Alice is Missing

 

Alice is Missing

I purchased this game based mainly on the hype about a year ago, but I never really got a chance to take it out for a ride... until last night. I'd asked three friends over, read the rules during the day, and off we went. We played from about 8.30 PM to 11.30 PM so the three hour mark indicated was correct. As context, Alice is Missing is what I'd called a bordeline tabletop roleplaying game. It has classic elements of RPGs as in you play a single character but also very boardgamey mechanics, but it still feels like a roleplaying experience. In a nutshell, you are the friends of Alice who has gone missing, and you go look for her in an increasingly tense US teenage drama experience. My feeling, once the game was over, was essentially torn. The game forces immersion in a way that may feel hamfisted, but actually works and makes you think and feel like your character, and that worked way better than I anticipated. Where the game falls flat in my opinion is that the players have no agency. At all. There is a pretense of an investigation into what happened to Alice, but actually that's all for show and immersion. The clues and conclusion are dictated by card picks, and nothing that happened in the 90mn of silent RPG has any relevance to the conclusion. And that, if I'm honest, was a big let down. I'm glad I tried, and I see the appeal for players who enjoy the immersive theatre aspect of roleplaying and don't really care about the story, but for me the preordained (if mildly randomised) plot is the ultimate in railroading.