Does this manga make more sense if you've played the video game it's based on? I honestly couldn't tell you. In large part that's because it leans so hard into what it wants you to believe is the fine line between dreams and the waking world that it renders itself deliberately confusing, and that's a risky choice to make. Stories like that absolutely can work – basically all of Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities relies upon a similar liminal space – but SINoALICE feels as if it may be trying a bit too hard to embody the device. In a game, that's much more of an okay thing to do, because the person experiencing the story is also invested in playing. But in a manga, even one based on a video game, the stakes are different, and while there's a certain joy to be found in simply losing yourself in the borderline nightmares of Alice, there's also a driving need for the plot to make sense, and this book isn't terrific at that.

Our point of view character is Alice, but that's probably not her real name. In one of the most effective pieces of the volume, Alice's name – as well as Snow's and Red Riding Hood's – is written in white inside a bordered black box. The implication here is that “Alice” is a filler name, something chosen by the player (or Player, in a more metafictional sense). For Alice, we can see elements of her literary roots all over her story; by the time we hit her awakened power with its distinct visual similarities to the White Rabbit's pocket watch chain she's already fallen and had an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-themed birthday cake. But the very sense that she can't quite decide if her life is real is also a reference to Lewis Carroll's most famous heroine, because when she's both through the looking-glass and in Wonderland, Alice can never fully tell what's real and what's nonsense.

That, regretfully, is very relatable while reading this book. Is it a well-crafted horror based on famous works of children's literature and fairy tales? Or is it hyper-gory tripe that loves shots of its heroine's underwear-clad butts and wants us to think that “dark” equals “deep?” There's an argument to be made for both readings, and in all fairness, it's only when Alice wakes up in a makeshift hospital with Snow and Pinocchio (whose name we don't learn until the prose story that finishes out the volume) that things really start to go downhill. The first half of the book does a much better job of leaning into the sort of bland horror that doesn't fully hit you until later on: Alice is just a regular high school girl with a crush on her handsome Classic Literature teacher. Her friend Miki also has a crush on him…but she's also sleeping with him and is now pregnant. She and Alice have paired phone straps of creepy ball-jointed dolls, but Alice doesn't understand the significance of them until it's too late…and then suddenly she's waking up in the morning just like she was before, but there's no Miki, no teacher, and a massacre in her kitchen.

Up to this point, the manga is, if nothing else, effective horror. The small details, like the fact that Alice suddenly has both phone straps, work to make us question what's real and what's not, and the background noise about a burglar/murderer on the loose makes the scene in the kitchen make sense narratively. But the introduction in quick succession of Red Riding Hood, Snow, and Pinocchio makes things move far too swiftly without taking any time to explain to us what's going on. Is Alice still in the same world? There are hints about that, but they're brushed aside in favor of Red wreaking as much havoc as she can and Alice awakening her power. As I've written it, I realize that it doesn't sound particularly confusing, but the way it plays out on the page is choppy and more interested in making sure we see (repeatedly) how Red mangled Alice's family, and we don't even find out some very pertinent information until the prose story at the end – and I'm not confident that all readers read those as a matter of course.

The art is, generally speaking, very nice, and it does have a way with its more upsetting elements. Pages can be a bit hard to follow in the latter half of the book, and the fanservice is almost entirely focused on the girls' back ends, with the exception of one moderately explicit sex scene. The translation is smooth and reads well, but mostly this feels like an exercise in frustration: it leans too hard into its own “reality or dream” philosophy and is more invested in confusion and gore than in telling a coherent story. It's a shame, because there are some neat concepts here, but even if you're a fan of the game, I'm not sure that this is worth picking up.