Malice in Wonderland Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Play
An action roguelike where your health bar is a stopwatch, and Wonderland flips dark the second you start swinging.
You are stuck in Wonderland and the clock is already running. Malice in Wonderland is a fast-paced Action Roguelike built around one nasty idea: time is your health. I played for about an hour, cleared the raid on normal, then unlocked Nightmare and got nowhere near finishing it.
Malice in Wonderland is a Play. An hour in, one normal clear, Nightmare stopped me at the boss, and I still wanted more dungeon runs. It looks great, it handles clean, and the stopwatch-as-health idea is the whole hook. I am excited to see what the full game does with more raids.
Pros
- Time-as-health stopwatch keeps every room tense without needing cheap jump scares
- Ability colour flip from bright Wonderland into greys and reds sells the malice hard
- Card-guard mix, especially the artillery, forces real target priority
- Meta Thorns plus Decrees and artifacts give enough build variance to stay interesting
The timer mechanic
There is a stopwatch ticking down for the whole dungeon run. Take a hit and that clock eats more time on top of the natural drain. Run out and The Hatter rewinds you back to the start.
It is five rooms and a final boss, shaped like a dungeon crawl even though you are tearing through Wonderland gardens rather than stone corridors. That timer pressure is what makes this Action game feel sharp from the first room. An artillery shot clips you, the stopwatch jumps, and suddenly you are not thinking about a health bar. You are thinking about whether you still have enough seconds left to finish the run.
Alice and the combat loop
You play a warrior-princess Alice in black armour with a red cape and a red sword. The look is bright and colourful until you fire an ability, then the whole scene snaps into dark greys and dark reds. Once you start clearing rooms, that palette shift sticks with you.
You get two abilities on top of the sword work. Rapture sends an attack straight ahead with a slight width to it. Pins and Needles is an AoE that surrounds you, stays up for about ten seconds, and chews anything inside the ring. That was my best build. I also tried Rampage, which jumps you to a point and throws out shockwave damage as you land. The Hack and Slash loop is simple on paper: keep moving, keep swinging, do not let the artillery eat your clock.
You fight the card guards from Wonderland, and there are a few different types. Some slap you with swords. Some throw artillery, and those hit me most, so I spent a lot of time hunting them down first. Others put shields on their mates, or do ranged shots you sprint away from. Moves are telegraphed, so you usually get a window, but it is not always enough depending on what else is on screen.
Progression and Roguelike variance
Clear a room and you earn Thorns. Those feed a meta shop outside the run for things like melee attack speed, crits, and extra time each time you finish a room. Inside the run you also pick Queen Decrees. Examples I saw: poison on an ability, more AoE damage, higher crit chance. Sometimes you get an artifact instead, such as more damage over time or a twenty percent chance that an ability fires as a multi-cast.
The maps rotate too, so even with the same final boss the rooms and layouts shift. Two Roguelike runs can use the same abilities and still feel different because the room order and the Decrees change the pressure. That Roguelike variance is enough without needing a brand new raid every time.
Normal cleared, Nightmare did not go well
I am not usually great at repeat-survive games. They get tiresome for me pretty fast. This one stayed engaging on the look, the colour flip, and how the combat handles. Even after I had most of the gold-shop upgrades I was still terrible at it, and that felt like me, not the build.
Nightmare mode halves your starting time and doubles the damage you take. I made it to the boss and got nowhere near killing those two giant cards. I suspect the full game will add more dungeon runs instead of looping the same raid forever, with the meta progression carrying through. I want that. No controller support in the demo yet, though they say they are looking to add it.
Developer: Slyglass Games / DigiPen Institute of Technology
View on Steam
Tags: Action, Roguelike, Hack and Slash, Indie
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