Alice Madness Returns: 3D Platform Jumps in Dreams
When I was a kid I had a lot of dreams about falling. The most disturbing aspect of them then (and even now) is that these falls never occurred in relation to a non-familiar environment, i.e. skyscrapers, cliffs, ladders, or liminal playground equipment. I was always falling from spaces that were in my own house. In one dream I still recall vividly there was an emaciated girl hunched forward on a rock above some kind of waterfall that was pouring out of my roof and into my home. She turned to me, opened her mouth, mumbled something in dream-speak, and I began to fall. The imagery of the lead-up to the fall was nowhere near as emotionally troubling to me as the next part. I watched what I can only describe as my soul fall from the ceiling and collide with my body which was “sleeping”.
Because this was a dream, I never landed.
I did wake up however to feel my body collide into the mattress.
This vaguely somnambulistic episode was one of at least a dozen similar dreams, but none of them ever had the same visual potency, or the lingering emotional and intellectual impression that I had watched myself outside of myself. I stopped having dreams about falling sometime in the second grade, and I suspect it was due to a new intellectual development that was occupying the circuits of my gray matter. Much like falling into oblivion, this new concern left me constantly stressed, frustrated, exhausted, and confused.
This is to say, I stopped dreaming about falling, and started dreaming about girls.
This background material is important because it provides unusually important insight to 3D platforming videogames, and because I’m finally writing something about the videogame Alice: Madness Returns.
I’ll be honest, this is terrifying and exciting. Seriously I’ve been wanting to write something about this videogame since I started this website and now I’ve finally got the initiative(insanity?) to do it. Trying to find something to write about this game isn’t difficult for me, but what is difficult is limiting myself to just one topic. I could probably, given the right amount of time, write a whole damn book about this game.
Maybe one day I will.
Before I gush too much though I need to cover the general background about when the game came out and what it’s about.
Alice: Madness Returns was released for Playstation 3, XBOX 360, and Windows Personal Computers in North America 14 June 2011, Europe 16 June 2011, and in Japan 21 July 2011. The game was the long awaited sequel to American McGee’s Alice which established American McGee as a videogame director. Before this game McGee had worked for id Software, a small videogame development company that I’m told made some pretty impressive and popular videogames(one of them was about a shotgun or had a shotgun? I think?(I know for sure one of them had a nailgun). The Alice series was instantly iconic because the content of the games are macabre reimaginings of the novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice: Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carol. The setup for the first game is that Alice Lidell is in a comatose state following a house fire caused by the family cat which resulted in her entire family being burned alive. Alice goes on a psychological journey through a now severely altered Wonderland where characters such as the Tweedledee & Tweedledum, the Duchess, the Mad Hatter, and the Red Queen have become distorted monsters that are either trying to kill her or else keep her mired in survivor’s guilt following the death of her family. By the end of the game Alice eventually conquers her demons and is able to leave Rutledge Asylum, the final clip offering a hopeful vision that Alice will be happy.
Obviously, this isn’t what happens.
Cover art provided by The Cover Project.
Alice: Madness Returns follows Alice sometime after she’s been released from the asylum. She’s now living in an orphan home tended by a psychiatrist named Dr. Angus Bumby who is trying to help her forget the memory of the house fire. Alice refuses to forget, and begins suffering hallucinations that lead her back to Wonderland where a new malevolent force is warping Wonderland and destroying it piece by piece in the form of a screaming train that honestly resembles a gothic cathedral right down to the stained-glass windows. From here Alice will navigate the realms of Wonderland trying to determine what this train is, why it’s destroying Wonderland, and trying to work her way back to the death of her family to determine if the cause of the fire really was because of the family cat and not some other bad actor.
In terms of gameplay Alice: Madness Returns is an action, shooter, hack-and-slash videogame with various puzzle mini-games and, most important for this essay, 3D platforming. This is a genre that I’m not unfamiliar with but, I’ll be honest, I don’t have a great amount of experience with. Considering the games that I’ve played in my life most of them have been 2D platform games, point-and-click interface, or else shooter games (both first and third person). Alice: Madness Returns is, arguably, my main point of reference for this genre partly because I spent so much time playing it, and then also because it’s one of the few games in that genre that I’ve actually played to completion.
In terms of design mechanics 3D Platform videogames are relatively self-explanatory. The player moves a 3D sprite character in and around various 3-dimensional spaces and regions. Probably one of the best, and popular, examples would be Super Mario 64. Looking at that game for context, players control Mario as they navigate him around Princess Peach’s castle and the different levels which are accessible through the paintings spread throughout the rooms. Levels are accessed by jumping into paintings. Early levels typically include wide-open area with little to no environmental damage to players, for example Bomb-omb Plains is a wide open grass plane no way for Mario to die by falling except if he drops off the sides of tall cliffs. Likewise enemies are scattered minimally and often in wide open areas that allow players an easy opportunity to learn navigating 3D space. As missions and levels are completed however the challenges increase in the form of more enemies, smaller platforms, and the time between jumps is shortened increasing the likelihood that the player will fall to their death and have to start over.
Alice: Madness Returns is a videogame which explores a number of heavy themes: sexual exploitation, sexual violence, murder, emotional and psychological dissociation, mental illness, and emotional abuse, just to list a few. Obviously none of these themes are going to be present in a traditional 3D platformer like Super Mario 64 or Spyro the Dragon (at least I don’t think so(then again both of those games have an uncanny energy to them(Huh…))). What’s important however is that these themes and elements are ever present in Alice. As Alice navigates the platforms, puzzles, and slides that make up the levels, the visual aesthetic of each level, apart from being distinct in their detail and execution, create regular subtle allusions to Alice’s ever-growing emotional turmoil.
To wit.
The second level of the game is a region known as Deluded Depths. The name is, kind of a dead giveaway. Alice begins this level on a glacier looking for the Mock Turtle. The early part of this level has several low-intensity fight sequences, multiple secrets tucked away into corners, a new weapon to acquire specifically the Hobby Horse, and then Alice arrives at Mock Turtle’s ship at which point an arguably great shoot ‘em up minigame begins. Once under the surface of the ocean the platforming begins in earnest. All at once the ground that Alice had been secure on begins to be broken up and the player has to navigate jumping on and around jellyfish in the water that act as the platforms. Likewise the enemy count increases and players have to balance combat, both in terms of short and long range attacks. Not only that but as the level progresses the spaces between jumps widen, enemy npcs become more frequent and difficult in their intensity, and health items become few and far between.
From a design perspective this is just natural growth.
Levels of any videogame, when done right, are about leading players into the game and showing them what is possible and then steadily increasing the challenge. There’s an educational process to making good levels and there isn’t a level in Alice:Madness Returns that doesn’t follow this philosophy.
The platforming naturally grows in challenge.
And damn if they aren’t fun as hell.
Whether it’s Hatter’s Domain, Queensland, or The Dollhouse the jumps in Alice require careful positioning and balancing of the slow descent made after each press of the action button. They’re also incredibly fun to make, and even during the most tense moments of the game there’s a joy to moving Alice from Platform to Platform because of how well the controls of the games are made, not to mention the visual aesthetics of the jumps themselves. By the time I reach the end of Deluded Depths I come away with a greater sense of confidence in my ability to navigate the space Alice is occupying.
And that confidence translates perfectly into the rhetorical significance because this game is about building Alice’s confidence.
Alice is being manipulated by multiple individuals, both in Wonderland and in real life. The characters Alice meets are never a source of direct information no matter what she does for them and in certain levels this is beyond frustrating. Anyone who’s trekked through the entirety of Caterpillar's level knows the sheer agony that is the conclusion of that sequence because after arguably the longest sequences of fights and jumps Alice derives no clarification of what’s happening to her or Wonderland. Instead she’s just handed a pompously mysterious riddle/non-riddle and the next level begins.
I note that several players of the game have bemoaned the length of the game, arguing that it stretches levels out to a point that they become cartoonish exercises in repetition. These players complain that levels in Alice: Madness Return are long and then end far too quickly, or that levels become a sequence of jump, fight, jump, fight, jump, fight ad nauseum.
With respect to these players, I get it. And, I’ll be honest, I thought the same the first time I ever played Alice: Madness Returns.
Replaying the game now, multiple times, I no longer have this impression.
Or, at the very least, it doesn’t bother me anymore.
The story of Alice is of a woman who’s lost everything and is continually being strung along by people who don’t have her best interests at heart. Even the benevolent people in her life like her nanny are no real help to her, and the ones who are supposedly trying to help are often manipulating her for selfish or frankly evil reasons. It makes sense rhetorically then that the ends of levels are not about finding an obvious solution. Trauma, and moving and living through trauma is not a straight road and sometimes it takes years (decades even) to fully process it.
And I know this because I, like everybody on this planet, has had to navigate trauma.
Whether it’s the religious trauma I experienced as a kid, or the grief of emotional abuse experienced from a previous partner, I know firsthand that trauma does not end with a flagpole, a small brick castle, and fireworks depending on your score. The reality is a winding path that often leads nowhere.
And, just like Alice: Madness Returns, trauma is about navigating the ground I stand on.
Several 3D platforming games have used the genre for entertainment purposes only, which is fine. People often play videogames like they consume just about all forms of media, because they want to enjoy themselves. I play Super Mario 64 because I enjoy the physicality of the character, and I enjoy playing Alice: Madness Returns because the jumps Alice makes are fun to navigate and they’re visually spectacular; it’s an entertaining videogame that I’ve played regularly entirely because the platforming is fun. What makes Alice unique as a 3-D Platformer is the way it blends a concern for design with the rhetorical meat of its story.
Moving Alice from platform to platform is not just an exercise in 3D spacial jumps. Alice is a woman floating above psychological ruin and oblivion and each jump is a reminder that her mental state is fragile and susceptible to ruin. If I fail a jump Alice will fall and her character splinters into an explosion of butterflies that also triggers a sound-file of the voice actress screaming. This death, apart from being the necessary failure clue to players, is also an important reminder that failure for Alice is not just dying, it’s worse than that. Failure for Alice means the death of Wonderland, it means failure to solve the mystery of her family’s death, it means failure to prevent the manipulation and sadism that is befalling other children like her, and it means she will plummet back into insanity.
From from Jellyfish to jellyfish, gear to gear, mahjong tiles to Mahjong tiles, Cards to Cards, and finally broken boards to broken boards warped by an absent caretaker, Alice is moving from what little ground she has to try and build herself back up to being whole again. The platformer as a genre of videogames is about keeping a character’s feet on the ground as long as they can in spite of the circumstances they find themselves in. While there are great videogames like Super Mario 64 that employed this structure for the sake of entertaining motion, Alice: Madness Returns is one of the few platformers I’m aware of that took that dynamic and molded it to become an incredible design structure and a powerful rhetorical tool for exploring the trauma response.
Alice is trying, and fighting, to keep her feet on the ground as long as she can because the alternative is falling.
And unlike the dreams I had as a child, Alice’s fall won’t end in a strange memory, it will just end.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
10.31.2024
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