Alisa Developer’s Cut [Review]
Alisa Developer’s Cut feels like an authentic Playstation horror classic.
Image credit: Casper Croes / Top Hat Studios
The first Playstation is one of my favorite consoles. I love the blocky 3D, the distorted textures, terribly compressed FMVs, and the many pioneering games. That console saw the release of a lot of weird and unique games, to a far greater extent than what we got in the 8-bit and 16-bit generation of consoles. It felt like developers were really experimenting with the medium. Most crucially for this review, the PS1 saw the explosion in popularity of survival horror with Capcom’s Resident Evil.
Resident Evil used 3D characters over pre-rendered 2D backgrounds. This allowed the game to have detailed environments that would otherwise be impossible to depict. It used the fixed camera angles necessary to make the approach work for the secondary purpose of controling the player’s vision, creating an almost cinematic experience with dynamic camera angles that was often genuinely scary. We got several games like this in that console generation, but the approach went out of style as technology improved with future generations.
Console version. Image credit: Casper Croes / Top Hat Studios
In recent years, there have been several games that imitate that style of survival horror. Casper Croes’ and Top Hat Studios’ Alisa is one of them, and might be the best I’ve played. It feels like an unreleased game of the era down to every detail. It maintains a 4:3 aspect ratio, has overcompressed FMVs and video backgrounds, clunky UI, features chunky, jittering 3D models, and has voiceover recorded with the correct level of era-appropriate amateurishness. It’s a perfect time capsule.
In Alisa, you play as the titular character, an elite officer in the army of a fictional European country. A spy has taken some important military plans and you’re tasked with apprehending him. Once you track him down, you follow him into the woods and are both attacked by weird creatures causing you to black out and then wake up in strange mansion. Now you’ve got to find a way out of this puzzle box, all while fighting creepy mechanical puppets. If this setup feels familiar, you can probably guess what game it draws from.
Console version. Image credit: Casper Croes / Top Hat Studios
Alisa nails its ambiance with a mansion that’s mysterious and compelling to explore. The sound design and music make the game very immersive; it’s scary and tense to walk around when you don’t know what’s ahead. The camera angles often create glaring blind spots to amp up the tension, so you can’t see the hideous creatures waiting for you down the hall or around the corner. You’ll probably hear them coming before you see them.
The controls might turn off some modern gamers, but Alisa plays just like a classic Resident Evil game as well. I played with modern movement controls that were added to this Developer’s Cut edition, but it includes tank controls, one of the worst aspects of this kind of game. When you hold a trigger to draws your weapon, controls change to aiming mode, where Alisa stands still, only able to rotate in place or aim up and down. You can only reload your weapon in this mode since the reload button doubles as the run button.
PC version. Image credit: Casper Croes / Top Hat Studios
The game has Resident Evil style puzzles. Some are of the emblem placement variety while others are lock combinations or object movement puzzles. A couple of them took me longer than others, but none of them took long enough to make me go look up solutions. There’s one puzzle in particular that has a time limit; this one can be irritating if you don’t save properly ahead of it. It took me a few tries to solve it in time.
Alisa’s weapons are mostly the kind you’d expect in a game like this—handgun, shotgun, magnum, machine gun—but with a few outliers like extra melee weapons, such as a sword and shield, a giant mallet, or a throwable spear. The weapons mostly have a really great feel. Like other games in the genre it’s important to conserve ammo, so when I played, I carried a melee weapon most of the time; once you get a feel for the enemies, you can take care of most with a sword. You can only have up to two weapons equipped and have to leave the rest in a closet you can access in Resident Evil style safe rooms. Though you can only hold two weapons, you can carry an unlimited number of inventory items. These are ammunition, med kits, keys, and puzzle items.
PC version. Image credit: Casper Croes / Top Hat Studios
Enemies drop machine cogs, which you use in the safe room shop to buy weapons, med kits, ammo, and some special items. You can find some med kits and ammo around the mansion as well. Weapons aren’t found out in the open; instead, you buy them in the shop over the course of the game. You’ve got to choose what you buy carefully because not everything is worthwhile or necessary. It’s important to balance what you buy since cogs are limited—enemies don’t respawn. Like weapons, you’re also able to buy new clothes with more defense or other special properties. Irritatingly, it costs one cog to save. It’s still far better than Resident Evil’s ink ribbons.
Once you pass a certain point in the game, the shop starts offering “modifications,” machine parts than can give you auto-aim, provide more protection, and more. You’re able to start with the auto-aim mod if you’re willing to take the punishment of earning less cogs from kills. Auto-aim makes the combat much easier if you’re really struggling with the playstyle.
PC version. Image credit: Casper Croes / Top Hat Studios
It’s frankly difficult for me to come up with negative things to say about Alisa. Perhaps at times the camera angles change too frequently, but I accepted that as part of the charm. Maybe it would have been nice to be able to lower the resolution of the game’s 3D models on this console version of the game.
Alisa completely succeeds at what it sets out to achieve in evoking PS1 era horror. The game nails its genre at a specific point in gaming history and does it while making a game that’s genuinely great even without the era-specific trappings. When I finished the game, I immediately started another playthrough to try to get a better ending. Alisa Developer’s Cut is perfect for what it is and I want to play a sequel or more games like it.
Alisa Developer’s Cut is available now on PC, Playstation 4 / 5, Xbox One / Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.
Overall Score: 10/10
Played on: Playstation 5
