I usually pick games at random, but I noticed I had only one game left from 2016, and that was Alicemare, so I decided to play it. It's old enough that I even wrote about finding it back in 2016. It's by the same developer (Miwashiba) who made LiEat, which was a charming little story-oriented RPGMaker game that I gave a partial recommendation for.
Alicemare is the second out of three releases by Miwashiba, and the least well received one. It still has a reasonable review score, but not that great for a story game. It's about 3 hours long, but I only got about 15% of the way through before I was greeted by an endless black screen that didn't seem to go away between saving and reloading. Now, 30 minutes isn't a lot to replay, but in those 30 minutes, it hooked me a bit less than LiEat did, while otherwise feeling quite similar. It seems the combat aspect is gone (I actually somewhat liked the combat), but the backtracking and checking every interactable object or person after each plot point progression is present and annoying as ever. I ultimately decided it was not worth another 30 minutes of starting all over, hoping it would not hardlock me again. I also decided to go ahead with writing this excuse for a review, because the alternative was to go back to a weekly instead of a twice-weekly review schedule sooner.
So I couldn't tell you much about the game or the story, except that you're a kid who lost his memories and so you're in an orphanage or something, and you end up in a place reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, where you have to go through some "Worlds" related to the other kids in the orphanage. I can't really recommend it, not because it was that bad, but because I literally couldn't play it, so make of that and my previous thoughts what you will.
