Alice: Madness Returns

Slightly more than ten years after American McGee first introduced PC gamers to his dark and twisted re-envisioning of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, it’s time at last for console audiences to fall down the rabbit hole. With his freshly formed studio Spicy Horse Games, McGee is back with an even more disfigured version of the time-honored tale. But even though this adventure is loaded with wildly creative flourishes, the game that pokes out beneath the layers of madness is rather outdated and linear.

Those yet to experience the distorted Wonderland found in McGee’s original outing are owed a severe warning: this is not the Alice in Wonderland of your childhood. As with American McGee’s Alice, this sequel is crafted from some genuinely disturbing subject matter - the kind of concepts and imagery that could quite easily trouble the dreams of those under it’s PG15 age restriction. Visually, and thematically, Alice: Madness Returns is a far more sinister adventure than you may expect, and one which proves quite enchanting - at least for a while.

This new chapter opens up shortly after where American McGee’s Alice ended - if you have yet to sample the dark delights of the original, EA has been kind enough to include a download token for an Xbox 360 version of the game with each new copy sold. Still, it’s in no way mandatory to have played the first game to follow the narrative of this sequel. Alice has been released from the asylum and placed in an orphanage in the dreariest interpretation of London you could imagine. Here psychiatrist Dr. Bumby is attempting to heal her troubled mind and erase the tortured memories of her family’s tragic death so that she can find peace.

While wondering the grey, foggy alleyways of downtown London - crawling with filthy street urchins, leering sailors and bedraggled prostitutes - Alice slips into one of her hallucinations and is soon tumbling back down to Wonderland, the corrupted world which mirrors her inner turmoil. It’s in this diverse and genuinely spellbinding world that Alice’s adventure really begins, a quest to save Wonderland from an unknown entity bent on its destruction. It’s a narrative that sends Alice across an incredible variety of imaginative landscapes, meeting up with old allies, exploring exotic worlds, and brutally murdering all manner of foul creatures.

The magical environments and outlandish characters spread across this lengthy adventure make for a rather impressive start to Alice: Madness Returns. Everything around you just begs to be stared at in wonder - or stabbed violently. A smug-faced crescent moon puffs on a cigarette in the distance, the green-blue smoke curling into the night like the Aurora Borealis; Huge teapots with glowing red eyes prance around Alice like brass ostriches, spewing hot death from their shiny spouts; lush, organic worlds merge into vast mechanical deathtraps of rusted gears and pumping pistons - the whole Alice universe really does seem like it’s been lifted from the dreams of a deranged artistic genius. This is a world filled with violence and social decay too, and Spicy Horse hasn’t held back much in this regard. Whore-beating pimps, hints of child molestation, dismembered freaks with blood dripping from their eyes, it’s like something out of a bad Marilyn Manson music video.

In stark contrast to the vividly expressive levels that make up Wonderland, Spicy Horse’s vision of London is a severely gloomy place to explore - but it’s this contrast that makes the Wonderland environments stand out even more. Other contrasts are less praiseworthy: while some areas are intricately detailed and stylized, there are sections which seem uncharacteristically minimalistic with open spaces which seem to be more padding than anything else. Texture quality also has a random element to it, where suddenly things go incredibly flat - textures sometimes pop in and out as you move around an area. Similarly, while many of the enemy creatures are genuinely impressive, others are startlingly bland by comparison. But even with these faults, the art direction here is strong overall, making for a gameworld filled with visual surprises - there will be times when you may be driven to push on just to see what is around the next corner.

Alice: Madness Return doesn’t rely only on its dramatic setting to get by, though. The core gameplay here is split pretty evenly between combat and platforming, both of which are handled quite successfully. The combat is particularly satisfying, equipping Alice with a handful of vastly different weapons and throwing her to the proverbial wolves. Dishing out violence soon becomes a knife-edge ballet as you learn to employ the various weapons effectively, since each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The Vorpal blade is deadly for close range hacking and slashing, while the Pepper Grinder offers long range firepower. Couple those two with the armor smashing power of the Hobby Horse, or the Clockwork Bombs which can be placed and detonated remotely, and suddenly there is a dynamic element to combat that you don’t often see in games of this kind. Best of all, even with a range of different attacks and defenses at your disposal, you never feel overwhelmed with special moves or complex abilities. Hastily switching between weapons to deal with a combination of different attackers is a seamless experience, and the result is a smoothly competent combat system.

The platforming element of Alice’s adventure is also rather well put together. Third-person action adventures with as much floaty platform jumping as this one can go horribly wrong if the controls aren’t tight, but Spicy Horse got it pretty much spot on. There’s nothing as frustrating as a fidgety control system which has you continually missing that last platform and falling to your doom over and over again, so thankfully that isn’t the case here. Instead we have platforming sections where you never have to wonder "can I make that jump?" or "Am I even supposed to?". You almost always know where you are meant to be going, and getting around is just about trouble-free. At the same time though, the platforming sections aren’t particularly inventive or imaginative - in fact, there are times where they border on tedium.

This is a problem which rears its head far too often throughout Alice: Madness Returns. The issue is that while the core gameplay elements are solid, they are also not overly ambitious. Sure, the setting for each level is more outlandish and breathtakingly imaginative than the last, but the actual gameplay becomes far too familiar. Jump around, flick a few switches, kill a swarm of bad guys, solve a basic platforming puzzle, and repeat. The pacing is also so predictable - you know exactly when you are due for another bit of combat, or when it’s time for the next precision jumping section. The repetitive nature of it all doesn’t register at first, purely because your brain is so preoccupied with the amazing landscapes you are navigating, but that initial awe can only last so long. Eventually you become accustomed to the twisted art style, and it’s then that you realise you’ve been stuck in some kind of platforming Groundhog Day. In the game's defense, there are quite a few other gameplay styles slotted in here and there, 2D shoot’em’up bits, exciting chase sequences, things like that which do break the monotony to some extent.

For a game which relies so heavily on its warped subject matter, it feels somewhat lazy on the part of the developers to have kept the actual gameplay so straightforward. There is such diversity elsewhere, flashing between stunningly crafted environments and truly disturbing and mature themes woven into the narrative, one would have hoped that that sense of imagination would somehow have carried through to the gameplay. To be fair though, the game mechanics at the base of Alice: Madness Returns are arguably solid enough to make it at least tolerable for the length of the adventure, even if it’s just to see where the story takes you. A dramatic visual style, along with a bloody but intelligent interpretation of a classic story, make American McGee’s return to Wonderland a worthy adventure, one which I found genuinely entertaining for a good few hours. But if you’re hoping to be spellbound by unforgettable gameplay, you’re looking down the wrong rabbit hole.

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