Let’s figure out what’s wrong with this podcast.
Welcome back to the podcast and welcome to the first episode in our spooky Halloween season. Today, we’re talking about Alisa, which is a dedicated Playstation era style survival horror game. And if specifically what you want is a game that goes very far out of its way to make the experience seem like it was originally made in 1996, then Alisa might be the perfect game for you. If you have any other stipulations, well… Alisa has its rough edges. The movement and combat both feel extremely cumbersome, with aiming overly reliant on staring at an icon in the HUD and dodging enemy attacks requiring some mastery over the tank controls, which compounds with the other intentionally rocky mechanics to make the whole experience often more frustrating than challenging. Still, there are some cool ideas in here, largely stemming from the surreal elements of the game world, but the aforementioned dodgy mechanical elements and overall steep difficulty make it hard to appreciate these things or in many cases even get to them to see. We’re going to be talking about the core design and how it butts heads with the way we play games these days, the aesthetic and thematic elements, and how a puzzle made me very, really mad.
Thank you for joining us again this week! Sometimes Halloween can be hit and miss and while this appears to be a hit for some people, those people weren’t really us. Still, there are some design lessons to be taken here and things that we did think were cool, so even if you aren’t in the target demographic for this game, it may be at least satisfying to examine from the outside. Did you give this game a shot? Did you grow up with fifth generation games and felt this worked on a nostalgic level? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Doom 3, awkwardly a bit more modern of a game than this one that came out in 2022, so we hope you’ll join us then.