[img]1313|left|||no_popup[/img]It’s been ten years since veteran game designer American McGee and his team presented to the gaming community a memorably gothic and harrowing vision of Alice in Wonderland. The sequel to Lewis Carroll’s books, simply titled American McGee’s Alice, posited the young heroine as the sole survivor of a fire that consumed both home and family, leaving her little more than a catatonic asylum patient. Unresponsive to treatment and the often tortuous efforts of psychiatric staff to rouse her, her only way out was in, through a Wonderland deformed by her own damaged psyche. Familiar but altered characters populated a world of death and insanity presided over by the corrosive Queen of Hearts: a punk-rock Cheshire Cat, a wistful Mock Turtle, a mechanical Mad Hatter, a cannibalistic Duchess, and many others. A few were allies, many were antagonists, and the whole menagerie could be slotted into the psychological allegory of a confrontation with tragedy and survivor’s guilt.

Though the gameplay was, in itself, mostly run-of-the-mill (yet still fun) platform jumping and combat, the way in which Alice delivered the gaming experience justly earned it a delightfully obsessive cult status. Unusual weapons such as toy jacks in addition to the necessary vorpal blade certainly played a part, but it was the detailed and imaginative reinvention of Wonderland and its characters that made all the difference in a uniquely told story. Gone was the innocuous blonde-haired girl with a summery blue-and-white dress and a penchant for attracting the whimsical. In her place, a dark gothic beauty with a blue, white, and bloodied dress, and a steely resolve to fight her way through Wonderland and, eventually, peace of mind.

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But as the recent and long-awaited sequel makes clear, peace of mind has proven short-lived. Alice: Madness Returns finds our grey as gruel Alice working in a dreary orphanage while undergoing treatment by a psychiatrist with the magnificent name of Angus Bumby. Already, in the introductory animation, we know something isn’t right. The hypnotic exhortation to forget the bad memories instead of confronting them reeks of, if not quackery, than some sort of barbarism. And the point is nailed into place given that the game’s Dickensian vision of a poverty-stricken London inner city District – Whitechapel, as it happens, although the sinister association is thankfully never consummated – appropriately reflects this questionable doctor and his grim home for children afflicted with grime both spiritual and physical.

The game proper begins as Alice follows a white cat through a Whitechapel lovingly rendered in a blend of realism and the style of old caricatures and pulp magazines. Her impulsive pursuit leads to the blurring of outer reality and inner psyche, a return to Wonderland that far surpasses the already impressive original game in artistic ambition, accomplishment, and astonishment. Allegorically, of course, the return indicates unfinished business – suppressed truth – and the elliptical but hard-hitting story finds Alice gradually reconstructing her memory in a process rife with raw, bloody emotion. The conceptual framework for the levels, another dimension of the game’s astonishing artistry, is as fine an example of psychological excavation as any you’ll find in video games or other media. Beginning with the idyllic Vale of Tears, the game steadily trades Wonderland’s natural beauty for the oppression of industry and the desolation of decay. The initial romp through the Vale’s forest hints at what is to come, as Alice is introduced to the oily, oozing menace of the Ruin infecting all of Wonderland. This sign of disintegration, manifested as dangerous blob-like creatures with porcelain doll faces, is soon reinforced by the increasingly destructive influence of the Infernal Train, a ghastly machine whose fiery locomotive and carriages are engineered with the architecture of gothic cathedrals.

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Where the first game saw Wonderland oppressed by the Red Queen, with Alice tasked with overthrowing the tyrant and restoring freedom, Madness Returns pits Alice against an apocalyptic scenario that sees each chapter of the game bringing her closer to Wonderland’s end. Each chapter mirrors, within itself, the escalating mood of horror that defines the game’s overall trajectory, giving symbolic form to Alice resistant journey towards the truth. In the Queen of Hearts palace, for example, the mournful stone ruins of the outer castle gradually give way to monstrously visceral structures of flesh at the center of which is the malignant, tentacle-laden child Queen. In arguably the game’s creepiest and most unnerving chapter, Alice’s venture into the ruins of a surreal, brightly coloured dollhouse city eventually gives way to an underground styled from a Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson video, giving visual shape to the corrosion of childhood innocence.

Curiously, Wonderland is depopulated in comparison to Alice’s previous visit. Where our heroine once encountered gnomes, chess pieces, and twisted versions of Wonderland’s key characters, she now faces a land devoid of life except for enemies and the occasional, distantly-glimpsed creature. Only two chapters offer a semblance of population, albeit of a variety more gruesomely oppressed then the Gnomes under the Red Queen in American McGee’s Alice: the underwater realm of Chapter 2, with its ghost sailors, Victorian fish-people, and oyster starlets; and Chapter 3’s Mysterious East domain with origami ants and grasshoppers besieged by vicious samurai Wasps. The character of a Wonderland deprived even of the relative normalcy that accompanied, in the first game, two forces arrayed against each other in a civil war, is extraordinarily eerie. When major characters do appear, their presence becomes all the more significant.

Especially interesting is how the characters appear in relation to their previous roles in Alice. The March Hare and Dormouse, once subject to the Mad Hatter’s cruel experiments in cybernetic surgery, return as new masters of the Hatter’s industrial empire and outright villains. For his part, the Mad Hatter – defeated by Alice in her previous visit – is a disassembled wreck overthrown by his former victims. The Queen of Hearts, also defeated, returns in a diminished but still potent capacity, slowly dying of bitterness in the heart of her ruined palace. Invariably, these former antagonists are none too friendly but for the fact that Alice is their only hope to save Wonderland from destruction. In allegorical terms, they serve to push and prod Alice towards the truth, often bluntly and without much kindness or sympathy. And the good news is that not all characters seethe with barely contained malignance. Caterpillar returns, oracular and kindly as ever, and the Cheshire Cat once again offers his companionship and guidance to Alice, however cryptic and occasionally disparaging. Even the Duchess from the previous game makes an appearance in a small, friendly role, humbled by her defeat and dedicated, not to eating Alice, but to perfecting her pig snout stew.

Continued in Part 2…

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Mr. Sisa, Assistant Editor of thefrontpageonline.com,  may be contacted at fsisa@thefrontpageonline.com
 
His blog: www.inkandashes.net
 
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