Alicemare

Alicemare is a strange game where we're put in what appears to be a kindergarten for children with special needs. It's a standard RPGmaker-style game. First of all, I must talk about the terrible movement system. The environment, like in a typical RPGmaker game, is divided into a grid, with one object per square. But, for some reason, the movement system in game is split into a half-grid, making movement, turns and interacting with environment painfully annoying, specially considering that no object in the game is placed on a half-tile. There is no sprint button either, and the character walks too quickly by default - it makes interacting with objects next to each other pointlessly difficult. The graphics are hand-drawn, unique and pretty. However, the screenshots on the Steam page do not represent just how hollow and empty most locations in the game are. A lot of them are just floor, walls and one singular sprite repeated a hundred times. Whole rooms of nothing displayed on screen but floor. This is especially showing at the beginning of a game - for example, why is the entire front hallway of the beginning location totally empty, other than having a telephone? Have you ever seen a giant room in real life which has nothing but a telephone? The game features plenty of sprites in different rooms, so even copy-pasting them here and there would make the place feel a lot more natural. In the game's current state, many rooms look like placeholders. The puzzles are fairly fun and tricky, however some form of a hint system is missing. There are a lot of puzzles, and alt-tabbing every 5 minutes to look up a solution is no fun. Some are straight up unfair however, and require nothing but luck. The gameplay is fine, but it screams lack of originality. It's just "interact with this, then with that and with this again" - allowing you to predict what you'll have to do and what the outcome will be. The most egregious example is the game forcing you to interact with a hundred graves to find missing objects. There is no indication of which graves are correct - you are meant to try every single one. I left the worst for last - the story. I'm sorry but I do not understand anything. I have no idea why we start where we start, what is happening, why are we in different worlds, why are we teleported into different worlds. I feel like the game makes an attempt at explaining some of it with the final few diary entries, but they had no impact of my understanding of the lore. When I saw a true ending achievement pop up, I was simply confused by what I've just witnessed. Perhaps I approached the game from a wrong standpoint, or I missed some obvious clues, nonetheless I'm totally lost with zero clue what was going on during my 6 hours of gameplay. It pains me to say it, but I consider the game to be a clueless walking simulator with a bunch of puzzles in between for an additional bit of annoyance. It has a lot of potential - by removing the half-grid movement, filling up empty rooms with objects and explaining the story earlier, in simpler, more detailed way, the game would turn into a masterpiece. I would not recommend it for any reason other than a handful of creative puzzles, which are not the primary focus of Alicemare anyway.

I really didn't like this game. The puzzles were either too easy or totally unclear; I wouldn't have minded if I enjoyed the rest of the game. But for a narrative-driven game, the story wasn't great. The premise is really interesting: travelling to different fairytale worlds. each distorted by the trauma of its originator. Brothers Grimm meets Kingdom Hearts? Sounds dope. Unfortunately, we don't spend enough time in each world. The characters are really interesting, but they're not fleshed out. And there are just too many unanswered questions. Did Ricky ever exist? We see both Letty and Ricky in the end credits, so was he ever a real person? Why was Chelsy obsessed with bears? Who was Cliff? Are the boy and teacher the same person? What's their history? What's up with the murder mystery? What's the deal with the cheshire cat and white rabbit? Why was Allen called Alice, and why was Alice treated as some sort of omnipotent being? As a total nitpick, the fairytale theming was a bit confused. I got Hansel and Gretel and Red Riding Hood immediately, but I had no idea about Stella or Joshua until I checked the other endings. Like I said, total nitpick. But I'm a sucker for a good theme, so I appreciate it when they're properly conveyed. The dream worlds weren't particularly interesting visually, and the puzzles didn't relate to the story being told, so they felt out of place. A character's telling me about their dying mother, then I'm confronted with a puzzle straight from an educational CD-ROM. Time spent there was super abrupt, with very little effort required to get each world key. So it didn't feel like much of an achievement when each world was cleared. There was no difficulty levelling either, so it never feels like you're progressing or getting better. The latter half of the game feels really out of place, as it shifts focus away from the main four kids to focus on the teacher and the institute's past. But it felt like unnecessary padding that caused the ending to be rushed and exposition-heavy. It was also filled with pointless busiwork to help solve a riddle that seemingly had no bearing on the main plot. This game had real promise, and I'd love to see it revisited with a higher budget behind it. It could honestly be on par with Little Goody Two Shoes or Goldenertraum in terms of storytelling and aesthetics. And if a remake is ever in the works, please scrap Stella's world entirely. Clicking around on a grey screen to find buried piano keys with no hint as to where they are doesn't make for engaging gameplay. Nor does navigating identical, all-grey mazes.

Alice Mare used to be one of my favorite RPG Maker games back in middle school, so of course I had to buy and replay it when it released on steam! The style is very cute and simple, and I'm a huge fan of the soundtrack, but I find some of the puzzles to be a bit too hard and feel like they could've expanded more on the individual stories, and even on the true ending. I decided to buy it mainly to offer support to the devs, and since it's so cheap I think it's 100% worth it, but I wish we had more contents, or a remake since lots of RPG Maker games from my childhood have been remade recently. Hopefully one day.

Kocham tą grę

this game has a special place in my heart, so i don't have much to say about it. i've played this a long time ago but never achieved all endings, so doing it after all those years was a nice experience if you're afraid of jumpscares, this game has close to none the story can be quite confusing, but i like its fairytale concept puzzles weren't challenging but weren't exactly easy peasy absolutely love the ost and visuals overall good game, unfortunately it's pretty short

VERY GOOD GAME REALLY!

I am recommending the game because I like Miwashiba and the potential of the story Alicemare tells, but I don't think I could recommend the game in good faith because it quite frankly isn't a very good one. I was really trying my hardest to enjoy this game, but I found the cryptic puzzles/riddles kind of annoying and the instantaneous deaths at most turns felt too punishing. I'm not gonna act like I couldn't save, but there are times when I over-saved and under-saved alike. There's no balance since there is no kind of autosave or return to a point before the death. If you played without saving the whole way through and died due to a single, seemingly insignificant choice, you lost potentially 30 minutes of progress in an instant. It's punishing in a way I didn't like that much. But the game itself is quite short if you're really skipping everything, so there's that I suppose. Music was whatever, not much of an impact. I wasn't a fan of the super simplistic visuals too much, and I wish Miwashiba's art was shown to me at a higher quality. The game's visuals kinda lent itself to being difficult to look at sometimes and I know there might be some segments (like Stella's) where my more colour-blind friends would be somewhat unable to properly access due to how similarly coloured everything is. Of course, the most important part of this is that I actually really like the story for how complex yet fun it was to engage with it despite the confusion it presents. The average person isn't going to deep dive into the lore of a mid ass niche Japanese RPG maker game, but [b] half of the lore is hidden behind a novel [/b] and based on people who enjoy Alicemare, the novel seems to be doing a great thing for itself and fully fleshes things out. [b] But you will not find any answers to the stories and your questions in the game, [/b] and the endings will feel lacklustre as a result since it's all hidden behind the novel. All this is to say, I still enjoyed it since this was Miwashiba's first game and I find myself reluctant to be that critical of it. And I absolutely will be reading that novel, and I will probably really like it too.