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I really, really enjoyed Alice: The Madness Returns.

Trust me, I’m as shocked as you are. I watched the quick look and it looked visually interesting, at least. It also got decent reviews. I figured I might as well rent and try it. That’s what Gamefly is for, right? When I got hooked on it, though, I was shocked, but I enjoyed the whole game, really. Alice isn’t going to be Game of the Year or anything, but if you like 3D platforming, this is really quite a fun time.

The plot is that basically, Alice is seeing an odd doctor to attempt to make her forget the death of her family. However, the treatment seems to be having ill consequences: Wonderland is being destroyed as her memories are wiped clean. Alice, tired of this bullshit after seeing what this process is doing to her Wonderland, sets out to recover her lost memories and save Wonderland from the Demon Train thing that’s tearing it apart.

Most of the game is platforming, but it’s not frustrating at all. Alice is incredibly mobile. She has basically a quadruple jump, and you can hold down the jump button to do a Princess Peach Float in between the first three jumps. This lets you save yourself from jump miscalculations most of the time, and for when you don’t, the game has really good checkpoints that keep you from losing too much progress. You’ll also find little secrets, like shards of memory, hidden about behind breakable walls or secret passages you must shrink to get into. Par for the course for this genre, certainly, but the shards of memory are really interesting! There is another collectable, bottles, that don’t do anything, and any time I found one of them, instead of a memory shard, I was pretty displeased. I guess they just didn’t have enough voice overs recorded to make them all memory shards? It’s a shame. There are also little challenge rooms you can find that give you Rose Paint, the game’s version of a piece of heart, if you complete the challenge. This challenge can be anything from a “survive waves of enemies” challenge, a harder version of a minigame you played in the game, or a riddle. Honestly, I wish more of them would have been riddles. It fits the whole Wonderland thing better, and the riddles they did have were pretty cute.

Other than the platforming, there is combat, which is really well done. It is really skill-based, and while I set it on Easy, which I believe just made every enemy drop tons of health which was fine by me, I still had to learn it and figure out what I was doing to succeed. You really have to prioritize enemy targets and figure out who in a group to take out first. You also have to learn when to dodge and when to attack, and what weapon works best on what enemy. It’s fast-paced, enemies don’t seem to be damage sponges in general, and it’s a lot of fun.
The weapons are also pretty cool. You have the Vorpal Blade, a bloody knife that is your quick melee. You have the Hobby Horse, my favorite, which is this gigantic horse head on a stick that you slam to the ground hard, and is your heavy melee. It is incredibly satisfying. Alice wields it in a completely badass way, and it makes satisfying noises as you smash people with it. You have the Pepper Grinder, which is basically a machine gun, only it works on a cooldown and doesn’t have ammo. The last weapon is the Teapot Cannon, which is kind of a grenade launcher that requires charging, so it takes awhile to fire, but can be good at taking out enemies with multiple weak points or a group of weak enemies. While I found myself using the Hobby Horse and Pepper Grinder for most situations, all weapons had a place and they were all useful.

The game is both polished and not. The game is fairly long, and every room has brand new horrors and oddities to look at. They do a good job of showing a descent into bad stuff in most areas, with them starting tame, but a little off-putting, and then ending with them being flat-out creepy by the time you’re done with an area. I even took some bad cell phone shots of some of the statues, because I was so impressed with how they looked. Also, because they were naked lady bugs.
In addition, the music is fucking FANTASTIC. It is very low key and just there to create ambiance, and it doesn’t really get very busy. But it sets the creepy tone perfectly. For example, listen to the fight theme. I love this. You’ve got the evil ruin she’s fighting with the war drums, feeling very sinister, but on top you have these bells, kind of innocent and light, representing Alice herself. Love it.
At the same time, there are parts where the game is a bit buggy or off. I kept bumping into tiny invisible walls on things like stairs, so I had to jump up them instead of just walk up them. There seems to be a glitch with the Teapot Cannon that freezes you in place sometimes after using it. You can fix things by jumping, but it is a bit annoying in combat. Many of the minigames seem a bit odd and out of place. There are several Guitar Hero-like sequences for no reason I can discern which feel very pasted into the game, for example. The doll-head-roll minigame near the end of the game is particularly odd in it’s inclusion, and is, unfortunately, really frustrating to do. That part of the game probably frustrated me more than all the rest combined. There was also only one boss fight, at the end of the game, which is odd, because it seems like there were several parts that were SUPPOSED to be boss fights, but the area would just end. As I said, oddly rough in some parts, but it didn’t ruin the game overall for me at all.

Finally, the plot is not particularly subtle. But frankly, I like that. I feel if the game was trying to go super deep with metaphor and shit, it would have felt very fake, forced, and “Look How Clever I Am.” It’s all in front of you, and somehow, that makes it more fun. There are clear relationships between Wonderland and the real world as you see it, and even Alice knows that Wonderland is a level of escapism that helps her cope and deal with the world, because there she is powerful. I figured the game would fizzle out at the ending, but it didn’t. Alice wins and solves her problems both in Wonderland and the real world in a very satisfying and believable way.

I highly recommend Alice as a rental or bargain bin purchase if you can stomach platformers at all. I never expected American McGee to make a good game, but this is quite a solid product that’s worth your time. I found it really worth mine.