Manic Pixie Dream Worlds: A Critique of American McGee's Alice Games

[Music] Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the story of a young girl who crawls into another world one of imagination in chaos with only her unflappable cool temperament to help her navigate sense from nonsense it's a novel formalized out of a story Lewis Carroll was telling the kids of some university friends of his the littles during a boat outing the littles daughter was named Alice so he starts spinning this yarn that does get quite away from him by the end of things though Carol would later say the Alice in the boat that day isn't exactly the Alice in the books this was where the story started the incredibly strong personality of the Alice in the books was in no small part due to his reported fascination with the Alice little in real life there is some stuff that I'd like to get out of the way about that it's a matter of debate whether carol was inappropriate with that obsession it's certainly uncomfortable in retrospect here in our slightly less naive era Carol would do things in his professional life like say take naked photos of kids but with their parents present as observers of a supposedly common thing for that time some argue that this sort of portraiture was relatively mainstream so that doesn't prove anything but others pair that behavior which it would be extremely generous to call a red flag with a falling out he had with little family to suggest that there was something predatory in his fascination with Alice little I'm in the camper I think writing novels about how amazing you think your friend's kid is is the extreme least suspiciously obsessive and off-putting ly personal the result of this weird by most accounts platonic relationship is one of the most recognizable children's stories of all time it's the basis for some of the most enduringly strange imagery in all of children's media at its root though for the Alice in Wonderland stories is the jittery contradiction of Carroll's perspective this is a story about a young girl's bravery tenacity and imaginative spirit written by an older man largely projecting a lot of those qualities onto her it's an idea of a girl unfailingly polite deferential and absurd circumstances clever resourceful when needed always charming and it never slow it's a particular archetype or sometimes stereotyped a feminine strength that it's easy to recognize today it's just that these days the men writing those sorts of women usually higher than 10 or 12 years old today you'd find that combination of traits and someone like Ramona flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. the world this feminine cliche of a flawlessly clever infinitely energetic casually eccentric waif who bounces into a person's life and subverts their sense of stability and reality is called the Manic Pixie dream girl the foundation of most of the criticism directed at the archetype is that usually the Manic Pixie dream girl is much more reflective of the author's idealized concept of a woman than it reflects the actual lived experience of most women Zooey Deschanel perhaps excluded Alice in Wonderland Media has never been able to escape the kind of contradictions in perspective that are built into its foundations most straightforward adaptations never bother addressing Carroll's perspective at all and I don't really blame them because the implications are a little gross and uncomfortable and the Alice stories are kids books there's one particularly notable exception to the rule though in the year 2000 a game developer who built his reputation on being one of the greatest level designers to work on doom to quake and quake 2 announced a solo project he was going to be making instead of a first-person shooter a third-person platformer exclusively for the PC and he was going to be basing it on Alice in Wonderland it would take a pairing of creator and subject this fundamentally contradictory to finally interpret the source material in a way that meaningfully brought those deeper older contradictions to the surface and American McGee would do it all without sacrificing the grindhouse Gore that had become his signature at it this game is American McGee's Alice it's easy to miss but the first thing the adaptation does is swap Alice's the protagonist of the game is a fictionalized Alice little not just the holy fictional protagonist of Adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass that Alice is still canonical but only as how little sees herself in her imagination and the opening cinematic Alice's at home surrounded by books those books and wooden clocks all fine and beautiful things that share a suspicious flammability her cat knocks over a lamp fire spreads and her family screams from downstairs years later and alice has been on Sibley catatonic in an asylum ever since she's in her teens now but a nurse brings her an old doll her old White Rabbit and that is where the killing begins the most important shift here is not in tone though it's in frame the symbols and references aren't from an older man trying to endear himself to a child pulling details from their limited frame of reference this story is completely introverted Alice has lost everything that ever mattered to her and she thinks it's her fault when it isn't working those feelings through in the context of a literal struggle is the arc of the game's story while that seems straightforward enough in today's market keep in mind that this was 2000 when evil corporations with cyborgs were typically the primary villain of a given action game more than that action games typically followed a Macho Man aesthetic from the low-key doom guy who's bruised Green is forever etched into a generations collective memory duke nukem is instantly recognizable voice and style of one-liners to the great mass of grim soldiers who to this day grace the box art of games with the same pattern of stubble attitude and automatic rifles there's plenty of great exceptions to this like no one lives forever skate Archer but the trend unequivocally did not point in the direction of pairing doom style supernatural grit with a teenage girls journey to the center of her psyche what makes American McGee's Alice stand out so much from even other women led action games like Tomb Raider was this internal frame Tomb Raider is not exactly about Lara Croft it's about pushing bricks and navigating mazes it's about exotic ism and using Lara's femininity to enhance that exotic system for a mostly male audience with Alice there really isn't anything remotely sexualized about it and the extremes being explored are the extremes of image and emotion anguish and grief manifesting as contorted horrifying versions of once familiar things on the surface some of the symbolism is so on the nose and simple and some of the images so self-indulgent ly gross and excessive that you might think the game is being edgy for the sake of being edgy but I don't feel like that's the case here the way American McGee's subverts the iconography of Alice in Wonderland also subverts the predatory aspect of the original work this is not a story being told by a grown man to a child it's a story about a wounded woman whose narrative is her own control as active media Alice the protagonist is responsible for her own success or failure adjudicated by your mechanical efforts as the player but most of all what is subverted is this idealized image of femininity like all humans she has regret and grief and rage and sometimes those emotions are overwhelmingly ugly the Alice in the game embraces the disturbing and the weird approaching the grotesque with the same wit and charm that she approached the merely whimsical back in the original books after all there's nothing in this Wonderland that wasn't part of her to begin with the tonal hinge that lets the game swing from disgusting to delightful a twill is certainly the way the game's voice acting continues the Alice in Wonderland tradition of being casual and low-key with every escalating absurdity when Alice returns to Wonderland the first creature she meets is an emaciated runic Cheshire cat instead of a grand reunion with a long exposition she just looks at him and says with an almost listless effect you've grown quite mangy cat but he grins at comfort and then the cat gives her some back sass and then a little bit of cryptic advice and off you go the minimalism of the moment the casual way alice is run so counter to the loud and colorful art style it's not cartoon colorful like a Disney Alice at all but instead the more familiar in shooter palette of melancholy industrial earth tones with pops of red and neon her attitude and her personality establish a strong continuity with the Alice that we all grew up with and provides a strong foundation for twisting the whole rest of the world into strange and unrecognizable shapes more Alice's perpetual matter-of-factness and mannered impatience with the obstacles in her ways help sell the surrealism so much more than if the script had drawn constant attention to the weirdness of what's going on you cannot turn to Alice for a sympathetic reaction in fact the bloodiest strangest things don't seem to strike her as weird at all it not only gives the world more credibility it lightly gaslights the player into feeling alone and recognising how bizarre and dire things are the stakes feel higher this way because if Alice really does come to accept that this is the Wonderland her mental landscape has come to be well she's gonna rot in that hospital room for the rest of her life many of Alice's old friends from her childhood adventures like the mock turtle or the white rabbit are scattered around in various states of mental and physical decay once she meets them again she acts as if it's just been a short while since they last met and just sort of picks up the relationships where they left off she isn't even always kind to them the moment in the game that always stayed with me the most is surely when Alice finds the March Hare and dormouse they've been hacked up and grafted onto clockwork parts they are disoriented and depressed all they still really care about is tea time but all that seems so distant to them now any other game or interpretation of Alice would have her bursting into tears but instead she demands that Dormouse confess his crimes because surely if this is how they've ended up this is what they deserve on the broader level that's what the fight against the Queen of Hearts is about if this is how Alice ended up if this is how her Wonderland is catatonic and alone and barren is it not then what she somehow deserved as well wasn't she responsible for the fire she can blame the Hatter but it's Alice who really did this to her own companions in the first place as they simply reflect her own guilt back to her of course she doesn't express surprise or sympathy this is how she's felt for years that's what I mean about the frame being subversive in so many different ways because this is a game almost entirely without heroes and or villains in a traditional way Alice the way you player in the game is just a whirlwind of destruction there's nothing but she can't eventually slash stab smash shooter blow up the Queen may rule Wonderland may be in shambles but Alice's fight is infinite infinite and unproductive forgiveness could heal but Alice doesn't want to forgive she wants to fight herself she wants to hurt herself so long as she uses her knife as a compass there's nothing to help getting more and more lost in the Red Queen's maze American McGee's Alice keeps the tone of the story elements consistently affectingly melancholy so the game is able to incorporate elements that are more straightforwardly fun without NASA's causing friction by making their design as freewheeling Lima cob as possible well Alice's main weapon is a kitchen knife she eventually rounds out her Arsenal with a wide array of toy based weapons a croquet mallet is obvious but a hidden blunderbuss that functions like a low-tech version of the redeemer from Unreal Tournament does come as a delightful late-game surprise there's a ball and tax weapon that does continuous damage an ice wand that's basically a color swapped flamethrower for all intents and purposes and a deck of cards that works like a machine gun or a shotgun all kinds of weapons that Phil familiar first-person shooter arsenal rolls but operate in whimsical or colorful ways American McGee's stated object was to make a game that wasn't about Space Marines for once and the way he's playful with the tropes of action design runs in parallel with the way as he subverts the imagery and characters of the Alice in Wonderland setting the third-person frame does better than first-person at establishing a mechanical personality for the game Alice is small and the environments are large and winding that sense of scale of being dwarfed even by small things like when you were a kid comes through best when you can actually see Alice in relationship to the environment first-person is sometimes better for picking up on environmental detail but the way the quake 3 engine is used here is mostly to paint pictures and broad strokes big architectural flourishes and clever sky boxes that further distort logic and proportion the only drawback is that Alice's movements feel slightly floaty and disconnected from the environment few of the weapons have much heft to them when fired and although the effects are entertaining none of them have the satisfying chunkiness of the weapons from doom or quake add to this a strange lock-on feature for some of the ranged weapons and you get a PC platformer that still kinda feels like a console port as creative clever and daring as the level design often is the way you actually navigate the level fails to cement the player within that world away the themes and artwork do that doesn't necessarily mean the game isn't fun to play it frequently is but when compared to the second Alice game particularly this hazily disconnected movement emerges as the clearest weak link in the experience it's fiddly Ness and jank is like a diagonal opposite from tomb-raiders fiddling missin jank interestingly enough where our tomb-raiders controls were much more and Lara's movement felt much more concretely grounded in the world that world also demanded a high level of focus and control over those movements a wrong step was often fatal dand surprisingly easy to do by simply forgetting to hold down the walk button or some other simple confusion Alice by contrast is surprisingly forgiving in all of its platforming elements but at the expense of feeling a little like a leaf blown about by gusts produced by the movement Keys the floating feeling doesn't conflict with the feeling of imaginative unreality but it doesn't enhance it either without texture without weight the combat and navigation also lack a grit in the way that the game kind of means them too luckily the game's art design is such a riot of creativity that any weightlessness or lack of grid in the game feel is made up for by the heft and verb of just the overall atmosphere the sequence of levels mirrors Alice's path back to consciousness starting from the childhood she remembers through impressions of the asylum she's only been dimly aware of finally towards confrontations with her guilt and her self-hatred the Jabberwock and the Queen of Hearts respectively the art style here is what sells it all so well what keeps it consistent and grounded despite being a non reliable dreamscape of an environment it takes that doom color palette adds just a few more brighter pops of color like Alice's dress throws in a little more sickly neon now and then it takes the grotesquerie of quake 2 like with how the straw cyborg army was forged from angry unwilling the flesh and grafted onto rusted steel but it drops both the right angles of the level design and the anonymous masculinity of the space marine perspective in choosing a feminine protagonist and extending that femininity into the structural design construction levels explicitly as her mental landscapes it immediately distinguishes itself as something more than a simple shift from first to third person camera now I'm not bashing quake 2 at all it's a brilliant and groundbreaking shooter but Alice was explicitly a reaction to some of quake 2 zone tropes and assumptions about tone pacing and perspective from one of its own developers in that deliberate pulling away found a lot of undiscovered country creatively speaking like the first major area that I was visits after the introduction it's a maze of portals in a swirling chaos where giant doorway is open and closed that let bits of the level pass through where everything is crumble I'm sure it's anxiety and confusion personified as a platforming sequence the tricks of scale that the game is using in this sequence to disorient and suggest a whirling limbo or effective and surprising some of these elements like the walkway is appearing from below trick are by now a design cliche of their own but at the time it was pretty novel and even now it's still artistically cohesive even if it may have lost some of the sense of originality at the end of the short jaunt through the chaotic ether is one of the last places that Alice really remembers being school as a child the engaging thing about the school sequence is how it's cartoonish nasteria lessness of its violence and gore contrasted to the seriousness of what Alice's feeling all make it seem off-putting ly childish in a way that actually makes it much creepier than it had been more aggressively dark Alice has outgrown this place mentally and emotionally but she's trapped here now and it's all quite hostile and deadly there are clockwork children all bug-eyed and weird who never attack Alice it's just what she remembers the place doing two kids standardizing them they're the equivalents of the kids from Pink Floyd's brick in the wall part two after that Alice's shrunk to the size of a bug smaller in some cases and set loose in a savage garden it's probably the most bland sequence from a visual perspective but the sense of distance traveled with the long leaf float sequence in the hour or so of mushroom jumping platforming afterwards kind of makes up for its blandness some sequences like an Indiana Jones Eska bit where you're running from a large marble or as delightful as any other Alice story and creating that kind of casually surreal feel that the setting is famous for others like ants rolling pebbles out of you down a hill in a moment of 2d as 3d platforming are obviously more kind of a game design riff particularly particular to the American McGee version of Alice the environments start to take their most drastic turn for the dark and bazaars Alice enters the Hatters realm still filled with the broken children from the school she's catching up with the present now but the president is grimmer than she had realized here the level design continues to experiment throwing you into a mirrored labyrinth giving you plenty of puzzles to solve Alice's Ark is a character the escalation of difficulty and the game's atmospheric and descent all run in perfect tandem the game does all this without once breaking the early conversational tone of its characters as madness seeps into the landscape Alice accepts it in a kingdom of the mind questions of sane or insane aren't helpful it's a little bit of both the games last area is divided into three parts centered around a hub map in defiance of any structure presented so far each is important and distinct but the hub map unites them and slowly slowly changes as you wind around to whatever new area you're going to often surreal landscapes are shown is very distinct from one another here it's like any other natural place with a transition zone in between biomes except you're transitioning between hard granite and a chess board or from volcanic Hills to a Victorian house or from a long Canyon to a maze of flesh and hedges my favorite levels in the game are certainly those in the tress lands in addition to simply looking amazingly strange and following the general board progression from White Castle to red Castle it even goes so far as to turn Alice into a chess piece and have the player do short mazes limited to how that piece moves like diagonal for Bishop and the l-shaped way a knight can navigate the boss naturally is the Red King despite not being an obvious match this is what is so fun about American McGee and Alice in Wonderland mashed up like this because a deadly chess maze would be an awkward fit in the aesthetic of any setting but this one its blood-soaked surrealism is still quite obviously connected to the traditions of its shooters doom 2 and quake 1 both did wild playful things with their levels that had nothing to do with creating realistic space remember barrels so fun that nap was sandy Peterson's but the American McGee half of the American McGee's Alice Equation is taking that tradition of extreme engine pushing playfulness and freeing it from any expectation of architectural believability quick to pivoted towards layouts that interconnected and made sense Alice is quite the opposite yet the most surprising thing is certainly the clever bold way the game is always exploring its themes and story at the exact same time it's pulling its level design flourishes and tricks quake 1 doomed to even quake 2 - a bit of a lesser extent we're much more mood pieces than narrative Alice is still a mood piece absolutely but it's riffs on the familiar character of Alice and the familiar iconography of Wonderland makers so much more concrete than the space marine style protagonists of those earlier titles that's what Alice in Wonderland brings to each side of the equation unknown structure and character from which the game can deviate with increasing creativity and violence as it gets deeper into the nightmarish aspects of its dreamscape when you get to the top of the volcanic mountain and see Alice's home at the top it's not presented with fireworks and a cutscene you simply arrive and you realize of course this is where you were going this is what the fire was all about you're going back to the night it happened it's a feeling of grim predestination which is a complex kind of feeling to foster the Queen of Hearts maze and Castle are stranger still leaning at last into body horror and presenting the Queen's influence is a kind of fleshy growth bursting through walls and pavement self-hatred is consumptive if left to fester or given enough attention to feed on it corrupts what it touches colors the good to bad and the bad to contemptible self-hatred try is your better self in a kangaroo court and declares off with your head at first it's a faceless puppet the Queen of Hearts the self hatred but defeat the first stage of the boss fight and the puppet retract so head pops out with the Hatter's head inside with Alice's own head inside that they tell Alice that their world is the adult one the world of cruelty and coldness go back into fantasy or risk losing yourself completely fear inside of fear inside of fear a stack of nauseating anxiety and regret so the last part of the climactic boss fight takes place in the dark mostly Alice alone and on sure against a gigantic and indescribable feeling personified as flesh what makes this story different from other Alice stories is that this Alice never fought for anyone other than herself and for no other purpose than to try to come to grips with the world around her it uses the feminine tropes and cliches of the Alice in Wonderland setting to create a game much more about emotion and interior ality and the Space Marine perspective would provide without sacrificing an ounce of the gore and in focusing in on Alice's emotional journey they've it more universally relatable to deal with grief paralyzing anxiety self-loathing these experiences go across all gender racial and generational lines in this way the first game also dodges the trope of the Manic Pixie dream girl Alice's not defined by how she changes the lives of others who she is in relation to other characters her struggle is simply to lift the load of her sorrow on her back in soldier on or else collapse under the weight of it and that struggle is unique to every human in the end she succeeds Wonderland is restored but more than that Alice can leave it she can come back to the real world as dark and grotesque is it god the game was never truly mean-spirited it's just that even the most good-natured can get to feeling low down and mean tendrils of corruption tearing down the castle walls it's not an explicitly feminist work but its respect for the interior depth of its female protagonist and the way it casually carries over so many design tropes have more square-jawed shooting games without sacrificing its feminine frame marks it as being one of the most playful games with both its gender and structural expectations out of any of its generation of action titles it's no wonder that the next generation would want to roll up its sleeves and have a crack at it Alice madness Returns is a truly unique game from its art style to its atmosphere yet when compared to the first it's quite different where the first was tight this is meandering where the first was introverted this is more extroverted where the first dealt with universal emotions this pivots towards the story of gendered vulnerability the first games utter completeness is the main obstacle in the way of the sequel Alice madness Returns is a better game than the first on almost every metric mechanical structural it is much better more satisfying controls it is much more intricate and detailed animations its art is even more experimentally surreal its level design much more labyrinthian and clever where it falls short is in the story like how with Bojack horseman the continuation in two more seasons and more story is predicated on the main character backsliding and failing to actually get better the way the earlier story arcs were suggesting he was trying to Alice's mind has to be in shambles again in order to provide a foundation for the game to come in grasping for villains outside of Alice herself the game ends up putting itself right back in the slightly exploitative perspective of the original Lewis Carroll work this game incorporates elements of sexual predation and vulnerability much more explicitly and obviously than the previous work which largely avoided a Carroll type figure at all in favor of focusing on Alice's inner life alone Alice's character in the game's respect for her and Evette individuality is still very strong the whole of Wonderland is founded on it but this time there is an outside force running wild through her mind a train of forgetting dissolving her Wonderland as it passes it's an idea planted there by her therapist who is not actually there to help her rather than the linear progression of dreamscape in the previous game from childhood to adulthood here we have different dream sequences into woven with small bits in the real world which then set up the next sequence is Alice blacking out entirely or are these levels how she perceives what's going on it's hard to say it was a lot simpler in the first game Alice was quite decidedly in a vegetative state while working through all this stuff here it's less clear and less structured each individual sequence is themed like a nautical world a clockwork world a parlor games world are returned to the Queen's realm the real world sequences set up the theme but sometimes it's a little more environmental than psychological for example when Alice fades into Wonderland during a conversation with her family's lawyer his offices walls are lined with Far Eastern art and artifacts so Alice's next world after a transition zone is an Orientalist mishmash of floating mahjong tiles samurai wasps and other little flourishes that feel more chisa li stereotypical than they do personal to Alice yes you can possibly defend the Orientalism by pointing out that this is Alice's understanding of the style all mashed together like this but why included it all if there's no emotional metaphor at work L so like it even has lengthy 2d platforming sections which follow a similarly imitative art style it's really self-indulgent without any character driven justification where the last game had character driven justifications for everything every level of the first Alice was tied to somehow dira thoughts or feelings this is simply tied to a passing impression that Alice has Alice madness Returns is one of the most self-consciously style games I've ever actually played it's the most fun I've ever personally had with a platformer and it helped me appreciate platformers more as a sub-genre but as an Alice in Wonderland story the style in the sequel is often the substance what's frustrating is the shift from a universal experience overcoming guilt and self-hatred to a more individualized kind of trauma like standing up to sexual abuse and intimidation with a universalist perspective American McGee could explore Alice as a feminine character and still maintain a high degree of emotional credibility because she's grounded in a common set of feelings all humans have by shifting into a story of repressed abuse American McGee is setting out into territory where I am not really sure he has any idea what he's really talking about the result in the game is often a little cartoonish with artistic representations of that trauma so on the nose explicit and tacky that it renders what ought to feel sharp and disturbing into something weakly goofy such as this doll in a compromising position where you walk into its hallway in the rudest way possible these sorts of things reduce the game's emotional credibility because of how straightforward and simple the metaphors at play are it's more obviously guessing at what the emotional experience of this sort of trauma might be like in the first Alice it seemed to me that American McGee and others on the creative team had felt much of what Alice felt and brought those experiences to the table in the art in the dialog here in the second game it just doesn't come across as so genuine this new older Alice brings us back to the original cliche that the first game had avoided with a Manic Pixie dream girl trope the problem with that trope is how the character in question is always more grounded in the author's perception of women and what the author personally values in women's personalities than in a more concretely grounded humanistic portrayal now Alice madness Returns is not ultimately that bad with its perspective I just find it particularly frustrating on account of how they got it so right the first time and how little it would have actually taken to shift the story back towards an arc that was equally dark but less exploitative to see what the game could have been had it actually been a genuinely sexist trainwreck look no further than Zack Snyder's sucker itself a blood and gore action take on the Alice in Wonderland story also released in 2011 that they were in development at the same time is kind of astounding it's an Armageddon deep impact situation it seems like one ought to be trying to copy the other but no they're completely independent if parallel works Sucker Punch however is a singularly bad movie and madness Returns is an enduring ly enjoyable game they use so many of the same motifs and even some of the same specific imagery to such very different outcomes in Sucker Punch there's a young woman named babydoll who witnesses the rape of her sister attempts to kill the rapist and has put into an insane asylum where the staff has been bribed to give her a lobotomy to keep her from testifying there are a few days before the surgeon arrives so baby doll goes into several levels of fantasy where she rallies the other asylum girls and stages an escape on the surface it is supposed to be about women's empowerment that there are depths to the women that the men hurting them will ever know about and strengthen their tomb that is the stated intention of the movie in practice the movie is two hours of sexualized violence where even in the women's fantasy worlds they're guided by an old white dude who advises them in one scene to and this is a direct quote remember ladies never write Shrek's with your mouth you can't cash with your ass the first level of fantasy world under the asylum is a brothel so all the heroines spend most of their screen time in this level of the dream looking sad in lingerie the fantasy is underneath that level are a medley of posters zack snyder's seem to have had on his wall in middle school beginning at beginning with baby doll fighting japanese monsters in a schoolgirl outfit moving on to fighting a dragon in a mech assault suit during a world war two ish sequence and just getting stupider from there baby doll never does take off that schoolgirl outfit even in what is supposed to be her own fantasy world what's more is that the woman's mental strength does not actually translate into meaningful agency only one of the women makes it out at the end and baby doll gets lobotomized anyway the affer mentioned a sucker punch movie ends with the rapists villains doing a musical number during the credits it is an astoundingly large amount of money being spent on the most myopic juvenile idea possible of what a woman's mental landscape must be like with the bizarre counterproductive flourishes like that credit sequence thrown in every moment it isn't being gross and mean compared to the first game Alice madness Returns is messy in its themes and its storytelling vision compared to sucker punch it is a feminist masterpiece when talking about gender in media it is important to have a baseline and in terms of feminine interior ality thanks to zack snyder we have a measurable point to place absolute zero ad on the scale of credible perspectives the central problem with sucker punch that also can be applied to madness returns is in asking for whom it is that the women in these stories struggle for themselves or for the audience when awful things happen to the women and sucker punch it often feels like the main purpose is schadenfreude taking joy in the suffering of others they suffer in slow motion while moody high production covers of post-punk songs play in the background they suffer in lingerie with perfect makeup they struggle they fight too but they do it in miniskirts and at the direction of an old man who's smarter than they are the movie is so glossy and so frenetic that it's obvious that we the audience are supposed to be excited impressed at all the stylishness of the way these women struggle their abstracted people framed as badass in their fantasies but simplistically vulnerable and ineffectual in the real-life levels contrast this with the first Alice game Alice gets better and walks out the front door of the asylum at the end her inner strength was outer strength that wasn't simple fantasy even if the journey took place within a dream if madness returns Alice is unable to accurately perceive or better her situation until the very last minute of the game her agency suspended long enough to set her up for parallel confrontations with dr. bumpy in the real world and also with her Wonderland version of him the dollmaker structurally this is rough because if Alice does not understand what she's going through then neither necessarily does the player the first game framed it so you knew is the player what was up even if Alice hadn't seen it yet you knew that this was all her way of processing what happened during the fire madness Returns goes back and actually changes the whole story of the fire turning it into a mystery into crime where it was just a tragic accident before as the game goes on it is slowly slowly revealed that dr. bumpy was stalking alice's older sister and trying to groom her to be sexually trafficked he broke into their home raped the sister burnt the house down and covered his tracks it's also revealed that Alice heard him doing this and did nothing none of this is necessary and all of it is awkwardly edgy what seems to have happened is that Alice needed a new focus for her guilt to build a sequel off of so a new source of self-loathing had to be provided she healed too much in the first game otherwise changing this backstory around serves the dual purpose of invalidating the emotional progress she made earlier wiping the slate clean for another break from reality while also positioning it so she's fighting herself in addition to Bumby the way the story is arranged this pivots on a change in who and watch the Queen of Hearts represents it's also the best place in the game to see the contrast between art and storytelling quality the return to Queensland is visually mechanically amazing her realm is shattered and apocalyptic with card guards from the first game reanimated as zombies holes through their faces the same as their card suit there's an enormous invincible nemesis called the executioner who chases you around intermittently and then at last when you get to the garden there's a cake that says eat me Alice becomes huge and stomps him literally in the game's most winningly comic moment it is so playful and the gore of the levels is less gross than it is transfixing where the deeper you get into the castle the fleshy ER it becomes a kind of surrealistic meets cape on the one hand this is about Alice's fear of the body of puberty and all that comes with it and if they had simply left it as that it would have been fine all of our bodies are [ __ ] weird man and everyone feels a lot of confusion and anxiety about growing into who will be yet at the heart of it is not Alice herself again it's not her self-loathing or some avatar of that but a memory of her sister as the new Queen it can't just be fear of the body that's too simple it has to be internalized self-disgust for her failure to act when he when she heard her sister being abused one set of those emotions is universal relatable the other set of emotions is extremely specific and highly speculative the problem is not that the game explorers Alice's sexual anxieties the problem is that those anxieties are sensationalized and distorted to the point where it's hard to figure if the story is more interested in where Alice's Ark is going or more interested in making sure she suffers as spectacularly and compellingly as possible along the way the thing is the game could be equally dark and confrontational without falling back on outside villains for Alice to fight the dark twisted Wonderland of the American McGee games is visually speaking one of the most remarkable game worlds I've ever seen the frame of expressing interior thoughts as an exterior landscape is adaptable into pretty much limitless configurations and coming from a feminine angle offers even more opportunities to explore stories and emotions outside the common cliches of video game writing most game writing does take a masculine extroverted approach it's a little like how for so many years The Catcher in the Rye was regarded as a critical unmissable story of finding oneself and Sylvia Plath's the bell jar which is practically the same damn book never much got past being the butt of people's jokes each are extremely self-indulgent stories of growing up on shore and miserable but Holden Caulfield story is extroverted masculine vaguely uplifting where Esther Greenwood story is introverted feminine and bleak each of them our story is about the anxieties of a young adulthood Holden blames others they're all phonies only he is genuine Esther blames herself she feels phony in her own shoes and so nothing she does ever feels genuine to her here in 2019 there are a lot of games that deal with mental illness and interior landscape like the oddly titled hell-blade two cinemas sacrifice the Alice games were trailblazers in that regard I'm spending so much time picking apart madness Returns handling of these themes not because they fall short by a lot but because it falls short by so little it's self conscious edge and retreat from a universalist emotional journey stranded inside its own aesthetic it could have been a game that meant more to more people had it offered as many is for a person to emotionally connect with as the original game instead it largely succeeds and fails on the mechanical merits and art design the American McGee's side of the game and not necessarily the Alice side I think that's interfered with the game's ultimate legacy American McGee has been trying to make a third game for years and as time goes on that seems like a more and more remote possibility he made some short films Alice other lands but that's it if this was five years ago even I'd say you should just ask Hot Topic to finance it because this is truly a game that could sell them a million t-shirts I know Hot Topic stores still exist in 2019 but I'm not much convinced that anyone set foot in them in years not even to buy a Big Bang Theory keychain madness Returns has a style to it that is hopelessly intertwined with that buckles on everything mole punk look of the mid odds there was a moment where it could have surfed a wave of mass-marketed self-identity but now we're coming up on the years where you're allowed to debate if avenged sevenfold counts as classic rock so I think that moment has passed I think a sequel would still be totally possible had madness returned left a stronger impression with its story which I believe could have been done with small tweaks in perspective and frame rather than any major overhaul of the template but where to from there at the climax Alice seems to experience a more or less permanent break with reality there isn't much at the end of madness Returns to hold on to or a tease out it's not a happy ending like the first game since Alice's physical form still exists in the real world and having a permanent break with reality that way is pretty bleak news for her without a friendly marketing environment without a strong hook for a third title all that's left is the memory that once upon a time there was this wicked cool platformer about Alice in Wonderland what a platformer though if madness Returns has to stand on its environmental design alone that'll hold the weight well enough madness Returns has levels that are considerably longer and more complex than the previous Alice with hidden upgrades and collectables tucked into every corner I didn't nearly get everything but I spent a tremendous amount of time trying to puzzle out how to get to out-of-reach teeth glittering in the distance there is a lot of punishment for falling off a Ledge either you just disintegrate into butterfly as in appear on the nearest default kind of ledge I'm pretty clumsy of these sorts of platformers so the lack of fanfare and quick recovery for fail states was one of the things that really won me over to its platforming the environments are so colorful and surreal that the jumping puzzle doesn't really feel all that repetitive the best view is usually from the highest platform after all game maps based on puzzles and secrets have a rhythm to them from mist to God of War once you catch to the rhythm of how the designers like to craft a puzzle those puzzles become easier to solve missed puzzles are contextual you need to think holistically about why an area is what it is and what you're really trying to accomplish god of war puzzles are camera driven and for the most part you're meant to challenge the game on its fixed point of view to explore until the camera cuts and reveals a prize madness returns puzzles are appropriately curiosity driven there's plenty of platforming and puzzling to simply progress in the main plot of the game the extra platforming and finding of Secrets is done when you notice something odd or out of place and just follow your nose I never did reach maximum health in the game because I didn't find all the bonus regular rooms but I well satisfied my own curiosity as I was going along I spent a lot of extra time secret and collectible hunting because I did not find it annoying at all I wanted to soak in the backgrounds I wanted to enjoy the spooky little Danny Elfman esque soundtrack I wanted to solve the little navigational riddles that the designers had put in front of me a puzzle game is a dialogue between designer and player more than most games there's a lot of personality into it that's why sometimes the designer headlights in the game like American McGee or more recently Jonathan Blow McGee is not the only map designer here in madness Returns but the physicality of the level design is really consistent and how it comes across all game long and the kinds of soft bells it chimes in a player's mind to make them feel as if a hallway is hiding something from them the violence too is a delight third-person action games came a very long way between 2000 and 2011 madness Returns has a heft and weight to the combat that was never there in the original and the combat animations are so fluid there isn't a lot of enemy variety and they're not quite as memorably the enemies of the original it's the spectacle and the weight of combat that carry it so the combat is good the platforming is great the style is tremendous madness returns is a worthwhile game to spend time with even eight years down the line what I wish is that it left me with the same feeling that the original did that I was seeing something uniquely strange and personal madness returns is an extraordinarily competent game in its design but it was also so much less harmonious in all of its elements so much crueler to its protagonist than its predecessor American McGee wants a third Alice game and part of me does too but another part of me feels that what worked best about the whole experiment was the context of the original games release one of the great minds of quake looking at his work and saying man I want to do something weirder the same kind of impulse that Tom Hall had when he pined for the Commander Keen days where everything didn't have to look so industrial the first game wasn't just about out Tim Burton and Tim Burton when it comes to Alice in Wonderland it was about creating new colors from an old palette when it comes to game design my worry is that a new Alice game would be necessarily nostalgic that it would go farther and farther afield from the simplicity's and harmonies that led the first game despite its jank be such a singular sort of work I would worry that it would become more like sucker punch all gloss no heart good soundtrack American McGee's Alice is a mash-up that oughtn't to work but the contrasts of setting and author tease out each other's 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Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 287,786

Keywords: American McGee, Alice, Madness Returns, Review, Critique, Retrospective, Analysis, Through the Looking Glass, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wonderland

Id: lJinl0G_i7o

Length: 49min 42sec (2982 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2019