Searching For- Graias Alice The Cage Fighter In... (2024)

The air in the amateur MMA warehouse is thick with sweat, stale beer, and the metallic tang of blood. In the center of the cage, a fighter is warming up. She is ancient. Not in the weathered, worn-down way of a journeyman boxer, but in the literal, mythological sense. Her name is Alice.

“The gimmick is the tragedy,” says lead combat designer Hiro Nakata. “Alice is the most powerful fighter in the world for sixty seconds. Then the eye fogs up. Then the tooth aches. She is racing against her own decrepitude. Every fight is a countdown clock to when she turns back into a forgotten old woman on a rock.” Visually, Graias Alice is a masterpiece of contrast. The world outside the cage is vibrant, ugly neon—the standard hyper-capitalist hellscape of fight promotions, energy drink sponsors, and crypto-bro managers. But inside the cage, time slows. The color drains. Searching for- Graias Alice The Cage Fighter in...

And she has one tooth.

In Graias Alice , creator Jenna “Gutter” Marchese throws that metaphor into a headlock. The air in the amateur MMA warehouse is

Her signature move is not a spinning elbow or a flying knee. It is the —named after the fate who measured the thread of life. Alice catches a limb, whispers a forgotten truth into her opponent’s ear, and ages that limb by forty years in a single second. The opponent’s arm shrivels. The cartilage crumbles. The fight is over, not by knockout, but by obsolescence. The Narrative: Can a Fate Retire? The narrative framework, penned by Hugo Award-nominated author V.L. Singh, is surprisingly tender. Alice isn’t trying to become champion. She is trying to lose the Eye and the Tooth permanently. She wants to give them back to her sisters, Deino (Dread) and Enyo (Horror), who have followed her to the mortal realm and now run rival fight promotions. Not in the weathered, worn-down way of a

The climactic fight is rumored to be against “Deino the Dread,” a heavyweight who doesn’t use her shared eye to see the future, but to see every possible bad ending for Alice at once, weaponizing despair as a debuff. Graias Alice: The Cage Fighter is not for everyone. It is slow, poetic, and brutally punishing. The control scheme is deliberately obtuse (mapping the “focus” function to a button you have to hold with your pinky). The art style is aggressively ugly-beautiful.