismemberment mechanic — where depending on where you aim you might just knock off one of their limbs and make them angry — but in practice, it’s not really possible to know what body part the game thinks you’re aiming at, so it ends up with you accidentally knocking off their hand or head rather than killing them… after which they immediately just hitstun you to death because hitstun on the player is majorly jank. There are so many points where you’ll get hit, knocked down… and then you’ll lose much more HP because the enemy will attack you and knock you down again literally the moment you get up. Your best strategy, particularly against bosses or tougher enemies, is to kite them, which… works way too well for its own good. Enemies generally move at the same speed the player does, rather than faster or slower, which can result in loooooong stretches of you and the enemy walking around each other, the fight not progressing because neither of you are in range to actually try to attack. I literally beat one boss because all of their attacks could be easily dodged by… just walking backwards around the arena. It’d be easy to brush off this jank as trying to be accurate to the old survival horrors of yore, or stating that the frustrating/sloggy parts as making the game feel more stressful or tense… but it feels at odds with itself. In, say, Resident Evil or Silent Hill (where fighting felt way more smooth regardless), combat was often a last resort if you couldn’t run from a situation, and added to the tension due to providing consequences, either in the short term (resource drain) or the long term (killing the enemy resulting in something worse taking its place later). Here, the shop system encourages you to try your hand fighting enemies… which then works against itself given how combat oftentimes doesn’t stand out for the better.
Which is a shame, because initially I was super vibing with this game, and even when things started to get annoying later I was still really into the parts that won me over at the beginning of the game. Regardless of its issues, I was still really into a lot of the things it brought to the table, and I still really like the dollhouse, gothic horror puppetry aesthetic. It’s just a shame that I started to notice the strings after a while, and got to see just how many knots were tangling the experience up. 6/10.
You play as the titular Alisa, a military officer in some western-European country around the 1920s. While chasing down a spy for the “blue prints” they’ve stolen, Alisa finds herself beset by doll-like creatures and taken to a mysterious mansion — one she is trapped inside, and one where everything is out to get her. With nothing on her except what she can scavenge, Alisa must enter the survival horror: explore the mysterious mansion and all its many areas, fight all its denizens, and hopefully uncover its mysteries and find a way out before it’s too late.
I think my favourite thing about this game is how it captures its aesthetic, both in graphical design and gameplay. The game nails the low-poly look of its inspirations, but not in a way that shoots itself in the foot: there’s enough of an eye towards both the graphical artstyle and the cinematography of the fixed-camera-angle that most locations you go through look rather distinct and striking. I’m especially into the gothic horror overtones: it’s a vibe I… haven’t really seen before in survival horror games like these, and I really love the way things such as dollhouses, puppets, and clockwork interweave through the mansion and provide a consistent throughline, even despite how hard each area can vary in look. I also like how this manages to extend into enemy design: there are a ton of different foes you brush up against throughout the game, and in addition to them all looking unique and varied they function as such as well — movesets and movements and special mechanics that make each fight (or flight) different than the one before. I’m a fan of when a nice artstyle manages to stretch into and improve other areas of the game, and here in particular I’m really into how the aesthetic makes each area feel distinct and different to play, in a way that then feeds into the survival horror: you solve puzzles and fight enemies to access new areas of the house, but you don’t quite know what you’re going to see until it’s right in front of you.
I was also super down for some of the ways the game iterates on the PS1-survival horror formula. While you’re still capable of finding supplies such as ammo or medkits through scavenging the mansion, most of what you get comes from a shop you find early on, the currency for which you get… coming exclusively from killing enemies. This introduces a new element of resource management, and works well as a sort of double-edged sword. Unlike, say, the first Resident Evil (or at least the remake) where the threat of resource drain or Crimsonheads encouraged you against fighting enemies, here it becomes a choice: do you want to get that shiny new weapon/want to try and save and find yourself too short on what you need to get it? What enemies are still around? Do you reckon you can kill one efficiently enough to actually get a return on your investment? This all adds a new layer to gameplay, and pairs really well with how varied enemies are. I’m also a fan of some of the other things you can buy in the shop, even if during my run I was often too poor to take advantage of them. Getting your pick of reward after killing a boss is a neat choice for the player, given that what they don’t pick is lost forever for that playthrough. Modifications seem neat — and even if I’m not generally a fan of “you can’t use these cool things if you want the good ending,” I like how it ties in lore-wise. Dresses are fun cosmetics, and the additional effects they give Alisa allow the player to finetune their stats to their playstyle. The shop, and the mechanics regarding money in general were a really cool addition to this type of game, both in terms of the mechanics surrounding them on their own and the additional cool things the shop gives the player access to.
Other iterations, however… fare less well. While the shop, in general, does a lot of cool things with the PS1 survival horror formula, some of the other things mostly just… don’t mesh and are super annoying to play around. It’s oftentimes a case where… the game will stop what it’s doing to become something else but that something else… really does not work well in a game such as this. There’s one part of the game which is flat-out a stealth section — one which comes down to “run to these specific points at this specific time or face instant death,” one which… has no room for experimentation or doing it faster than the game wants you to, and due to the fixed camera angles often results in you being unable to see where the things you’re meant to stealth past… even if the player character themselves wouldn’t have that problem. Right after this is a boss fight, which I’d prepared and stocked my items up for... only to find out that actually this specific boss was actually a rather clunky rail shooter, where you can’t heal, can only barely dodge certain attacks, and one where ‘aim’ and ‘move’ are bound to the same keys, which rather than seeming like a fair challenge just feels really annoying to deal with, where whatever skill you’ve picked up through playing the game is moved to the wayside in favour of trying to figure out this brand new style of play the game has just thrown on you.
Combat… also becomes rough once you start finding more advanced enemies. Some mechanics get attached to enemies, and while sometimes it works and makes them fairly fun to play around sometimes it… doesn’t. There are these mermen skeleton enemies which have a dismemberment mechanic — where depending on where you aim you might just knock off one of their limbs and make them angry — but in practice, it’s not really possible to know what body part the game thinks you’re aiming at, so it ends up with you accidentally knocking off their hand or head rather than killing them… after which they immediately just hitstun you to death because hitstun on the player is majorly jank. There are so many points where you’ll get hit, knocked down… and then you’ll lose much more HP because the enemy will attack you and knock you down again literally the moment you get up. Your best strategy, particularly against bosses or tougher enemies, is to kite them, which… works way too well for its own good. Enemies generally move at the same speed the player does, rather than faster or slower, which can result in loooooong stretches of you and the enemy walking around each other, the fight not progressing because neither of you are in range to actually try to attack. I literally beat one boss because all of their attacks could be easily dodged by… just walking backwards around the arena. It’d be easy to brush off this jank as trying to be accurate to the old survival horrors of yore, or stating that the frustrating/sloggy parts as making the game feel more stressful or tense… but it feels at odds with itself. In, say, Resident Evil or Silent Hill (where fighting felt way more smooth regardless), combat was often a last resort if you couldn’t run from a situation, and added to the tension due to providing consequences, either in the short term (resource drain) or the long term (killing the enemy resulting in something worse taking its place later). Here, the shop system encourages you to try your hand fighting enemies… which then works against itself given how combat oftentimes doesn’t stand out for the better.
Which is a shame, because initially I was super vibing with this game, and even when things started to get annoying later I was still really into the parts that won me over at the beginning of the game. Regardless of its issues, I was still really into a lot of the things it brought to the table, and I still really like the dollhouse, gothic horror puppetry aesthetic. It’s just a shame that I started to notice the strings after a while, and got to see just how many knots were tangling the experience up. 6/10.