Alice: Madness Returns, designed by American McGee (horror video game, 2011)

[lb_lee]

"I want to forget! Who would choose to be alone, imprisoned by their own broken memories?"

Blurb: Alice's Wonderland is decaying and being tampered with by outside forces. Time to pick up the Vorpal blade and hack and slash through some more inner demons! (Or are they inner?)

Why is it worth your time? It's fun; people tend to prefer the first game, but we preferred this one. The controls are much more fluid, the combat and weapons system is much more streamlined, and we enjoyed how the game built on and expanded on the themes of the first. The soundtrack isn't amazing like the first game's, but is still good, and the visuals are gorgeous. (There are an annoying number of invisible walls, though.) This is also probably my favorite depiction of memory work in fiction.

Plural Tags: memory work, non-switching, headspace galore, abuse intermediate-focus

Content Warnings: In comments below; contains spoilers.

Accessibility Notes: game has both audio dialogue and subtitles, and a Let's Play is available. (Note: if I link a Let's Play, it's to a completionist version with an unobtrusive, leisurely player who focuses on the game.) Available for PC, Playstation3, and... er, whichever Xbox was in use in 2011.

Misc. Notes: There are two experimental short films made after this, called Alice: Otherlands, but in our opinion, they aren't worth your time. If you want to see a stop-motion animated Alice in short films, stick with the three stop-motion animated trailers for this game instead. They're quite striking!

Comments

Content Warnings

[lb_lee]

Just as goth and edgy as the first game. Lots of blood, gore, and violence directed towards headspace, though Alice is remarkably UNviolent towards the "real" world (with one very notable exception). Memory work is a key plot point, though it's dealt with in a fragmentary way: you mostly only see brief, vague visuals and hear characters' voices saying only sentence or two.

This game also has very bad therapy, and the therapist is the ultimate villain. Child sexual abuse is discussed, but never shown, and it never happens to Alice. Alice's stories so far focus on witness and survivor trauma, which is unusual on this comm.