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.