Without wishing to sound elitist, I usually try to avoid RPGMaker-style games. At least as premium game experiences. I played around with the engine a lot myself and that makes me very conscious of any RPGMaker game's design. It irks me when the look & feel uses stock design elements from the engine, for example. Or when I look at a map and immediately think of how I would've made it myself. Alternate DiMansion Diary pushes these annoyances to the extreme, yet somehow ends up being a decent experience.
You play as Sae. An ordinary high school girl who, during a school trip, ends up making a nasty fall. While trying to find her friends again, Sae then stumbles upon the courtyard of an impressive mansion. Nobody appears to be home and the building itself looks dilapidated. Having no sense for horror movie tropes, Sae opts to head inside. Maybe they have a telephone she could use to call for help?
Once inside, things only get more weird. The house is full of odd paintings and devices, doors locked by absurd mechanisms. With the entrance shut behind her, Sae's only way forward is to figure out these strange puzzles.
Alternate DiMansion Diary is a relatively compact game and I like it that way. The house has 2 floors to it with about a dozen rooms each, so it's not too hard to keep track off where everything is. You can't go to many places at the start, but gradually unlock more rooms and paths as you complete the puzzles. It's nice seeing the map gradually get colored in as you gain access to more and more of the mansion.
The puzzles themselves occupy a nice level of complexity. You find some weird machine with obvious markings, then later run into a clue like a painting or a poem that suggests what you should do with it. Or perhaps you run into a room with an isolated puzzle you can solve right away. You do have to pay attention and keep everything you have seen in mind, but it's unlikely to ever leave you stumped. This keeps the story moving forward at a steady pace.
Where the game definitely falls short is in its visuals. It is very RPGMaker. Basic tilesets and chunky architecture, with little room for making anything impressive. I was particularly put off by the attempts at adding shadows to the sprites. You get this grey, blocky outline under tables and other sprites, which looked more like the transparency was messing up. Walls also look ugly and often make it difficult to discern where doors are actually located.
Some sprites are also just weird in general. Sae herself is very oversized for an RPGMaker sprite and animates weirdly as a result. She walks like she's constantly in need of a piss, which is extra silly when running. I also ended up missing clues at times because I didn't recognize them as important. In one room I was meant to pick up a ladder, for example, but the sprite was so tiny and basic that I didn't recognize it as one. I thought it was an empty shelve or rack and so didn't bother to interact with it.
The limitations of RPGMaker also rear their heads in other ways. Your interactions with the world are restrictive and so most puzzles involve little more than pushing the use button or walking on specific tiles. You also end up loading a save instead of overwriting it if you use a save point while running. And F12, the default screenshot shortcut for GOG, actually resets the entire game when you use it. I found that one out the hard way.
I also ran into some general bugs. Dialogue popping up in the wrong locations, dialogue that wasn't translated from Japanese, or controls locking up entirely when loading a save. Nothing game-breaking, but certainly annoying.
Like Seed of the Dead, this is also a hentai game for which you need to install a separate patch. This I feel mixed about. One the one hand, I think the game is better without it. Despite having the exterior of a horror game, the overall tone is lighthearted and fun. Even comedic at times. Having a bunch of violent sex scenes interspersed throughout felt jarring. On top of that, the game barely clocks in at about an hour. I beat it in 61 minutes exactly on my first run. When I then replayed it with the patch, the runtime was extended significantly because you can't go ten steps without trigger another scene. It's too much and that, in turn, drags out that fluent pacing that I praised earlier.
On the other hand, the hentai content is what they put the most effort into. The otherwise-unimpressive visuals are redeemed, as the sex scenes feature exquisite pixelart animations. Everything is custom made and complex stuff for the engine.
This leaves players with a choice. Do you want to throw money at a simple puzzle game that you beat in an hour and which offers nothing impressive. Or do you want to play that same game, but have to stop to watch some porn every 5 minutes. Honestly, if I wasn't too late with trying to refund the game I probably wouldn't have bothered to begin with.
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