Do you miss the days or fixed camera angles, janky combat and bad voice acting? Then this may be the perfect game for you!
Alisa is a love letter to classic survival horror games with a focus fixed camera angles, tank controls and obtuse puzzles. If you like the original Resident Evil or Silent Hill games this what you're looking for.
Alisa has a rather unique setting taking place in a large doll house full of creepy dolls, clowns and more monstrosities that I won't spoil here.
The gameplay has you exploring a large doll house (see: mansion) full of monsters and puzzles where you have to find the right key or item to progress. Ammo is somewhat scarce, however enemies drop currency upon defeat which you can use to buy upgrades and ammo. The upgrades include various dresses which give you different stat boosts such as taking less damage, or faster movement. You have to decide how much ammo you want to use to clear a room and whether it's worth the exchange as enemies don't respawn. After you finish exploring an area you will fight a boss, which upon defeat will give you access to the next area of the game. The combat can be quite difficult however the game has has some options to make the game easier with things like an auto-aim toggle,
The level design is quite good and the different areas of the game all feel unique with different enemy types, visual styles and music, and as you progress you'll find shortcuts linking the areas together for faster travel.
The develooper has continued to add support post launch and the patches have continued to add content including new areas and endings. There won't be any more content updates for the game, so now is the perfect time to jump in and experience everything. It takes about 8 hours to beat on your first playthrough, but there are 3 endings to unlock and New Game+ has additional features, so there's good replay value with bonus costumes and the like.
If you're a fan of old school survival horror pick this up you won't regret it.
I really like this one. Figuring out where to spend the cogs is difficult though - you can’t just resolve to never buy ammo, and yet there’s so many bonuses to spend on.
I liked the vibe of the PS1 FMV opening, I almost wish we could get more of those, where a game is telling a story that it will frequently “up the budget” for when something important is happening.