Back in October 2000, video game designer, American McGee, brought the world his twisted version of Alice in Wonderland. The game received generally favorable reviews and was praised for its—at the time—cutting edge graphics and mature, dark take on the familiar world of Alice’s imaginary dimension. Eleven years later, Alice is back for another trip to the disturbing, Wonderland of her mind. The Madness Returns does an awful lot to draw players back into the macabre landscape, but unfortunately your time there will be hampered by enough frustrating gameplay mechanics that you may be looking for the next train back to the real world.
The best part of anything American McGee has his name attached to are the distinctively strange and twisted visuals. From the opening cinematic you are reminded that this is not the sanitized Disney version of Wonderland that many are familiar with. The moment you see your rabbit companion’s head explode into a gushing river of blood, you are thrust into a dark and disturbing world full of terrifying creatures and creepy set pieces. Unfortunately, the compelling first couple of hours soon give way to an overly long second act, which seems to drag on forever and doesn’t carry with it the same impactful visuals and disturbing imagery.
The game is split into five separate levels and each one takes an unusually long time to complete. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but the middle sections of the game are boring and generic, and I found myself wishing emphatically that it would be over soon. The game picks up steam again as you get closer to the end, but you have to slog through several hours of boring underwater and feudal Japan inspired levels to get there.
The actual gameplay—which is always the most important aspect of any video game—is a hit and miss affair. Combat is satisfyingly simple and by the end of the game you will be slaying evil minions with ease. Unfortunately, the combat is also frustratingly simple. You will have four different weapons at your disposal – two close quarter and two ranged weapons, which you can upgrade several times. The problem is that even when they are upgraded to their full capacity, they do not seem to change very much. By the end of the game, I found myself performing much of the same combat moves I was performing at the beginning of the game, and any game that forces you to engage in combat as much as this game does needs to make fighting fun and interesting. That’s not the case here.
Platforming is also a problematic affair. Most of your time in the world will be spent traversing obstacles and jumping over pits, but the design is not intuitive enough to pull off what the game is asking you to do. Alice can jump incredibly far but the controls are so floaty that landing where you want is often times a guessing game. I can’t tell you how many times I died, and not because I wasn’t skilled enough to do what the game wanted, but because it’s often times impossible to judge where you’re going to land. If this was just an occasional occurrence I think I could live with it, but you will find yourself performing these jumps and floating around the world on a constant basis. It’s bad enough that the platforming is so poorly implemented, but when you have to do it over and over again for hours on end, it’s almost enough to make you want to hang up your controller.
The story, on the other hand, is actually rather compelling. Alice has been in an insane asylum since the death of her entire family and as a result of her fractured psyche, Wonderland is now suffering. Your time in Wonderland is littered with bits and pieces of information to help you piece together the truth about what happened, and this gives the player incentive to explore the world, even if the world itself does not.
There are also a few fleeting moments when you are in control of Alice, not in Wonderland, but in real world England. You’ll find yourself in the Asylum, a hospital, a seedy port town, and a terrifying hospital. These moments remind you that, while Alice may be spending most of her time in an imaginary world, she is still living in the real world and dealing with the monsters of the real world. To me, these were the most compelling parts of the game, but they only popped up every once in a while and you only spent five to ten minutes there at a time before you were thrust back into a world of jumping from mushroom to mushroom.
By the time the credits rolled I had come to realize that Alice: The Madness Returns is the very definition of what people call a “mixed bag”. I absolutely loved the disturbing art style and the compelling story, but this isn’t a picture book or a movie, this is a video game and the gameplay really just doesn’t hold up. It’s really a beautiful package but it’s too repetitive and unintuitive for me to ever want to pick it up again.