Alice in Cyberland

Alice in Cyberland

released on Dec 20, 1996

Alice in Cyberland

released on Dec 20, 1996

Adventure game released exclusively on Playstation.


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hell yeah. This shit is 90s anime as FUCK, it's got it all. vibe girls, vibe OST, vibe setting, it owns. The plot basically consists of 3 girls that can dive into a physical manifestation of technology to help solve problems and save the world n whatnot. The cast is rad; there's Alice, your typical anime heroine, Rena, your Oujousama type beat, and Juri, the more moe-coded one whose ditziness makes her the punching bag of the group. The writing is also great, and I never got tired of hearing the banter between the three as they go through the game. The gameplay is basically an adventure game/VN with occasional RPG battles that use a rock-paper-scissors system, and while it's a bit frustrating to have the tides of battle be essentially up to chance, I never actually lost any encounter and the battles are so few and far between that they may all be rigged from the start to make the whole combat system a placebo.

The game is basically paced in a way where things just happen and ya gotta roll with it as it comes. A lot of the conflicts happen for very "blink and you miss it" reasons, and the game has a LOT of stuff crammed inside its brisk 4-hour runtime. Like, sometimes a girls cyberpet will go crazy in the cyber movie world and ya gotta stop it, or sometimes your QT classmate will get possessed by her new smart watch to become a baddie cat-themed phantom thief. The game actually did end up predicting a lot of the modern cyberworld, including the existence of vtubers, AI deepfakes, NFTs, and the overabundance of garbage information, which is quite crazy for a PS1 game. The world building is quite cracked indeed. There's also an entire optional bonus chapter where you can go on a gay date with one of the side characters, and it's done in a really innocent and wholesome way instead of being really weird and fanservicey about it. Fuck yeah.

It's just good vibes all around. I looked around on mobygames to see what the heck the studio and people behind this game went on to do, only to find the studio behind this only made like one other game, and most key staff members went on to either work at konami or sega. Truly an anomaly of a video game. But still, got damn, this game was some of that good shit.