Alice: The Madness Returns does a lot right, but it ultimately falls victim to its own insecurities.
The Madness Returns sees the player take control of one of the most famous characters in English folklore, Alice from Alice in Wonderland. The story of Alice has always been a fairly dark one from a literary standpoint, but just so we're clear: don't expect a kid friendly, playful romp through the fabled realm of Wonderland. Developer Spicy Horse has opted to use an extremely dark but wonderfully unique version of the fairy tale that actually managed to disturb me, a hardened gamer, more than I'd like to admit. In this retelling of the classic story, Alice actually suffers from severe psychopathic episodes brought on by her involvement in the deaths of her family members. The opening cutscene highlights this psychopathy nicely, featuring a slickly stylized but still unsettling cinematic that culminates in Alice having her face torn off by her hallucinations. Alice's madness is obviously the centerpiece of the game and Spicy Horse does a great job of developing it over the course of the story. Early on, the distinction between reality and Wonderland is stark and obvious, but by about the halfway point you'll probably be wondering what's real and what's just in Alice's head. Moreover, Alice's hallucinations change based on where she is in reality, so the environments and enemies that you encounter throughout her journey can be used to interpret her mental state as well as her character itself. This kind of subtle, indirect character development is nothing short of brilliant, and I found myself being consistently impressed with how well The Madness Returns molded each area of the game around Alice's character.
The story picks up immediately after the events of the first Alice game, and unfortunately if you haven't played that title you may have some difficulty in deciphering what is going a lot of the time. The good news is that the first game is actually included as either a free or relatively cheap DLC (depending on how you acquired The Madness Returns), though I can't make any statements about its quality as I haven't played it myself. I can say with certainty that if you want to get the most out of the story in The Madness Returns, you will want to familiarize yourself with the original game. The story essentially deals with Alice coping with her psychosis while attempting to save Wonderland-a physical representation of her own mind-from a malicious force. She encounters all of the characters that one would expect to make an appearance in a title based on Alice in Wonderland, though I once again have to warn you that they are unlikely to fit with your childhood perceptions and may thus cause severe emotional trauma if you aren't prepared for the twisted and sometimes frightening representations that Spicy Horse has cooked up for the game. I won't spoil too much here, but suffice it to say that you would not want your little ones to see many of these warped creatures and you may even find yourself feeling a little queasy from time to time when dealing with certain characters.
Spicy Horse's dark, disturbing take on the Alice universe is made all the more unnerving by some downright haunting art design. As I've already mentioned, the characters are almost always twisted in ugly ways, but you will also frequently come across smaller, equally disturbing tidbits that keep the tone of the game dark and oppressive. I once came across a statue of Alice with black tar pouring from her eyes instead of tears, a scene that was highly reminiscent of something out of The Grudge or The Ring. Later in the game, I stumbled across a room in which the cutely cartoony fish residents of an underwater city had been butchered, gutted, and even crucified for my viewing pleasure. Watching Alice slosh through ankle-deep blood while surrounded by mutilated cartoon corpses was enough to make my skin crawl, and that was far from the worst the game had to offer.
Even the environments play with your sensibilities, and I found myself shaken when I was placed in an underwater area at the bottom of the ocean in which Alice could breathe, speak, and act normally despite being completely submerged. This and a few other areas really stretched my ability to suspend my disbelief to the breaking point, and although I hated that feeling to begin with I eventually realized that it was probably done deliberately to help keep me off balance. Nearly every aspect of the word is warped and twisted in a way that was clearly designed to make the player uneasy, and as a result The Madness Returns can be an extremely unsettling game to play. This isn't a bad thing, though, as the dark artistic direction and disturbing imagery are really what makes this title so memorable.
Sadly, the fantastically unique art direction isn't supported by a convincing graphical engine. Many of the textures in The Madness Returns are horribly low-res, muddled messes that look as if they were stretched to cover surfaces that were clearly too big for them. The game is also rife with graphical glitches and hiccups, and I noted several instances of weapons becoming stuck in Alice's character model instead of being stored properly as well as more than a few substantial frame drops in certain areas. The lighting is also sub-par at this stage of the generation, and there are multiple areas that simply lose much of the impact they could have had due to the lack of a decent lighting engine. None of the environments look bad, per se, but many of them seem unpolished from a graphical standpoint and really could have been enhanced by a little more visual tuning. It's a good thing that the character models look as good and unique as they do, because it is usually they and they alone that preserve the feeling of uniqueness and wonder that the game rests its value upon. Alice's character in particular looks awesome and sports a distinctly Tim Burton feel, and the enemies that she'll face over the course of the game are also superbly designed and sometimes just plain creepy (just wait until the first time you meet a Ruin), though they can sometimes be found a little lacking in the variety department.
The twisted nature of The Madness Returns is even preserved in its gameplay mechanics. In the main reality hub, Alice is much like any normal (albeit psychotic) girl her age. She can't really jump, she has no weapons or combat abilities, and she's generally at the whim of those around her in terms of where she can and cannot go. When she is in Wonderland, however, Alice becomes a hardcore killing machine complete with a blood spattered apron and several weapons that are quite a bit nastier than one would expect in a platformer including a cleaver, machine gun (known here as the pepper grinder), and a ticking bomb. The Madness Returns' combat is actually my favorite part of the game, and it's shockingly deep for a title in this genre. Alice can dodge, strafe, and string together multi-weapon combos- a must if you want to defeat the many enemies that require orchestrated approaches with multiple weapons to bring down. All of the weapons in The Madness Returns can also be upgraded by spending the teeth (weird, I know) that Alice collects during her journey, making the weapons more effective while also enhancing their appearance. The relatively deep combat and upgrade systems lend the game a pleasant RPG lite feel and provides a good incentive to continue pressing on for that next upgrade. There are a few hitches that come along with the combat system like the fact that melee attacks force Alice to move forward on the game's frequently small platforms or a little clumsiness when it comes to selecting and using the pepper grinder, but for the most part The Madness Returns' fighting is highly enjoyable.
Alice can also jump pretty impressively when she's in Wonderland, and she's able to make her to some seemingly out of reach places with ease through the use of triple jumps and glides. The platforming in the Madness Returns is actually remarkably enjoyable and familiar, and if you've had any experience in any other platformer you'll likely feel right at home here. The distance jumps can sometimes be a little difficult to judge and the whole system has a little bit of a floaty feel to it, but it didn't take me long to adjust and settle into the rhythm if the game. As an added bonus, some of the levels are actually downright intricate in terms of their design, and it isn't uncommon to come across an elaborate platforming puzzle that takes a half hour or more to pick your way through.
There are a couple of major annoyances that come packaged with the generally acceptable platforming, however. The most noticeable of these is the wildly schizoid camera. I frequently had the camera pan to within inches of Alice's face or backside while attempting to make a difficult jump, which of course led to some irritating deaths. Camera issues have always plagued the platforming genre, but they are unfortunately more noticeable here than usual. There is also the issue of invisible platforms that Alice must enter "shrunk vision" to see. This involves her shrinking down to a fraction of her size- a mechanic that allows her to reach some hidden areas, but has a fatal flaw: Alice cannot jump while shrunk. The invisible platforms quickly fade from vision once Alice re-enters her normal vision mode, meaning that you will frequently have to do a bizarre and frustrating dance of shrink, jump, shrink, jump to cross certain areas of the world. Spicy Horse could have eliminated this problem by allowing Alice to jump while shrunk or by simply making the invisible platforms stay visible for longer after exiting shrunk vision, but as it stands now the system is more of an annoyance than a fun innovation.
The issues with the Madness Returns don't stop there, either. As I mentioned earlier, the game's biggest issue seems to be its own insecurity. Spicy Horse had a solid package on their hands between the excellent art design, enjoyable combat, and solid platforming experience, but they appear to have felt like they just hadn't done enough to succeed. This resulted in two follies that I have seen far too often recently: the string-out tactic and the kitchen sink approach.
We'll deal with the string-out problem first. In the interest of variety, Alice includes a number of different hubs focused on solving different types of puzzles. Unfortunately for Alice, these hubs tend to be obnoxiously repetitive due to a clear-area-return-to-hub-multiple-times design style, and some of them are so long that I was just plain bored by the time I was able to move on. As an example, a hub in the later stages of the underwater area of Wonderland has Alice rescuing the ghosts of some lost sailors from an underwater crypt, an undertaking that involves half a dozen excursions into more or less exactly the same area and all culminating with the same mini-boss fight. This kind of rinse and repeat gameplay seems to serve little purpose other than to drag out the length of the game, and the end experience winds up being one that can't seem to properly deal with its pacing and far outstays its welcome. In my experience, 10 hours for a platformer of this type is more than enough to satisfy my needs. When I crossed the 8 hour mark in The Madness Returns, however, I was barely over halfway through the game. There just isn't enough depth in the title to justify a near 15 hour playtime, and the game begins to drag heavily as the story progresses, a problem that will likely turn off many players. Making a game too long for its genre is every bit as detrimental to an experience as making a game too short, but Spicy Horse seems to have fallen for the "longer is better" fallacy that plagues many games today.
On to the kitchen sink issue, then. As I mentioned earlier, most of the hubs in The Madness Returns revolve around some kind of central puzzle. Some of these are simple and work fairly well, such as an early hub that involves collecting limbs to reassemble the Mad Hatter, but others venture way too far off the path of what Alice does best: platforming. One hub has the player shuffling puzzle pieces that Alice has to collect until they match a certain picture while another involves a shockingly unnecessary Guitar Hero-style music mini-game. These kinds of novelties have no place in a game like The Madness Returns, and they serve no real purpose other than to provide unneeded variety and break down the pace and rhythym of the fun parts of the game. Beyond that, Spicy Horse has inexplicably decided to include a couple of 2D, side-scrolling vehicle segments that rip the player right out of the experience and essentially slap them in the face just in case they were starting to get immersed in the flow of the game. The developers seem not to have recognized their own design strengths and weaknesses here, and their apparent worry about the game's variety has wound up making The Madness Returns feel out of touch with its own identity as a platformer, weakening the experience overall.
When all is said and done, Alice: The Madness Returns falls well short of the gaming greatness it could have achieved. The platforming is solid if occasionally flawed by some questionable design, the combat is unexpectedly deep and enjoyable, and the art direction and vision underlying the title is top-notch, but the developer's attempts to address their complex about the experience being too short or not varied enough bogs the game down in a big way. There is enough enjoyable material in The Madness Returns to make it worth your while if you enjoy platforming or unique art design, but its problems are too substantial for me to recommend a purchase regardless of your taste in games. I say rent it.