Alice: Madness Returns

Warning! This post contains spoilers about Alice: Madness Returns.

So, I pre-ordered Alice: Madness Returns for the PS3 a little while ago, and was really looking forward to it. I had played the original American Mcgee’s Alice, and while I only have vague recollections of it, I at least remember enjoying it. So, the game has been out a little while now, I finished the whole thing and it’s finally time I got around to writing down my thoughts on it.

A couple of starting up points first! Alice: Madness returns came with a free copy of Alice, which is pretty neat, and it even has trophies – though they are pretty basic. The game also doesn’t really come with a physical manual, which was a little weird – but it does has one on the disk, and I’m pretty sure no really reads manuals anyway.

The title really sets off the premise of this game, it’s Alice, she’s still mad and traumatised after her family dies, and she’s off to wonderland again. Well kind of. This wonderland is and isn’t the same wonderland as the previous wonderland. It’s different, and changing and maybe this is good. Or is it?

So, after spending a little while in the ‘real world’ where Alice’s controls are exploring and looking around exclusively, we’re back in…some kind of wonderland pretty quickly. A large section of the start of the game is tutorial based, introducing all the control elements – shrinking, fighting etc – adding more and more controls slowly, so while you end up with a lot of things you can do, it’s pretty easy to keep up as you try out each new move/weapon one at a time.

It has a nice variety of weapons, fast weapons and slower heavy damage/group weapons – but they’re all useful, and supposed to be used in tandem with each other. The only real annoyance in terms of game play mechanics so far is the shrinking – it feels a little, gimmicky? Basically, you check shrink vision in every new area for any hidden items, so it becomes a bit chore like. But! Other than that the controls work, so far so good.

Wonderland is split up into a number of different stylised realms, and in each realm Alice gets a new outfit.

Our first big area is the Mad Hatter’s domain, now taken over by March Hare and Dormouse, both suitably presented as weird half animal half machine creatures in Mad Hatter’s industrial (dare I say steam punk? Cosplayers will certainly like the outfits I suppose) factory complex realm.  Completed this area starts to show us the direction of the plot. There is a train, an evil train destroying wonderland and we want to know why it’s here.

So, we travel from one realm to another, seeking whatever help we can from the whole host of unreliable characters wonderland has to offer.

The underwater world had some of the creepier moments in the game, Carpenter and Walrus are are putting on a show and they need Alice’s help to round up the cast. Except really they aren’t interested in putting on a show as Alice fans well know. So, after rounding up some young oysters for this ‘show’ and finding a bloodied room with a whole load of strung up dead creatures, we watch as Walrus chops up and eats a whole bunch of Oysters, and then proceeds to eat the audience too. Obviously, Alice gets no help.

We move to the Mysterious East, which is very pretty, and has origami ants which were neat, and finally we’re given a little (just a little) help. Caterpillar tells us to visit the red queen, or what’s left of her anyway. It feels a bit nostalgic travelling to the queen’s realm and seeing it all crumble apart. The design for the queen’s domain is also quite interesting, as we travel past the crumbling outsides, inside the Queens Domain is very vibrant, oozing red. Maybe that’s because you killed her before?

The final part of the game, The Doll Maker’s realm is where we see the game’s plot fully revealed. This realm is made of childish things, dolls and toys and houses. But twisted, covered in things that hurt you. The residents of the Doll maker’s realm are children, but they seems to have been…. lobotomised. It’s a bit creepy. There are large doll statures with doors in place of their genitals and it’s getting a little Freudian now, or maybe it’s just not being all too subtle anymore.

We’re also treated to a nice (in a creepy way) walk through an asylum as a straight jacketed hairless Alice, watching not so subtle hints at the ‘treatment’ Alice has been through. All of this wrongness is culminated in the revelation that really, nothing has been Alice’s fault – it’s all this other guy, and he’s been abusing her and other kids.

It is, I’ll be honest here, a bit silly how this revelation comes about. Alice just…well remembers it after a while. Seemingly remembering a whole new set of events stored away conveniently for the game, and it’s a bit of a stretch. Well, quite a bit of a stretch to be honest, and it’s there to move onto the ending, so it’s sticks out sadly.

I really liked the ending, personally. Because, to be honest, Alice has acted like a lunatic – and no one will believe her that this buy is evil. But that doesn’t mean she should put up with it. So she makes her choice, getting rid of the doctor and deciding (seemingly) to stay in wonderland. It’s wonderfully un-happy ending like. But it is happy, in a way.

So, some points about actually playing the game. There are a number of mini games. Being giant Alice and stomping on little cards was very fun, I also though the side scrolling platformer type mini game in the Mysterious East was good and pretty, though frustrating at times.

Graphically, the game has it’s ups and downs. I really like the design and art and whole feel of the game, each realm is very vivid and fully imagined. It’s nice and colourful sometimes, and dark other times. It’s just…it runs, in a lot of ways, like a game that wasn’t developed very well from a technical point. Alice’s hair jerks and loads after Alice does, which is a shame, because if they loaded all together it would have looked great, the hair is pretty, it’s just not in sync with Alice. Elements would also occasionally load jerkily, or Alice wouldn’t land in a steam elevator or a little platform like she should.

The biggest complaint I’d really level at the game is that it is very combat heavy, and in a much different way than in Alice – it feels very Devil May Cry. At times it’s just overly complicated, some enemies only receive damage from certain weapons, and they take a long time to die. Most of the game is combat based and the combat gets quite difficult at times if you’re in the middle difficulty. Sometimes the game is simply giving me too many enemies to fight, and it isn’t fun. It isn’t very rewarding to fight this many enemies, so normal as a difficulty doesn’t feel very balanced.

The mood and art of the game to me, felt like it should’ve really had more puzzles. It has some puzzles, like finding blocks and arranging them or playing some chess. But these are pretty rare and short. It honestly makes me want to play in the easiest difficulty, because frankly, I didn’t buy Alice to play a combat heavy game with an unfortunate difficulty curve – which unfortunately I can only assume is because of that idiot trope of current gaming whiners, that games ‘need to be x and x difficult because I say so’. I wanted it because it’s pretty, because of the story and the characters – it’s a very art driven game. I also think people who do like action and shooting type games probably aren’t going to be interested in playing Alice, so it seems a shame it was developed as a combat heavy game.

I played the game pretty thoroughly, so I collected almost everything. It feels like I’ll play it again and try and collect everything. It has a plus mode for starting a new game which is neat, and you can pick your favourite dress to play the game in.

Overall, it still feels like it was worth it for the lovely looking vivid game, something a bit different. But if you’re not interested in something combat/difficulty heavy then play it in easy (because I honestly don’t care for all the difficulty elite-ism at the moment) or watch someone else play it – because it is certainly lovely to watch.