Update One Hundred and Thirty-Four: 1 March 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Guess who! It’s me again. I actually finished this last night, but figured it’d be best if I avoided posting three times in one day again. I’d like to bring you tsupertsundere vs. wordless narratives: revisited.

The Rivers of Alice is an atmospheric point n click where you explore a young girl’s dreams. The backgrounds are all wonderfully watercolor painted, and Alice herself looks like someone from a Shel Silverstein illustration. It’s lovely… and it’s also one of the most moon-logicky point and clicks I’ve come across in recent times.

I’m lucky I used a guide for this one - there was NO WAY I’d have gotten anywhere without it, or even had known what to do to progress most of the time. I know they wanted to follow dream logic, and that they meant for it to be hard (most of the screen-tranisition text involves difficulty and what to do when you’re stuck) but this is ridiculous. Two biggest detractors from me having a positive experience were two of the later puzzles. One, which involves arranging different colored vultures on a board by color, made my blood boil. These two different types of vultures were so close in color that I could barely tell them apart, which I thought was an ass pull way to increase the difficulty. The puzzle after that, the tightrope one, was poorly ported from phone to PC, and I had to manually alt-tab out and re-tab in a dozen times to keep her from falling off. That soured my experience a lot.

There’s stuff to like in this game - it is gorgeous, and a lot of the other puzzles are cool and interesting, like the constellation/apartment building lights one. Unfortunately, it just didn’t capture my heart.

Next up: Man, I gotta be more careful with my categorizations. This is a VN, but it’s in the general game list! Oh well! I’ll play it anyway.

See you soon!