Bottom Line: Alisa is a love letter to 1998 written in the fluent, deliberately clumsy dialect of tank controls and fixed cameras—a survival horror throwback so committed to the bit that its flaws are inseparable from its charm.
The Gameplay Loop
Alisa's core loop is a museum piece, lovingly restored. You enter a room. The camera locks to a cinematic angle chosen for mood over utility. You hear something before you see it. You round a corner, and a porcelain horror lurches forward on clicking joints.
Now the tension crystallizes. Combat forces you to plant your feet and aim, trading mobility for accuracy. The manual vertical aiming is the wrinkle that separates the tourists from the survivors—misjudge an enemy's height and your precious bullet sails into the wallpaper. Ammo is scarce. Every shot is a negotiation between fear and arithmetic.
This is where Alisa either wins you over or loses you completely. The friction is the point. The clumsiness of tank controls isn't a bug to be patched; it's the source of the dread. When you cannot spin on a dime, every doll becomes a genuine threat, and every hallway a gauntlet. Modern design philosophy spent two decades eliminating exactly this kind of vulnerability. Alisa reinstalls it and calls it a feature. It's right to.
The Toothwheel Economy
The Pol merchant system is the game's smartest deviation from its source material. By converting kills into spendable currency, Alisa introduces a risk-reward calculus that the classics lacked. Do you burn ammo to farm Toothwheels for a better weapon, or hoard your rounds and slink past danger? The stat-altering outfits add a layer of build experimentation that feels fresh without breaking the period-accurate illusion.
It's a small addition with outsized impact. It gives the player agency in a genre defined by scarcity, and it makes the puppet merchant one of gaming's more memorable oddball vendors—a spiritual cousin to Resident Evil 4's trench-coated hustler, filtered through a fever dream.
Puzzles and Pacing
The thematic puzzles are genuine brain-benders, woven into the Dollhouse's twisted logic rather than slapped on as filler. They demand you pay attention to your environment, backtrack with purpose, and think like an architect of nightmares. Some will stump you. That's the intended texture.
The pacing, however, is where the difficulty curve bares its teeth. Alisa is hard—sometimes punishingly so. Save points are sparse, resources tight, and the learning cliff steep enough that new players may bounce off the opening hours. This is honest design, but it's also a filter. Alisa has no interest in meeting you halfway.