Alisa

I went into Alisa half-expecting a surface-level nostalgia grab, the kind of retro homage that borrows the aesthetic but skips the soul. What I found instead was something genuinely unsettling in the best possible way: a one-person project that understands, at a cellular level, what made late-90s survival horror so psychologically sticky. Casper Croes built this alone, and that handprint is all over it, in the obsessive fidelity of every pre-rendered background panel, in the dramatic fixed camera angles that hide enemies until the last second, in a soundscape that recalls the muffled, odd-key ambience of early PC horror fare. This is not a facsimile. It is closer to a recovered artifact. You play as Alisa, an Elite Royal Agent who ends up trapped inside a Victorian mansion called the Dollhouse, surrounded by mechanized, doll-like humanoids that are genuinely unnerving in their variety. Cymbal-wielding monkeys, gentleman dolls crawling on all fours, giant ballerinas, clowns, swimming horrors, and invincible robots all populate the mansion's wings, each with distinct animations and behaviors. Combat runs through a small but satisfying weapon loadout, with a sabre for melee, a pistol, a machine gun, a military shotgun, a crossbow, and eventually a Gatling gun for the finale. Outfits double as armor, each conferring actual stat bonuses, and currency dropped by defeated enemies funds your purchases at the mansion's eccentric item shop, including the save mechanic itself. Puzzles span box-sliding, combination locks, hidden codes, and arcade-style enemy waves. There are multiple endings depending on player choices, plus a New Game+ mode with added enemies, dresses, and weapons that extends the run meaningfully. The difficulty is the most important thing to understand before you commit. The developer explicitly drew from Bloodborne when designing enemy aggression and the punishment loop, and that influence is felt. Camera angles occasionally trap you mid-fight, spinning uselessly while something bites chunks out of you. Auto-aim is iffy. The story is deliberately sparse, scattered through documents and light character interactions rather than exposition dumps, which will frustrate players who want clear narrative scaffolding. Both a classic tank control scheme and a modern directional alternative are available, but neither is frictionless, and players new to the genre will likely spend the first hour feeling out the controls rather than feeling scared. Early versions shipped with a few notable bugs too, though updates have addressed the worst offenders. What earns real admiration here is the atmosphere. The pre-rendered backgrounds and low-polygon models produce exactly the kind of eerie, lonely dread that the PS1 era specialized in. Each wing of the mansion carries its own musical tone, composed to feel like it was pulled from a forgotten Alone in the Dark disc. The voice acting is campy and slightly off-key, but deliberately so, and it lands with the same bizarre charm as the original Resident Evil script. The story stays wrapped in mystery, which keeps the world feeling larger than it is. For a game built in Unity by one person, the cohesion of mood and craft is remarkable. The download weighs in at roughly 200MB and will run on decade-old hardware without complaint. Alisa is not for everyone. If you have no patience for the structural language of 90s survival horror, the fixed cameras and resource scarcity will feel like punishment with no purpose. But for players who grew up memorizing safe room layouts and rationing shotgun shells, this is one of the most earnest and well-executed love letters the subgenre has received from the indie space. Croes has since released a Developer's Cut update, available on PC via Steam, that adds auto-aim options, minigames, and New Game+, making the current version the most complete and accessible the game has been. Kai, Scout Team