Alice's Gaze
by Starmoon Cat
Media
Alice's Gaze combines clicking and idle mechanics with light puzzle-solving as you help the protagonist escape a dark mansion filled with hostile creatures. You'll manage resource production through various characters and locations—the Cat God's altar generates gold while Rabbitfolk harvest carrots—while gradually uncovering the mystery behind Alice's imprisonment. It appeals to fans of narrative-driven clickers who enjoy unraveling a twisted story alongside their incremental progression.
About this game
This is an eerie clicker idle game with light puzzles and idle combat. Alice wakes in darkness, trapped in a strange mansion, seeking escape. The Cat God's altar drops gold, Rabbitfolk gather carrots, and dungeon monsters block the way... Can you accompany Alice to the final truth?
Players, last 30 days
Peak 1,539 · Low 0Daily peak concurrent players, sampled once a night from Steam.
What players are saying
The game starts out strong, very. The Alice in Wonderland setting, the hand-drawn artwork, combined with the RPGMaker feel thanks to it's font selection, it is a charming game, even though the latter can be argued to be an unintended effect. The early game sets you up for something great as you unfold new mechanics / subsystems with a short, concise narrative mixed with the dark atmosphere as you find your way out. Soon you unlock the main system of the game, the Abyss, turning the game into an auto-battler, going deeper into the Abyss, and by extension, the madness as the painting starts talking to you, unfolding new mechanics along the way. The adventure begins.
But then you reach the farms system, and suddenly everything gets downhill, fast.
Theoretically, it's where the game should shine; New systems, upgrades that affect other systems of the game, creating that sense of synergy and inter-connectedness, every incremental games do this.
But at the same time, the mystique, horror feel drops entirely; The painting stopped talking, the music selection gets calming, even the narrative starts to slow down to nothingness. It's as if you're accustomed with the madness that you forgot your main objective.
This translates into new unlocks getting increasingly unexciting; they trickle down to flavor texts to the interactable whose unique text can only be seen once.
Said over-arching upgrades? They completely throw the game's delicate pacing out of the window as you suddenly get so much money you can essentially upgrade your equipments super fast you just outscale the entire dungeon for a long time you don't have to worry about it anymore.
This would not be a problem, after all you don't want to keep your players baby sit on a mechanic for too long without automations.
But it is a problem here, when each subsystem has their own currency; the dungeon being one of them, and your dungeon scales your enemies so slowly because each dungeon runs for 10 waves, with no option to speed up the battles in any way, even though you are one-shotting them right on your first turn. That slow scaling means you're just waiting to get enough currency unlocking the next thing, with absolutely nothing to do. This bottlenecking only gets worse when the final unlock suddenly requires astronomical amount of it, turning the final part of the game into an asinine, 2-3 hour long waiting game with nothing to do, as you pretty much already have all the remaining systems completely maxed out, other than the Abyss, with their useless upgrades as you're way too overpowered with thousand fold damage difference.
And that what makes the overall experience disappointing, there is so much to like, but the second half of the game drops the ball so much that by the end it ends up spoiling everything. I too remembered playing the demo of the game when it was published on galaxy.click, and my first impression was rather positive that I somewhat look forward into the full release, even though I didn't finish the demo (which ended at the farm phase). Too bad that it come out like this.
Reviews are by Steam users, hosted on Steam.
Latest updates
Patch 2
16 days agoPatch 1
18 days agoDemo update-6.8
99 days agoPosts come from Steam's official announcements feed.
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