With all of our favorite survival horror games being remastered lately like Resident Evil 2, RE3, RE4, and the upcoming Silent Hill, it is nice to see a game provides that classic experience in today’s market. There has been some good throwback games like Signalis, but many others don’t truly capture that old school feel. In comes Alisa, a classic survival horror game heavily inspired by Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Luckily, Alisa doesn’t just rely on retro visuals to make it feel like a classic horror game, its structure and how it handles its scares is what really made me feel like I was playing an old school title.

Alisa is a 90’s inspired survival horror game set in a 1920’s fantasy universe. Alisa is an Elite Royal Agent on a mission to track down a wanted criminal. While tracking down the wanted criminal, she is taken by some creatures and awakes in an old Victorian mansion in a strange dress resembling a doll’s clothing. As she tries to escape, she is haunted by strange mechanical doll-like humanoids and realizes that the mansion is actually a twisted doll house.

The entire beginning part searching through an abandoned town with heavy fog really sets the tone and feel.

One of my favorite things about Alisa is the game doesn’t hold your hand at all. You have to interact and explore everything and get clues and combinations from notes or subtle environmental hints. It’s such a refreshing feeling having to make actual notes in a game because it doesn’t just have a journal or an arrow directing you. There were a few times I needed to take pictures or notes of puzzle solutions so I could proceed. It respects your intelligence without being too obtuse or annoying with backtracking.

You’re probably thinking “yeah that’s what old school games did”. Well, you’d be right, and that’s what I liked about it. Many newer survival horror games have gone away from actual puzzles and rely on more simple exploration of items to progress. Alisa provides more of a challenge than that. The other aspect of its old school design is having to spend currency on just saving the game. Old school Resident Evil you had to use a limited amount of Ink Ribbons, but in Alisa you have to actually use some of the gears you collect from defeating enemies. It isn’t a lot of money to save, but it could put you out of not being able to purchase another ammo box.

One of the early puzzles, but the solution is found on a note in a dead end area, how FUN.

There isn’t anything more iconic to the old school horror genre than tank controls. Alisa of course features these controls, which is both good and bad. You get the classic nostalgia feeling, but at the expense of fluid controls and movement. Shooting and aiming does require you to stop moving, so of course plan your time to shoot when you have some space. One good thing about the shooting is that there is a crosshair indicator on your HUD that will light up when you’re aiming at an enemy. Since the hit boxes are pretty small on the enemies, this indicator is crucial to landing accurate shots.

Alisa does feature a modern control scheme, but all this does is allow free movement with the joystick. You still need to stop and shoot, but you aren’t stuck to the stiffer movement. However, the modern control scheme does come with its own set of annoyances with scene transitions. With normal tank controls, holding forward during a scene transition will just continue your characters current facing path.

Unfortunately, with the modern controls, when the scene changes it will direct the character to the direction your moving them. For example, if you’re running up, but then the camera changes to in front of you, you’ll then switch directions and run back the other way. This creates times where you’ll get stuff in a camera switch loop and has led to my death since it makes it harder to run away from enemies when there are a lot of camera changes in an environment. That being said, I do feel like Alisa has a lot of camera switch, some being very disorienting with how far it skips to the scene.

While sometimes camera cuts can be annoying, they can often set you up for great scenes like this.

Alisa does feature a nice variety of weapons ranging from your Royal sword, your standard issued pistol, a blunderbuss, machine gun, revolver, pump action shotgun, high powered rifle, and a crossbow you’ll need to find through a puzzle instead of being available through the story. These weapons are purchasable through a creepy little hand puppet in the wall named Pol. He is found throughout the mansion in safe rooms where you can save, purchase, and swap loadouts. Instead of doing inventory management like other games, you’re only allowed to hold two weapons at any time.

Besides the weapons you’ll also unlock dresses through the game. As I mentioned before, when Alisa wakes up in the mansion she is wearing a strange doll-like dress. Well, you’ll find various dresses through the game that will offer different buffs. You can find your old Agent armor again which offers defense and faster weapon reloading. Another will offer the ability to swim, because yes there is a creepy flooded basement level. I liked the idea of the dresses, but I found that the fast reloading was crucial in this game because of the numerous fast moving enemies.

Pol will sell you weapons, ammo, health, and let you save.

Visually, Alisa is gorgeous throwback to the old school pixelated 3D modeled games of the 90’s. Featuring pre-rendered environments and backgrounds to contrast the interactable characters and items. Not only are the graphics in the classic style, but the game is fully rendered in 480p resolution to really offer that authentic retro look. Despite the nostalgia bomb of the classic visuals, Alisa features some really unique enemy designs to make sure it has its own identity. Some of these designs are wacky and I’m all for it.

Sound design, much like the visuals, is carefully crafted to fit that 90’s video game era of partial CD level voice acting and music with synthesized sound effects. All-and-all the end product came out well made with a nice soundtrack that matches the wacky and eerie aspects of Alisa. The general sound effects are decent, but I would have liked a bit more variety here for the enemies.

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Alisa is an extremely competent survival horror game that stands out not only because of its retro focus, but because it has some good ideas, puzzles, and setting. The classic rendering does instill that nostalgic feeling, but it’s not what drives Alisa forward which is why I think the game works so well. I honestly believe that if this game came out around the same time as Resident Evil and Silent Hill we would be remembering it as a classic and would be getting a full remake/remaster like the rest of the classic horror games right now.

Alisa Developer’s Cut is available now on PC PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X.

A copy of Alisa Developer’s Cut was provided by the publisher.