It's A Little Less Wonderland, A Little More Nightmare

'When you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.' - The Cheshire Cat

Alice: Madness Returns is a sequel to American McGee's Alice as I understand it. I didn't know that when I started it, I simply assumed it was a sequel of sorts to Carroll's original story. Maybe it is, but this Wonderland is a fair bit uglier than the one I remember from the Disney version.

At this point, Alice is some years on from the loss of her family in a fire. She's living at the office of Dr. Bumby, helping to care for the children there as he tries to help her mind. By wiping away all those memories that trouble her so. Unfortunately, Wonderland itself is under attack by a monstrous train that destroys all in its path. Alice finds herself falling back into the world within in her mind with increasing frequency as she tries to stop the train, regain memories she fears lost, as discover the person responsible for everything.

I'd call the game a platformer myself. There's a lot of jumping, avoiding pitfalls and traps, triggering switches then trying to get where you need to go before time runs out. There's also a lot of combat, as Alice finds an array of weapons as the game progresses. Four of them - the Vorpal Blade, Teapot Cannon, Pepper Grinder, and Hobby Horse - can be upgraded multiple times, provided you find enough teeth. Fortunately, there are plenty of those around, and I was able to upgrade all of them fully well before the end of the game. There are also Clockwork Bombs and the Parasol. More a defensive piece, that last one, one I wish I'd used more. But you know me. It's attack, attack, attack all the time. Each weapon has its strengths, and it's fairly easy to switch between them, as most of them are mapped to a different button. The Grinder and Cannon share the right trigger, but you can switch between them by pressing the D-pad one direction or the other.

Combat on the whole is not necessarily easy, though most battles aren't hard once you find the enemies' patterns and weak spots, but the game doesn't try to hinder you the way some do. The camera is generally helpful, the controls respond well, and you get some nifty moves to help. Alice has a Dash move where she turns into a flurry of butterflies, which you can direct a short distance. It's a quick way to close or elude an enemy. What's nice is you can use it without even moving if you want to avoid an attack without losing your prime position. Tap the button, but don't move. Alice will dissolve into the butterflies, the attack will pass through, then you can reform and resume your attack. It's a lot like the dash move in Shinobi, which I also quite liked, except I think it works even better here. The camera isn't actively making life hell, for one thing. I will say I found it a little hard to switch targeting sometimes, which can be a problem when a boss surrounds itself with mostly insignificant subordinates. I couldn't get the weapon aimed at the thing I really wanted to strike. That didn't come up too often, though. The jumping puzzles were a bit more of a problem, because trying to find the right combination of repeated jumps and glides was difficult. I'd think I could glide the rest of the way, and then abruptly she'd stop gliding and start falling. Or I'd find I couldn't do any more mid-air jumps, but also couldn't glide.

One quibble with the game for me was just how long the chapters are. When playing games, I often like to try and finish one level or mission each time. With Madness Returns, that really wasn't going to happen without investing more than 4 hours. This wouldn't be so bad, except you tend to have just one true objective each level. So I start a level trying to climb a mountain to find the Caterpillar. 2+ hours later, I'm still climbing the mountain to reach the damn Caterpillar. There's been a lot of fighting, a lot of lever pulling, and helping these poor oppressed, um crickets I think, against the Daimyo Wasps, but ultimately it's all been in service of reaching Caterpillar. It doesn't help when you use Shrink to view hidden messages, you keep seeing pictures of him with an arrow pointing ahead. Yes, you've been telling me that for quite some time. Exactly how far ahead, though, would be more helpful.

I complimented the functionality of Dash, but I also really like it from a visual perspective. The burst of butterflies as she vanishes, then reforms looks very nice. The game has a lot of that. Most of the levels look very nice, each kind of has its own theme. I particularly liked the section set well up in the clouds, where walkways and buildings would form out of playing cards. Some levels have vibrant colors, others are murky and grey, things falling into disuse. Others are pretty disturbing, depending on how you feel about preserved specimens or the internal workings of your body. And that giant eye peering in through the keyhole? Yeesh. The Wonderland parts contrast nicely with the parts in London. Very little there is vibrant, but it's more that everything looks shabby, like it was never beautiful, and there's a sort of greasy smear to everything, emphasizing how dirty and unhealthy it all is. Except for the part in the asylum.

While playing, I very much wanted Alice to learn the truth she was seeking. Regain her memories, feel whole, and perhaps alleviate the guilt she felt. I had lots of theories about what was happening. Her sister wasn't dead, she'd used the fire as cover to start a new life. The Cat's responsible for the destruction of Wonderland. he is, after all, the one egging her on, and besides, he's a cat. Of course he'd be up to no good. In the end, I was wrong on all counts.

Still, as much as I wanted Alice to succeed, I understood the Wonderland inhabitants' frustration with her. Not only do her stated desires keep shifting, but everything is always about her. She wants Wonderland saved for her peace of mind, and they are merely tools to help her achieve it. Now one could reasonably argue that they are parts of her, or things created by her mind, but their lives seem to have progressed since the last game. Rarely for the better, but how much of that is their failure, and how much is Alice? There's a real sense that whatever she did in the first game was also done with only her own well-being in mind, and it had a ruinous effect on everyone else. And perhaps on her, given her state in this game. As it is, I'm not sure what to make of the ending. There's a part of me that thinks this entire game, her entire life since she left the asylum, was nothing but an extension of her mental trauma, and that none of it happened. Kind of like how there's a shot at the end of Once Upon a Time in America that makes me think maybe all the scenes in that movie from the '50s are a DeNiro opium hallucination. The lines between London and Wonderland do blur quite a lot, but I'm not sure if it works that way.

The game's story does have some deeply satisfying moments. The large fellow with the scythe in the background over there is the Red Queen's Executioner. He's an invincible monster that hounds you for most of a chapter. When Alice is finally able to turn the tables, I hardly even cared that it happened in a cut scene. Sure, I would have liked to administer the coup de grace, but I doubt I'd get to see the great reactions from both parties if I did.

Complaints about the length of chapters and occasional jumping issues aside, I really loved Alice: Madness Returns. I'd say it's easily in my Top 5 for the 360 at this point (though admittedly, the only two other sure things are Singularity and The Saboteur), and it's only looking better for how disenchanted some of the games I've begun since finishing it have left me.