I played Alice: Madness Returns a little while back and had some conflicting opinions regarding the game itself. As a piece of media, it was gorgeous to sit back and look at. Watching Alice slip between moments of peace and insanity in this sequel to American McGee’s classic was, at times, more entertaining than playing it. The worlds are beautifully - and nightmarishly - crafted, and even during the lulls between the heroine’s mental splinters you have to appreciate the detail that went into the spooky, Gothic view of 19th century London. There were a lot of flaws that sandbagged the overall experience, though; simple, overly repetitive combat and buggy platforming were the chief troublemakers.

But that’s not what I was really impressed with. Madness Returns treads into a lot of territory that many players won’t be comfortable with. And that’s good. That’s great.

If you’ve played the first game, you should remember Alice’s first struggles in the twisted version of Wonderland that’s taken over her mind due to the painful experiences she’s dealt with in her childhood. Barely escaping her home in a fire that killed her sister and parents, as well as being raised from that point on in Rutledge Asylum (complete with “advanced” 19th-century psychiatric treatments like trepanning and iodine medication) scarred her permanently. Even against the nightmares she created in her catatonic state, she managed to kill the Queen of Hearts, her mental manifestation of guilty memories from the night of the fire. Cue credits, she wakes up and is cleared from the asylum. Happy ending.

Now, Madness Returns takes place shortly after her release and introduces you to a slightly older, though still immature Alice in the care of Dr. Bumby; a psychiatrist who specializes in hypnotism to help his child patients forget their harmful memories. The message you’re bombarded with from the beginning is to forget. Forget all the trauma in your past, move on, try and start over.

Dr. Bumby- Worst is over, and over, and over. Forget it, Alice - forget it!

Even after repairing her Wonderland (and her psyche) in the first game, Alice has begun to have strange visions of a newly ruined dream world. Something I noticed pretty quickly while touring the orphanage where Dr. Bumby treats his patients was that Alice isn’t a friendly, caring girl. She’s mean, she’s hypocritical, and she’s quick to point out that the younger children whine too much. None of them seem to look up to her, and a few openly mock her and her ongoing mental problems, but if you feel around for a while you can see that they’re all in trouble and they’re desperate for help. As the oldest and the only sort of authority around other than Dr. Bumby, Alice should show some sort of care for the other kids. Instead, she’s entirely focused on her own problems and chooses to ignore everyone else. The really aggravating part comes when you begin to see that Alice isn’t just ignoring the other children’s problems; she’s ignoring her own.

Mad Hatter- Forgetting’s just forgetting, except when it’s not. Then they call it something else. I’d like to forget what you did. I’ve tried, but I can’t.

As she makes more and more frequent trips into her new, even more disturbed world of Wonderland, you can almost set your watch by how often you check your heroine’s reliability as both a narrator and a character. She’s forced herself to forget most of the events during the night of the fire that killed her family, convincing herself that she was at fault. She refuses to acknowledge the other children she’s living with, not even noticing that they’re in worse danger than she’s ever been. And worst of all, she’s allowing her mind to be tampered with - over and over again - by a sadistic bastard. Alice is warned several times by her Wonderland friends (all of them different manifestations of her own memories, feelings, and thoughts) that what’s happening to Wonderland isn’t all her own doing this time. It’s being wrecked by some outside influence. But throughout most of the adventure, our friend Alice is on a straight-and-narrow road to root out bits and pieces of her own mind, tearing herself to shreds trying to fix herself up.

It wasn’t until I got to the Far East area in Wonderland that I really started to notice something was very wrong with Alice’s real-world scenario. While navigating the level I kept seeing giant porcelain statues of Asian women, wrapped in beautiful, colorful clothing. But as the level went on and Alice continued to search deeper and deeper for her old friend the Caterpillar, I gradually began to see that these statues were changing. Each new one I found in some nook or cranny would be wearing a little less clothing. It might be posing with a little more shame in its appearance. After a while, some of the statues appeared to be crying - covering their faces or their bodies with their hands, grasping at fabric that looked like it was being pulled away. A few of them had been partially cracked or shattered, one was completely beheaded, and others had their heads replaced with a wasp’s face, creating some kind of ugly monster.

What, I thought, was happening to Alice in her real-world experience that would manifest this kind of picture? Beautiful women were being broken, shamed, and eventually turned into something horrifying.

And so, like the British, I went once more unto the Beach.

The Dollhouse level was where things became immediately, horribly clear. I jogged around a bit, taking in the fantastic toy-store feel of all the little buildings and structures. It looked like everything was built out of Tinker toys and doll dress fabric. And then I saw the porcelain doll carcasses. Most of them were female, and all of them were stripped of clothing. Eyeless, empty heads were lying in piles of garbage, and one tunnel you had to crawl into forged straight through a massive hole that had been punched between a doll’s legs and out the other side.

It’s here that Alice meets the Insane Children, characters that return from the first game. The difference here is that they actually represent the children that Alice knows from the orphanage. They’ve all been tortured and experimented on, and they’re all on the run from a man they call the Dollmaker.

Doll Girl- The unstable are more than merely mad: they have ‘other parts’. The Dollmaker will deprive them of what remains of their deranged souls. They need care!

Alice- I know their pain. I would assist, but is sanity required for the job?

Doll Girl- A limited quantity. You’re not mad enough to be rejected. You’re like them, of them in a way, but not them. I should say ‘not us’, for I’m them, but you are on your way. The way is clearly marked.

Alice- I believe I know that way and I’d rather not travel further along it.

Alice finally begins feeling some sort of responsibility for them, but she’s still fighting herself over going out of her way to help these children when she’s still so scattered.

Cheshire Cat- Threats, promises and good intentions don’t amount to action.

What I really want to point out is that even though the game itself is flawed, the characters and the story that they build are all much stronger than they were in the first title. I’d say that the story itself, while dealing with heavy-handed issues like child abuse, prostitution, mind control, murder, rape and insanity, tries to tackle a lot of ideas that few other stories would try to touch. A couple of other games and films (for instance, Rule of Rose or Silent Hill) might play one issue or dance around a couple of others, but I was very happy to see someone that I at first considered a horrible, unlikeable protagonist grow to become something better. The storyline that carried her there was spot-on, and I’m glad that the good people that developed the game weren’t afraid to test their limits when building her world.