Hello, travellers!
AliceMisaki & Annina are the authors of this "Nemesis - In Darkland", an RPG Maker VX Ace adventure puzzle game originally made and released in 2017 on the rpgmaker italian Rpg2s site. The game was made and released in english (translation by YoonAyeong93), despite the fact that the developer is italian, it's about 2 hours and 30/20 minutes long and it's inspired to Alice in Wonderland.

Anyway the protagonist of this game isn't Alice but Nemesis, a girl that wakes up when her cat disappeared. She follows him to a garden, when she meets the White Rabbit (that appears like other characters from Alice in Wonderland, like Mad The Hatter and the Queens) and entering a hole on the ground she arrives into a surreal and magical land populated by many bizarre characters...


Choices, choices... uhm maybe saying I'm lost is better than talking about rabbits!

The gameplay is about solving puzzles and riddles, looking for specific items, in order to proceed with the plot and see what happen next (the game is linear and divided into six levels), anyway mind that some choices will determine the outcome of Nemesis' surreal adventure (there are 4 different endings). The game is, in short, a classic adventure game without battles but with some minigames and tasks that we've to complete. I liked some of these parts, others (like the classic chase sections seen in many other rpgmaker horror game) a bit less.

Visually the game is really good: I like the custom made portraits, even if they aren't all good (a couple of them are just decent and their style do not merge really well with the usual rpgmaker game visuals) the cutscene are nice and the custom made assets are ok, even if not always match with the usual RPG Maker VX Ace Rtps, just look at the statues in one of the first areas. Unfortunately the game includes some mapping errors (like passability errors, one is the tile over the armchair in Maryrose and Rosemary living room) and also maps cpould have been better, due to some repetitivity and overly large maps. There are also some other kind of errors, for example a room that has a corridoor running on the left side, cannot obviously have a window on that same side once we enter it (I know that the setting is surreal still this is an error for me)!


Uhmmmm... seems that the cake was made with some funny mushrooms, probably!

Final Verdict
"Nemesis - In Darkland" is an ok game, I mean it's visually pretty good, and I liked most of the puzzles, still there are some little imprecisions (typos, for example) and also the story is pretty mysterious and frenetic, I mean pacing could have been a bit better (it's a nevereding run to catch that cat, going from here to there without any pause), maybe involving LESS characters with MORE dialogues and interactions, instead we have some characters whose presence seems like cameos (Mad Hatter and White Rabbit have just some enigmatic lines and are absent for most of the game, so they're more or less irrelevant to the plot). So is this a bad game? Well of course not, it has many good aspects, but some imprecisions and flaws that detract from the final result without making it bad. It's ok and pretty much an enjoyable puzzle adventure game if you like this kind of classic rpgmaker genre!