Technical Information

Developer: Synergy Circle Games
Publisher: Synergy Circle Games
Release Date: January 28, 2020

A curse has fallen upon the girl wizard Emily’s books, and now each story is told from two different perspectives. Control Sophie and Elise’s alpacas, get absorbed into the books, extract magical crystals from them, and choose which version of the story is correct!

Unlike Alpacapaca Dash, this is a platformer with puzzle elements and rich storytelling.

Final Thoughts – Analyzing the Game as a Whole

Graphics and UI

The game’s art style is entirely pixel art, and overall it is well done. The animations are simple but work well for the game’s concept.

In research books and school scenes, I felt a bit confused because the background and some platform objects seemed to be on the same plane. For example, in the school phase, I didn’t know if the ball was part of the scenery animation or something that was there to kill me. This happened because the same color tones were used for both planes. However, in the castle book scene, this confusion did not occur, as different color tones were used, making it easy to distinguish which parts were platforms the character could walk on.

The only thing that really bothered me was that the resolution of sprites and environments seems inconsistent when playing in full-screen mode, leaving the pixels slightly stretched.

Some labels on the score and pause screens were not aligned with other elements on the screen, but this did not affect visibility.

Soundtrack and Sound Effects

The music is super cool, it was really well done! It has that classic 16-bit game feel. The same goes for the sound effects.
The comic book scene’s music was much louder than the others, which caused a bit of discomfort. :/

Gameplay

Despite being a platformer, there are puzzles in each stage, which really puts the player’s neurons to work.
The difficulty of the phases is moderate, except for the bosses. The bosses are very hard because although their movements have a pattern, the areas they move through are random. They’re much faster than you, so defeating them doesn’t just depend on skill but also on luck, as they can move to areas where dodging becomes impossible due to their speed. This, combined with imprecise hitboxes, makes the challenge even greater.

In each stage, a bar fills up as you make choices. This changes the story’s perspective at the end, which is shown in panels similar to a comic book. Bosses also change depending on the path you take.
In addition to different routes, it’s possible to buy cosmetic items for the alpacas through gacha mechanics.

There’s a Time Attack mode where you have to complete phases as quickly as possible. There’s also an online ranking system to increase competition!

Unfortunately, there are many localization issues. There are also some gameplay bugs (for example, dying after jumping on top of an enemy or being hit after touching the book that ends the level).
I believe that after these issues are fixed, the game will offer a much more player-friendly experience.

Replayability and Game Retention

The game has a lot of potential with its mechanics and is rich in storytelling. This encourages players to replay it in order to explore other routes and understand the other protagonists’ points of view.
However, the biggest obstacle is the bugs, which greatly discourage replaying the game.