Seems like a solid exploration game. Cute art and writing, with pretty good level design. Combat is a bit slow and clunky though.

After falling down the rabbit hole, I'm never coming back up again after experiencing the overflowing cuteness of what's called Magical Girl Alice a magical girl game that's short but super adorable to the core.

Magical Girl Concept:

This one is pretty hard to evaluate because you are looking at a really cute bunny girl that fires off magical hearts and is able to transform between humanoid form and a rabbit... Yes, literally a plain old rabbit that don't even shoot magical hearts, which begs the question, do magical girls only transform between two humanoid forms or can it be between a non-magical animal form and magical humanoid form. Technically, it does fall in the magical girl criteria since the transformation is basically a magical transition, an impossibility that can only be explained by magic, hence this game definitely has magical girls in it and a bunny one it seems (￣ω￣).

Visual:

Right off the bat the game reeks with overflowing cuteness which is hard to explain in words so playing the game makes sense since the art style are all oriented towards the soft pastel colored look and feel. However in general, everything is really well made and it feel professionally done to begin with. The character animations, including the enemies, are all nicely animated giving the extra cuteness and appeal of a complete game. The tile maps and background for the environment is designed with multiple layers, making the environment design rich with different shapes and sizes. The title screen is simple but quite polished in terms of the artwork used. It feels like nothing is left out in the art department and everything seem to have been taken into careful consideration.

Audio:

The game uses some really cute choices of sound effects especially for the player character. Besides that the music composed suites the art style very well and the stingers for the game over scene complements the animation closely.

Theme:

Wave and particle duality was picked for the theme in this game, although it could just be duality, omitting the wave and particle bit, but its still within acceptable reason that their intention was to show that the player character can transform between a person and a bunny. Besides that the theme is well ingrained with the mechanics as certain parts of the environment requires the player to change into a bunny to traverse over narrow pathways.

Challenge / Engagement:

Since the game has only two playable levels, its reasonable that the game should be hard at the start and it is quite challenging even with the familiar control layout. The challenge comes not from platforming rather the limited view of the game area where a lot of it involves guess what comes next and also taking a leap of faith into unknown territory which could lead to discovering a pit full of spikes. The level design is good as it has multiple paths and options available when it come to going from one end to another. The boss fight is quite easy to beat once its behavior pattern is laid down but I find that since her movement rate is quite slow, the dash ability comes in handy when closing in for the attack. As for the engagement, its engaging in the gameplay side of things which might have most of the attention in the development while on the other hand the story is a little short ended for what it is since it is written to be pretty casual and laid back, without any direction in the story development. However there is a level of creativity with how the dialog is conducted between the two characters, Umi and Mimi, where their conversation is fun and playful.

Overall:

The game has a solid outlook to it and has good ground work for further development in terms of level design and story development. There is a lot of elements in the game that isn't utilized yet but is present in the game, such as trading cards and collecting fruits. With that in mind, I can guess the game would have a lot more going than what was released for the game jam, so I hope more development can be considered in the future.

Cute game with nice graphics and fun gameplay!

Controls are good overall, but the jump feels somehow a little “floaty”. I wanted to use my PS4 controller, but gamepad support on web is a bit hit-and-miss. Having the option to download would be nice? It’s great that you have so many abilities, but having one button for everything means the controls aren’t super simple and intuitive. For example, Interact and Skip dialogue could probably be on the same button. There are a lot of times where you don’t see what’s below you in a pit. Some games solve this by letting you zoom out or pan the camera, others just put warning signs and arrows. Also I did miss some of the dialogues in the first zone, due to being midair…

The health/respawn system is pretty jank. Health doesn’t refill across levels, but when you die it refills. There’s no way to tell where the checkpoints are, and the boss doesn’t reset when you respawn. Are apples and carrots supposed to heal you? Otherwise why do enemies drop them?

The level design varies, the first level is pretty open and easy to get lost in, the final level has some nice platforming “puzzles” in self-contained areas. The final boss was pretty fun.

In summary: The graphics, audio and controls are very neat. The technical stuff could be more polished. I’ve definitely seen some bugged out jam games, and this is not one of them, but there are many mild annoyances that take away from it.

I'm gonna echo the other reviewers in my overall thoughts: the art and sound are fantastic, but there are some design decisions that make me go "wait, what?"

To start, why web-only? While I do advocate for including a web deployment to allow the maximum number of users to experience the game, I find it best to compliment it with a local install option for those who can take advantage of it. Since I was limited to the web version, it added an extra layer of difficulty because I had to fight with hotkey combinations triggering during play (Chrome's bookmark hotkey is Control-D) and occasionally encountering window focus issues.

As for the actual game, let's start with the characters: I haven't played any of the previous games in this series (it is a series, right?), so while I understand both from the game's page and the in-game dialog that Alice is a bunny-turned-human(ish), I have no idea who Umi is. Alice, for her part, looks good and acts in understandable ways, so no problems there.

The dialog doesn't seem to have a clear focus. During the introductory story, I'm given dialog choices, but their purpose doesn't seem clear and sometimes there's only one choice. When we get into the game proper, I'm greeted with a line about how to jump, then...nothing. Nothing about movement, nothing about the rabbit transformation...but then I get to an area for climbing and I'm told how to climb. OK, at least there's something. But then I get to an enemy and I see the dialog explaining attacking for a moment but it's dismissed before I have a chance to read it. And apparently there was an inventory system that I didn't know about. Even advancing the dialog is confusing: sometimes it's advanced with Enter, other times I have to click "continue."

The overall design seems to be a little confused about what it wants to be, too. Is it a tactical sidescrolling platformer a la Mega Man, where the player needs to defeat enemy obstacles while traversing short, simple platforming challenges? Is it a precision platformer where the player needs to be mindful of their jumps and learn the ins-and-outs of the control system to overcome complex platform challenges? Or does it want to be akin to a "rage game" like Super Meat Boy or Celeste where the player must learn the enemy patterns and level layouts through trial and error? The game saw me mostly just swinging from vine to vine and getting killed repeatedly, which drained my life and eventually resulted in game overs. The continue option was appreciated, but if the idea is to be a game that I learn the format through trial and error like those "rage games," why have life drain and game overs at all? The enemies were mostly non-threats; the worst ones were the spiders that threaten to knock me down as I try to get to a vine, and few of them can be defeated with an attack. Each of these platformer formats require a different structure, so if this game is going to be worked on further, I advise reviewing the format of the game, decide on which way you want to go, and restructure the game around that decision.

There are a couple of other design decisions that struck me as odd, too: one was the placement of keys for doors. The first time I ran into a locked door, I had to go through a series of platforming challenges and a small passage that required the rabbit transformation to acquire the key; the next key was placed right in the middle of the room and the door was right across from it. That latter instance is what should have been presented first, and the former would make more sense as a late-game challenge. In other words, present the player with the easy stuff first, then build the challenges up as the game progresses. The other design issue I found was the blind leaps of faith: while many of the jumping challenges are presented clearly, there are occasions where I'm not sure if I should be dashing to safety after jumping or just fall and figure out where to go next. On a similar tangent, there are some areas where there appear to be branching paths, but it's not clear if I should be going on one path instead of another and what the advantage will be. While some games have done this in the past (classic Mario and Sonic games come to mind) it would be better if these alternate paths' purposes were clearer.

I ultimately feel like this game looks and sounds good, but the design needs to pick a direction and stick to it.

Nice game, the characters look very cute.