From Nightmare STUDIO comes Alice’s Warped Wonderland: REcollection, a retooled visual horror text game for Nintendo Switch and PC. The original game, Alice’s Warped Wonderland, was created for certain Japanese phones with the correct features for gameplay, but this August 25, it will be available through Nintendo’s eShop for Switch. Though it will be released on PC, there isn’t a set release date for the platform yet.
A creepy visual novel game, it stars Ariko Katsuragi, a Japanese school girl who wakes up at sunset in a classroom. With no memory of how she came to be there, she is also confronted by a strange man in a toothy, grinning mask. The man calls himself the Cheshire Cat and addresses Ariko as “Alice,” clear references to the most popular characters from the Alice and Wonderland story. The Cheshire Cat tells Alice to hunt for the White Rabbit, and so the game begins.
As the title implies, the world in the game is not like reality in many ways. For a start, there are not many humans in this world, though Ariko does have a best friend named Yukino. There is a large cast of strange and creepy creatures. While Ariko’s main task seems straightforward, capturing the White Rabbit is more difficult than it sounds. He often disappears into thin air when she gets close. Meanwhile, the continuously smiling mask of the Cheshire Cat is your most common companion.
This is a visual novel style horror adventure game, so there will be a lot of text and point-and-click gameplay. Players will have many forks in the road to play through. With multiple endings to be unlocked, this game can be enjoyed multiple times too.
Alice’s Warped Wonderland: REcollection will be available to play in the original Japanese as well as in English and Chinese. Though the game is essentially the same, just slightly adjusted for the new platforms, there are a couple of subtle improvements. First, the game will be adjusted to the new screens it will be played on. The original only had a vertical view because it was played entirely on the phone. This retooled version will have widescreen capabilities as well as touch screen support for the Switch.
There will also be some small changes to the script. Though careful to be as faithful as possible to the original, the new game has some very subtle rewrites in the script. This goes for the music as well. The original background music’s rich qualities were maintained and improved, no doubt to be supported by the new systems. For Nintendo Switch and PC, the game will likely be played with bigger speakers than a phone, so they were likely adjusting for the difference.
In addition to the changes above, the new game will also feature text skip and auto-play options that are handy in a text-based game. Finally, there will be the addition of bonus content, including a gallery of cutscenes and warehouse images for players to enjoy even after they’ve finished the game.
