ALICE VR

I want to like ALICE VR more than the evidence allows me to. There is something quietly ambitious about transplanting Lewis Carroll's logic-defying universe into a desolate sci-fi planet, waking you from cryo-sleep aboard a malfunctioning ship, and then asking you to scavenge liquid graphene from a world whose citizens simply vanished. The premise has texture. The electronic ambient score by EON Sounds has real atmosphere, the kind that wraps around you when you first step out of the ship and onto that alien terrain, all fractured geometry and surrealist imagery. Sharks float through the sky. Black-and-white forests loom. A robotic Cheshire Cat materialises to offer cryptic hints before dissolving again. On a flat monitor, without a headset, there are genuine moments of mood here that a smaller, stranger game could have built something lasting from. The trouble is that ALICE VR was designed with VR in mind first, and on that front it stumbles in ways that matter. The core mechanics centre on shrinking and growing to squeeze through scale-shifted spaces, shifting gravity to walk on walls and ceilings, and collecting graphene by solving environmental puzzles or draining abandoned machinery. In concept those ideas suit the Carroll source material perfectly. In practice, the free-gliding locomotion and the wall-walking sections in the game's second half create serious motion-sickness risk, with no snap-turning option and no genuine VR comfort mode to fall back on. Reviewers across the board flagged this, with some having to pull the headset off entirely to finish certain levels. On a flat screen the discomfort goes away, but so does much of the intended magic, leaving an experience that feels neither optimised for VR nor satisfying without it. The puzzle design sits at the heart of the disappointment. Over roughly three to four hours of play, you will mostly cycle through a small handful of puzzle types: throwing objects at switches, shrinking to access blocked passages, flipping sequences to unlock doors, and repositioning crane-like devices. None of them are obtuse, which is something, but very few of them are interesting enough to repeat across an entire playthrough. The difficulty barely rises from start to finish, and the story, which gestures at a planetary mystery and multiple endings, wraps up without the revelation it keeps promising. There are twelve hidden playing cards scattered through the world that unlock a Steam achievement if collected, and audio logs tucked off the main path that add flavour, but the collectible layer is thin padding over a short experience. What the game genuinely earns is its visual identity and its soundtrack. The indoor spaces are polished, the city sections carry real presence, and EON Sounds' pulsating electronic score does quiet, patient work that a dedicated headphone listen rewards well beyond what the gameplay itself delivers. If you are someone who can sit inside a strange atmosphere and let it settle, there is a haunted quality to the abandoned planet that lingers. But ALICE VR carries a Metacritic score of 55 and a Steam user rating that sits mostly negative, and those numbers reflect the honest experience of a first VR production from Carbon Studio that over-reached technically while under-building mechanically. It is a game that knows what it wants to feel like but does not fully know how to get there. Play it flat, headphones on, expectations tuned down. The three-to-four hour runtime is honest about what it is. If the score and the aesthetic hook you, there is a brittle, flickering thing worth seeing here. Just do not go in expecting the puzzle depth of Myst or the VR comfort of a title built by a studio with more headset hours under its belt. Kai, Scout Team

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