Alice: madness returned? or just another dose of Ritalin required?

At some point we all find ourselves through the looking the looking glass. The original Alice in wonderland, the story by Lewis Carroll, who else, has become a staple of popular tropes. The Alice allusion crops up just about anywhere that things might get the slightest bit surreal. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination then to expect that it was remade in the last decade by Tim Burton. That film was about as good as the red queen would be as a hairdresser or as a flamingo is as a croquet mallet.

But we don’t talk about films here, because the we is me and i’ve no time to deviate from my strict schedule of video games, hattery and tea parties. At the centre of all three lies a Alice: madness returns, a 2011 release that took the whimsy and childlike awe of the original and sanded it down to a grit laden grim ‘psychological’ edgy...thing. This is not an uncommon occurrence for many works of fiction, least of all for Alice in wonderland whose tvtropes pages lists this as a “frequent target of grimmification” the page then reminds readers of the all the dark jokes the text has, pointing out this is hardly surprising.

The game itself is mostly a bit of platforming, light puzzling and some ‘use the weapon that thing is weak against’ combat thrown in for good measure. It’s not really the thing we’re here to discuss and that’s by design, the game never really wanted to be more that a vehicle for this aesthetics of an edgy alice in wonderland; hence it didn’t really try. It wears black rim glasses with no lenses in them. It has suspenders that hold nothing up because it’s wearing a belt. It has a personality about as interesting as porridge and has tried to hide this by stating ‘controversial views’ it’s a teenager’s alice in wonderland.

Exactly what one would expect from alice in wonderland for teens. Now at this point one might rightly expect that i don’t like this game, but i do. Not massively, but i had a good time with it, just not a good enough time to make me forget my criticisms after 5 years. Teenagers with personality like porridge aren't the worst. They’re boring and vexing at times but otherwise one can see the quality in them, knowing this is just a phase for them and the making of something good is within.

So in this version of events, taking place after the book. Alice’s house burns down, and she is now living in an orphanage with some therapist who is trying to cure her of the madness. Meanwhile in wonderland there is a giant cathedral train bringing ruin by ummm… ruining everything with muck and oil. Making all the characters from the book go more loopy than usual. This all culminated in peak ‘psychological’ edginess when at the end we discover the TheRapist is actually The Rapist who burnt Alice's house how and is now trying to erase her memories to make her a into a child prostitute… lets take a breather for a minute to let that sink in.

Even in ludicrous abstract i find mental fuckery disturbing so it actually hit a note for me. The edginess of it if anything was a detractor to the gold that lay within. Madness, you see, has two sides to it in popular imagination: Psychotic behaviour and creativity. In reality the relation is non existent. Alice in wonderland is read both ways, hence a gritty sequel naming itself madness returns, but a remake by burton emphasising the power of imagination and creativity. HA, there was a reason i brought that film up earlier, not that i planned this it just worked out neatly. For a moment i could almost convince myself that the game knew the difference and was exploring it, then it went on to talk about creating child prostitutes using hypnosis and it kind of lost me, along with all sense of credibility towards being self aware.

The game went for it’s teen edginess over any true sense of horror, which it inadvertently stumbled into nonetheless. The porridge boys and girls have an amazing capacity to blunder into good things while aiming for something not very interesting. The history of treating things thought to be mental illness is full of true and skin crawling nightmare fuel. The use of mass lobotomies, electroconvulsive therapy to ‘cure’ homosexuality and the treatment of the female orgasm as a defect were all hallmarks of the time in which the story was set.

Children experiencing auditory hallucinations often report their voices being of a kind and positive nature. This changes in adolescence when the voices become altogether more sinister and grim. I don’t mean to imply too strong a linkage but one can see the analogue here. That alone is the basis for a compelling aged up Alice. Instead they went for the most tweedledum version they conceive, urggghhh.