# Alice: Madness Returns



## Toby Frost (Jan 10, 2012)

_Alice: Madness Returns_ is a sequel to an old game called _American McGee’s Alice_, in which Lewis Carroll’s Alice struggled to repair her sanity by assisting the inhabitants of Wonderland to overthrow the Queen of Hearts. Both games are platformers, and in terms of gameplay don’t offer much different to, say, _Tomb Raider_. What distinguished _American McGee’s Alice_ was the quality of the art, which depicts Wonderland as a sinister, madcap place, as if dreamed up by a less schmaltzy version of Tim Burton. _Alice: Madness Returns_ continues in that vein.

I must admit to having always been a fan of the Alice books. Although generally thought of as zany, the lunacy is very tightly controlled (_Through the Looking Glass_ is actually the story of a chess game) and Alice’s prim logic makes her an entertaining foil for the weird creatures she encounters. Like Gormenghast, Wonderland is at its best when carefully controlled. Also, the lack of moral uplift or sentimentality is appealing (most of the sentimentality is directed at Alice by Carroll himself, uncomfortably). But back to _Alice: Madness Returns._

It’s the height of the Victorian age, and Alice (who seems to be about 20) lives in a squalid, caricatured London, where a psychiatrist is helping her piece her mind together after a breakdown. However, her childhood fantasy-world, Wonderland, starts to break through into reality and threatens her recovery. Wonderland is being ravaged by a murderous train and she must rescue the world by discovering what the train represents in the real world.

A detective-style plot is introduced, where, by progressing through the game, Alice opens sections of her repressed memory to reveal the truth about her past. The final revelation is pretty sinister, and may be a nod to the controversy about Carroll himself that will probably never be resolved. In a way I was disappointed to discover that Wonderland existed solely in Alice’s head, but never mind.

The level designs are both ingenious and lazy. Ingenious because, artistically, they are interesting to look at and have a sort of grim beauty that I suspect is hard to achieve. They draw from surrealists such as Beksinski and the Hi Fructose group, and for the most part look like nothing you will see elsewhere. Arguably, they stray too far from the original books, especially towards the end, but the Hatter's domain and the castle of cards are excellently realised. However, they are lazy because they are much too long, without any clear end in sight, and use the same enemies over and again. In particular, the inky blob monsters are tedious, and the doll’s head motif is tiresome by the halfway point – by the end it’s really dull. The platforms are just about taxing enough, although I found the drab last level quite irritating. Wonderland may have been many things to different people, but it was never boring before.

But there is a more fundamental weakness with this game and its predecessor. The style simply doesn’t suit the subject matter. Alice’s interactions with Wonderland are limited to jumping on things and/or hitting them. There no option for the player to be involved in the complexities of the books and so much of the wit, even the ‘dark’ stuff (how I hate that word as a term of quality!) is lost. There simply needs to be more interaction, more opportunity to pick the flowers (even if they protest) in order to make a getting-small elixir, or a choice of responses in each weird conversation. The closest games I can think of to this are _Morrowind_, _Thief_, which at times were quite bizarre, and the _Shivering Isles_ add-on for _Oblivion_, which for its flaws got quite close to creating a gaudy, dangerous fantasy world that seemed to owe as much to Carroll as to Tolkien. Were Wonderland to be made in the style of _Fallout 3_ or _Skyrim_, it would be superb: as it is, _Alice: Madness Returns_ scores 6.5 out of 10.


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