Alice: Madness Returns (2011)

Alice has returned to Wonderland. But things are still even worse than before.

A year ago, the girl emerged from a coma. She had spent eight years in it. After her parents and her older sister Lizzie were killed in a fire.

Why did it happen? Did she fail to put out the fireplace? Did Dinah (“Dinah was her cat”) knock over the candlestick?

Alice doesn't know for sure. But she went through hell inside her own imagination in order to come to terms with herself and start living again. She was even discharged from the asylum, and Dr. Bumby took her under his care and allowed her to work at his own orphanage for the mentally ill. A seemingly good man, although he says strange things. “Forget Wonderland, the past doesn't exist…” Maybe he's right.

But still, what actually happened? Alice doesn't want to admit it, but she feels it: the madness is returning.

The infernal train of Looking-Glass Land must be stopped while there is still something left of Wonderland.

“Alice: Madness Returns” is a game by game designer American McGee, who is, generally speaking, best known for the first installment, which came out in 1997 and became a very notable event. An unusual interpretation of Lewis Carroll's classic fairy tale, a dark world and eccentric characters, distinctive music, and a respectable level of difficulty made “American McGee's Alice” a well-deserved classic. And 14 years later, it got a sequel.

How good is it? A difficult question.

The 2011 game perhaps gained even more fans than the first installment, and also became a cult classic — but, unfortunately, somewhat in spite of its own nature. “Madness Returns” has an absolutely wild art direction by artists who were given completely free rein, along with a dense atmosphere that at times sends chills down your spine. On top of that, the whole concept is quite interesting — Wonderland as the world of Alice's subconscious, into which something external intrudes and begins destroying it. The narrative jumps between two realities, and we understand why the heroine prefers the second one: the contrast between the suffocating real world of 19th-century London, with its soot, filth, crime, vices… and the pure world of fantasy at the beginning is striking. But the gameplay itself and the level design range from moderately interesting to extremely boring. And it's hard to overlook that, no matter how much you'd like to.

There are only six chapters/worlds in the game, and they are quite diverse. Alice finds herself in the esoteric Oriental Grove, then makes her way to playing cards among serene clouds, and from there to the disgusting domain of the Queen of Hearts… but everywhere there are corridors, corridors, corridors. Repetitive puzzles like sliding-tile puzzles (five times during the game!), platforming for the sake of relatively insignificant secrets, navigation that isn't always intuitive, and level design that becomes tiring in places. No, it's interesting to look at all of this, even despite the very poorly aged graphics on Unreal Engine 3. But it really is too drawn out.

A full playthrough took me 14.5 hours — and I didn't even collect all the secrets (I completed 93%). The game could definitely have been a third shorter and noticeably more varied. Especially considering its rather meager plot, delivered through hand-drawn cutscenes (McGee's team had apparently run out of money and time for 3D graphics) and fragments of “memories” scattered here and there.

The core gameplay mechanics, however, aren't bad. Alice is more than capable of defending herself: by the end, she has an entire arsenal consisting of the Vorpal Blade, the Duchess's Pepper Grinder machine gun, the Hobby Horse (hello, hobby-horsers), and the Teapot, which can spit out bombs. The ugly, rot-infested creatures with the faces of eyeless dolls won't know what hit them! But even if there are too many of them, Alice can enter a state of Hysteria, and then it's best to stay away from the girl with her loose hair and bloody tears: she'll send them to their ancestors in no time.

Interestingly, all of this plays noticeably more comfortably on a gamepad than on keyboard and mouse. I had almost no moments when the heroine missed platforms and dissolved into butterflies (although who am I kidding, there were plenty of those moments — damn timed challenges!).

The controls are responsive enough to let you react in time and correct a mistake. The camera, though, behaves like an idiot during combat if enemy lock-on is enabled and Alice gets cornered, but it's not that terrible. Playing on Easy is quite comfortable — why torture yourself in a game when ordinary life does a perfectly good job of that?

The visuals… sigh.
The lighting is flat, the textures are blurry, and the shaders sometimes look nowhere near as cool as they presumably should. UE4 came out later, but damn, I stubbornly refuse to believe that more couldn't have been squeezed out of UE3. The graphics ruin the game and the artists' work, can you imagine that?..

A current tip for dealing with this: if you have an Nvidia 5000-series graphics card and don't mind doing a little tinkering, install DLSS 5.0 and play around with the settings.

RTX Remix doesn't work well with “Alice” (I tried it; the textures glitch out), but the new neural filter instantly updates the visuals so that it looks as if EA finally decided to splurge on a remake. If you don't have the hardware capability, try good old Reshade instead; it's very easy to install and configure. If you enable Ambient Occlusion and SSR (Screen-Space Reflections), it looks almost like ray tracing, and is more pleasant than the original. But of course, that's subjective.

The music and, perhaps, the voice acting in the game aren't exactly great (the composer of the first game barely worked on the second one), but the main theme is quite memorable. That's about all that can be said.

The sound effects work better: the roar of gunfire sounds satisfyingly textured, while the howls of the slime-like monsters are especially good when you knock their heads off with a toy horse whose eyes are burning with the fury of its owner. You don't mess around with Alice!

Is it worth spending your time on this game now?
How should I put it.

Watch the video. Admire the juicy and gorgeous promotional screenshots. Browse through fan art. Finally, find the artbook “The Art Of Alice: Madness Returns” — it's gorgeous.

But the game itself, unfortunately, isn't.

Don't look for modern polish, variety in gameplay situations, or the dynamism of a carefully designed and expensive entertainment product. Prepare yourself for it to toss you around, the way life tossed around a hardened girl with a murderous stare and a tattooed big cat with a huge grin at her feet. Accept that there will be more corridors, keyholes, and damn invisible platforms in the game than interesting enemies that are fun to hack to pieces.

But at the same time, it will also contain a strange, broken world seen through the eyes of a person struggling with their own darkness and searching for healing. A mad, bold, and, in the best sense of the word, sick work by dozens of artists, many of whose ideas never even made it into the game (thanks, EA!). Imagery and caricature that continue Carroll's own ideas, as if he had gotten hooked on opium and Nietzscheanism.

The rabbit hole of depression and self-destruction turned out to be far deeper than Alice thought
But she also turned out to be sturdier than Humpty Dumpty.

All the king's horses, all the king's men
Let them just try to stand in her way.

Rating: 6.8/10, a great idea, a weak game, a gorgeous visual style, an engine that was already outdated in the year of release… a mass of contradictions, which, however, is precisely what true art consists of.

Ready to jump down the rabbit hole?

P.S. A cool feature: in each of the worlds, Alice has a different dress. And if you don't like one of them visually, you can switch it in the settings to a bonus outfit with a specific enhancement: for example, the “flesh” dress lets you enter Hysteria at any moment, while the butterfly costume lets you use the magic sense without having to shrink yourself in the style of the “Drink Me” bottle. What imaginations these people have.