Endless Alice

My first few runs in Endless Alice hit a very specific frequency: the comfortable thrum of looting a big, chaotic map while builds slowly tip from functional to absurd. HowlingRain is a small Taiwanese studio, and the DNA here is unmistakably Risk of Rain 2 - third-person action, roguelite run structure, escalating item stacking, enormous bosses, and that satisfying moment where your character stops feeling human and starts deleting everything on screen. Whether that inspires excitement or skepticism will tell you most of what you need to know before buying. The content foundation for an Early Access title is honestly respectable. Six playable characters each bring distinct combat identities - Takehime plays like a melee samurai, while another character swaps between a grenade launcher and an assault rifle for a bursty ranged style. Over 120 items spread across the loot pool means build variety is already tangible, and the elemental, talent, and awakening systems layer enough RPG texture on top to give each run a different personality. Between stages there are rest areas where you can test your current build against practice targets, and in co-op you can freely drop and trade items with teammates - a small touch that makes four-player sessions feel genuinely collaborative rather than competitive. The gacha-style decoder system for unlocking additional items adds a meta-progression loop that keeps things moving session over session, though it does bloat the late loot table in ways that can frustrate players hunting specific synergies. Honesty matters on an Early Access page, so here it is: Endless Alice is rough around several edges right now. The English localization is machine-translated, and item descriptions frequently read as nonsense, which is a real barrier when understanding your build depends on parsing them correctly. Maps lean large, and loot visibility suffers as a result - especially in the darker interior sections of some levels. Enemy AI has been criticized in the community for feeling slow and inorganic, with some enemies teleporting beside the player rather than navigating naturally. Early bosses feel HP-bloated relative to the damage output of a fresh run, which can drag pacing before the item stack kicks in. These are all solvable problems, and the developer has shipped over 26 updates since launch and maintains an active Discord presence - but they are present problems, not hypothetical ones. The soundtrack deserves its own sentence. Players who lean toward J-trance or upbeat electronic music will find it genuinely pleasant to sit inside, and it does real work keeping energy high during longer runs. The anime aesthetic is consistent if clearly DLC-forward - the game ships with a suite of optional cosmetic outfits, and the volume of that DLC catalogue relative to the base game is worth noting if that sort of thing bothers you. The core game itself, though, does not require any of it. Who is this for? Roguelite players who want a co-op-friendly, build-expressive run structure with an anime skin and a small, engaged developer behind it. Solo runs work fine, but the item trading and shared chaos of a four-player session is where the game genuinely shines. Anyone expecting a polished release-state product will be disappointed. Anyone happy to buy into a promising Early Access loop and watch it grow will find more to like here than the budget price point implies.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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