This article is more than 1 year old

Alice: The Madness Returns

Jabberwonky?

Review I have been waiting 11 years to be reunited with American McGee’s Alice and strangely enough, Alice: Madness Returns parallels this as we join our unbalanced heroine 11 years after her defeat of the Queen of Hearts and discharge from Rutledge Asylum.

Alice: The Madness Returns

Who are you calling a pussy?

Alice Liddell has spent the past decade in London’s East End reconstructing her fragile psyche. Haunted by the conflagrant death of her family - “roasted like chestnuts” - Alice’s madness returns and the imaginary construct that is Wonderland starts to re-manifest itself around the question of who - or even what - started the fire?

After a beautiful wood-cut stop-motion animation intro, all swathes of blackberry jam blood and goat-headed men, we wake up in Doctor Bumby’s house full of boorish big-headed children and take to the streets following a ghost cat past big-nosed Eastenders, it’s not long till we are falling past sinister dolls heads and talking to a rather skinny emo-looking Cheshire Cat.

Alice: The Madness Returns

Ring of fire

The game is set partly in Victorian London - all grey smog and dirty petty coats - and half in Opium dream Wonderland, and I was absolutely stunned by the obvious quality and depth of the artwork. Think trapped in a Brothers Quay animation while sniffing glue on tabs of acid dressed in your finest Steampunk garb.

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like