Richard & Alice

My first hour with Richard and Alice was spent watching two strangers talk across a prison corridor, and I genuinely did not want it to stop. That is a hard thing to pull off. Owl Cave, a two-person team of Lewis Denby and Ashton Raze, built this entirely in the Adventure Game Studio engine, and the handcraft of it shows in every measured pause, every carefully chosen line of optional dialogue. The setup is almost achingly modest: an endless blizzard has dismantled society, the government is quietly converting underground prisons into luxury bunkers for the wealthy, and Richard, a soft-spoken army deserter, has been staring at nature documentaries alone for long enough that the arrival of Alice, a wry, cagey woman imprisoned for murder, feels like sunlight through concrete. The structure alternates between two modes. In the present, you play as Richard, shuffling around a small cell block, cobbling together makeshift tools from mops, sticky tape, and small metal trays to adjust an Environmental Control Unit in the hallway or file a support ticket through a prison computer that may or may not be monitored. The puzzles here are light to the point of being largely ceremonial. In the flashbacks, which unspool as Alice tells Richard her story, you control Alice and her five-year-old son Barney as they survive one harrowing situation after another across a frozen, post-collapse landscape. It is in these flashbacks where the writing does its real work. Barney is written with an attention to how children actually speak and reason that most novels cannot manage: trusting, literal, unaware of the weight his mother carries. The parent-child dynamic between Alice and Barney is the emotional spine of the whole game, and it holds. What does not always hold is the pace of the in-cell dialogue. The conversations between Richard and Alice are long, and some players will feel the script overstays certain beats. The art, rendered in a sparse, low-resolution style that critics routinely called primitive, is another point of friction. I think there is a case for the aesthetic: the bleak flatness of the pixel environments matches the game's emotional register. But the character portraits are stiff and expressions are limited, and there are moments where a slightly more expressive visual language would have helped the story land harder. The MIDI-based soundscape, though, is genuinely atmospheric. It does the quiet, droning work of keeping you in the cold. Five distinct endings, each tied to a Steam achievement, are shaped by subtle choices scattered throughout the playthrough: whether you give Barney a toy car, what you say to a stranger in a church confessional, whether you hand Alice a photograph. None of these moments announce themselves as consequential. That restraint is intentional and effective. Who is this for? Narrative-first players who treat interactive fiction as literature, people who admired the tone of early Telltale work but want something slower and more literary, and anyone who appreciated how a game like Papers Please used mundane actions to carry enormous moral weight. It is not for players expecting puzzle depth, mechanical complexity, or any kind of tonal relief. The gloom-o-meter is, as one critic accurately put it, off the charts from early on. At roughly two to three hours for a single playthrough, the game knows when to end, which is itself a form of craft that many longer titles fail to demonstrate.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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