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| screenshots c/o Mobygames (PlayStation 3 version) |
American McGee’s had it rough. First, his mom named him that. Then he got fired from his dream job at id Software. He went over to Rogue Entertainment with a bunch of other Doom and Quake community veterans where his 2000 platformer hit American McGee’s Alice made him a star, but a couple of stinkers since then drastically tarnished his image. What’s a guy to do? Well, in McGee's case, he went back to the game that made him rich and developed Alice: Madness Returns in a bid to restore his credibility. Did it work? Let's find out!
The original Alice was a sleeper hit, an unsung classic among late 90s/early 00s PC gamer culture that stood apart from the likes of Quake III Arena and Counter-Strike with an edgy vibe that appealed to a budding Millennial goth demographic. Alice: Madness Returns, in contrast, entered a market in transition and choked with “edgy” titles of all stripes. That’s not to say that Madness Returns is the same old thing. It’s lost the adolescent bent of the first game; it’s still edgy as all get out, but in a more sophisticated manner: McGee has grown up, and thus so did Alice. It’s overall a little more aesthetically pleasing for all its dementedness. It also attempts to flesh out Alice’s real world life more. Each chapter (of five) begins with Alice in 19th-century London, a squalid, horrible place, under the care of one Dr. Bumby, who operates a home for wayward children. But it’s clear there’s something sinister afoot.
Alice
is just as crazy as ever, slipping into hallucinations of a wonderland
slowly being corrupted by some kind of outside influence that manifests
itself as black gloop and broken doll parts. Alice spends the game
piecing together her memories to solve the mystery of the fire that
killed her family and destroyed her home. What this manifests as is a
classic late 2000s design trope where the entire game is little more than a
treadmill with some side paths containing collectibles for you to find.
Most of these collectibles are just unlocks for concept art or
whatever, but some are Alice’s memories — and if you want to get the
whole story, you have to hunt them down. So, much like the original,
it’s still kind of a middling platformer game. Its attempts to change
things up now and then don’t really save it from dragging on, and on,
and on, well outlasting its welcome. And if you want to find everything,
you’d better bring a guide.
It’s
not all bad. The soundtrack (Chris Vrenna again) is amazing and the
aesthetic is less aggressively “Tim Burton with his hand in his pants.”
The combat is a big step up over the original’s “middling idTech
3-engine FPS with cg_thirdperson 1 on” style gameplay, taking design cues from
the likes of character action games like Devil May Cry,
though much less robust. You have a limited selection of weapons, but
all have their uses, and most can be upgraded.
But what struck me about the game is that there’s only one real boss, at the very end. You’re teased with bosses once or twice that turn out to be red herrings; usually you’ll just fight tougher variants of enemies you’ve already fought, and they’ll recur later. There’s also not a whole lot of enemy variety; most of them are the weird gloop things, with a few chapter-specific enemies that each have their own quirks. For the most part you’ll just be fighting the same enemies over and over in between interminable platforming segments. The overall gameplay design feels half-baked. There just simply is not enough to keep it interesting throughout.
Spicy Horse, McGee's personal studio he set up in Shanghai, shut down in 2016. In the decade since, McGee has spent a lot of time trying to get a third game made. His first attempt became a pair of animated shorts; after his attempt to get a third game off the ground was rejected by Electronic Arts, McGee has since given up on the prospect entirely. (They refused to sell the IP to him too, claiming it was an important part of their catalogue, but clearly have no intention of doing anything with it.) It's probably for the best: does our poor Alice really need to go through this shit a third time? Surely, she deserves peace. Don't we all?
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