February 2, 2015

Alice: An Interactive Museum

Toshiba-EMI Limited, 1994


One of the most obscure adventure games, a masterpiece directed by Haruhiko Shono, an acclaimed Japanese game maestro. Alice in fact is inspired by the Lewis Carrolls' classic stories of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass." You play the role of Alice, who is stuck in a mansion that consists of twelve rooms, a parlor, a bar and a studio. Your goal is to find and gather a full deck of playing cards by solving puzzles hidden in the painting and portraits hanging on the walls or in other objects in every room. Each card you find will provide you with a clue for finding the next card. Solving puzzles and finding these cards will lead you to other rooms or reveal hidden passageways to eventually reach the last room of the mansion. Once you've gathered all the cards and reached the last room the game will end.

Alice is a true piece of art, which exhibit rich quality of graphics in the  form of paintings created by Kuniyoshi Kaneko, a well-known Japanese artist. Another distinguishing feature of the game is that it has no speech nor any exchange of dialogues with other characters as there are no other characters in the game. I know that this will sound strange for an adventure game but in fact these are the qualities of this game. Overall, a classical game with digital quality classical music to entertain you while you jump from room to another.