If Alice: Madness Returns was useless on arrival, that may at the very least be aesthetically constant.
The 2011 sequel to American McGee’s Alice went even deeper into Alice in Wonderland’s pink guts than the primary sport, pulling out essentially the most nightmarish elements of the Victorian kids’s story and tying their shadows right into a neat action-adventure. But it surely suffered from abysmal launch sales, with reviewers and fans each being disenchanted by what they felt have been tough controls and stage design.
Nonetheless, sport designer American McGee wasn’t giving up.
McGee, who created the sequence after being fired by id Software program, hoped to collect sufficient neighborhood help for a follow-up, and essentially the most diehard Alice believers gave it to him in spades. However after a decade of this slicing fan strain, writer EA lastly decided in 2023: there can be no extra Alice video games. They blamed the “evaluation of the IP” and market circumstances.
Was it throughout? Would Alice must lie facedown within the graveyard as soon as and for all? Not precisely. Alice: Madness Returns would not simply stay, it thrives.
“Regardless that EA was going to let Alice die,” says 33-year-old Twitch streamer Foxfire47, who has been a fan of the sequence because the first sport launched in 2000, “the followers have been completely not.”
She credit Madness Returns’ vigorous on-line fanbase to McGee himself. He started working on a proposal for a possible follow-up, Alice: Asylum, in 2017, and inspired followers to contact EA instantly to point out their help. His now retired Patreon incorporates all the opposite methods he incentivized followers to deepen their obsession, like referring to the fandom as “Insane Kids” and finally posting an Alice: Asylum design bible bursting with art.
His otherworldly design is at the very least one motive why followers might by no means actually abandon Madness Returns, or the Alice sequence usually. They’re a stunning testomony to the truth that anybody can survive the worst factor that is ever occurred to them.
Friendships and bonds
Foxfire47 found Madness Returns’ on-line fan base via McGee’s Patreon in 2018. She remembers feeling McGee’s pleasure for Asylum bleeding into her preexisting enthusiasm for the sequence, and it did the identical for everybody she met over Patreon and Discord.
“Friendships and bonds have been made via Alice: Asylum,” Foxfire47 says.
When EA finally handed on the mission, they have been additionally rejecting a complete neighborhood that had put years and cash into materializing a shared dream. However McGee had skilled his followers to change into personally invested, and an IP situation appeared small within the face of their dedication.
“After [EA rejected Asylum],” Foxfire47 says, “I really feel that, as followers for Alice, we wished to maintain the spirit of the video games alive. With the camaraderie of this neighborhood, we’re at all times going to point out our love for these video games.”
The neighborhood now sustains Madness Returns via YouTube movies with millions of views, pouty TikTok fancams with a whole bunch of hundreds of likes, detailed cosplay, tattoos, and different tangible strategies of worship. All of this online word-of-mouth has helped Alice followers achieve an unprecedented purpose. They’re actively accumulating new followers for an deserted, 24-year-old franchise telling the unusual horror story of an orphan teenager, Alice, who retreats into an hallucinated Wonderland.
“I purchased Alice: Madness Returns, and I’m taking part in the primary one for the primary time due to your cosplay!” one commenter lately advised in style TikTok cosplayer Jessilyn Cupcake. Lately, she’s made and shared a number of Alice cosplays together with her keen followers, together with Alice’s ultramarine tea dress and the yowling Pastime Horse hammer from Madness Returns. She first discovered Madness Returns in 2011, telling IGN that she “fell in love instantly.”
“It nonetheless feels trendy and a contemporary take regardless of being 15 years outdated,” Jessilyn says. “I believe [its] hack-and-slash-style gameplay with a number of weapons, costumes, and skills is likely one of the finest examples in a sport, ever.”
The sport is an intoxicating mix of lethal and delicate, very similar to its most well-known weapon, the lace-patterned Vorpal Blade – a chef’s knife for short-range combat. In Madness Returns, traumatized 19-year-old Alice should take on the kid intercourse trafficker and psychiatrist Dr. Bumby, who tries to trick her into insanity with the intention to commodify her physique. However Alice learns to wield her fragile energy in opposition to any abomination.
Alice’s means to work via her ache and sort out any drawback, from baby dolls that vomit to harmful males, is a part of her underdog attraction. And McGee accessorizes Alice’s hypnotic visions with touches just like the creamy, white bow behind her bloodspattered apron, and the crystal-blue butterflies within the misty, tree-covered Vale of Tears.
Although Madness Returns the sport has been out for years, the preferred approach for followers to publicly be a part of collectively is by wanting on the tiniest sport particulars via a magnifying glass. On TikTok, a scene exhibits Alice hallucinates having her cranium drilled open on the corrupt Rutledge Asylum. The digital camera lingers on swollen leeches in jars. Alice seems dazed in slow-motion, with make-up staining her pores and skin like a bruise, and moved viewers provide the video with 43,000 likes.
“SAVE ALICE ASYLUM PETITION,” says the preferred remark.
Madness Returns YouTube movies likewise prioritize evaluation of the sport’s visuals and story. One 51-minute video by video essayist Boulder Punch spends virtually half of its runtime on sequence “highlights,” praising its surreal platforming and aching orchestral rating.
YouTuber BlackRose was amongst these captivated by its “lovely, grungy paintings” when she recorded her first YouTube episode with it in 2023, main her to suggest it to her 111,000 followers.
“I used to be instantly hooked,” she tells IGN. “One explicit a part of the sport that sticks with me vividly was when Alice turned an enormous after consuming [enchanted Eat Me cake in] Queensland. I had a great deal of enjoyable turning into massive and terrorizing all of the enemy card guards whereas I laughed maniacally for having a lot energy.”
Grasp of the macabre
“The artwork path of the 2 Alice video games are undoubtedly what struck me essentially the most [about them] — that darkish, gothic fashion that blends objects of childhood with violence and the macabre,” says Maria, who runs the horror gaming YouTube channel eurothug4000.
McGee’s defunct Shanghai-based video games studio, Spicy Horse, specialised within the distinctive fashion that gave Alice life. Except for the Alice sequence, the developer additionally (considerably unpopularly) turned a number of Brothers Grimm tales into platformers, whereas padding them with intriguing, cartoonish gore. However American McGee’s: Alice is what actually established Spicy Horse as a purveyor of cute brooding. Madness Returns’ artwork director Ken Wong was definitely impressed by it.
After Wong created Alice fanart in 2000, McGee took discover, and the 2 labored on designs collectively for a number of years. And on Madness Returns, “we noticed a possibility with the visuals to create one thing that was violent and horrific, but additionally lovely and stuffed with creativeness,” Wong says. “Wonderland is such a tremendous setting.”
“I am biased because the artwork director,” Wong continues. “However in 2024, I believe it is value taking part in Madness Returns to expertise an actual visible feast. We have been pushed to unleash our imaginations and discover some actually darkish locations, and I believe the sport we created has among the most lovely environments and among the most f’ed up characters I’ve ever seen in a sport.”
@leah___lbbh However recovering the reality is well worth the struggling. #SeeHerGreatness #alicemadnessreturns #alice #madnessreturns #fyp #SeeHerGreatness #fyp #fyp #fyp ♬ Alice Madness Returns – °•💘💌 𝒜𝒶𝓁𝒾𝓎𝒶𝒽 💌💘•°
Although the content material of its story suggests defiance of its lineage, Madness Returns nonetheless shares its core with Alice in Wonderland, the concept that being a lady in an grownup setting feels surreal. Due to this, actress Susie Brann, who voiced Alice in each video games, tells IGN over e mail that she “wished to deliver to life the Alice [she’d] examine as a toddler.”
“I noticed her as frank, well mannered, nicely introduced up, curious, sincere and adventurous,” says Brann. “I used to be conscious that there was an important disparity between the innocence and truthfulness of Alice and the horror that was going on round her. However being conscious that she had skilled actual horror within the lack of her mother and father in such a horrific approach, the video games might be seen as an outworking of what was going on in her thoughts. Perhaps bringing some type of closure, if not therapeutic, to her thoughts.”
The unique Alice in Wonderland gives a roadmap to kids hoping to detangle the weird world of grown-ups. Madness Returns has, in flip, change into a cornerstone information for girls who’ve realized to change into distrustful of the white rabbit that led them to it. Followers on-line gush about the best way Madness Returns handles trauma, which is, to today, uncommonly nonjudgmental and empowering.Whereas the villainous Bumby forces Madness Returns’ Alice to endure from gendered grief, she by no means permits it to contaminate all of who she is. She’s extra of a goth position mannequin than a tragic hero, and in followers’ appreciation of her, she’s been in a position to be a part of Alice in Wonderland as a fairytale basic.
Some followers have even grown up with Madness Returns the best way different kids, for greater than a century, have had Alice in Wonderland learn to them at bedtime. That was the case for twenty-two-year-old Johnnie, whose mother had been taking part in Alice video games since earlier than they have been born. They first performed it themselves once they have been solely 5 years outdated.
Today, Johnnie appreciates how “[Alice] is not sexualized, demonized, or saved by a person,” they are saying. “All of her therapeutic is completed on her personal, and I’ve at all times beloved and appreciated that. […] Alice as a sequence, I imagine, sparked a variety of dialogue round trauma, psychosis, and psychological well being and supplied that protected area for many who have suffered too with out being painted as a villain.”
Twenty-three-year-old Brynlee Daigle agrees. She’s beloved Madness Returns since begging her mother to purchase it in 2012. Now, she discusses it with pals on Discord and does Alice roleplay on Tumblr. “One facet of the sport that also sticks with me is the necessary message about psychological well being, that irrespective of in the event you’re disabled, or severely traumatized, you may overcome any impediment in your approach.”
“It is why I’ve the [American McGee’s Alice] Jabberwocky [boss] battle tattooed on my thigh,” she continues. “It is there to remind me I can at all times defeat my internal demons.”
A neighborhood lives on with out its authentic creator
Although he is helped Madness Returns sprout a loyal and hopeful neighborhood, McGee himself may desire to let Alice’s reminiscence fade, like ink. In an e mail to IGN, a consultant for McGee declined a request for remark, as a substitute citing a recent YouTube video as McGee’s “closing phrase on the matter” (after that, McGee acknowledged the “depth of Alice followers” in relation to this text on Twitter). Within the video, McGee describes being “emotionally, fairly destroyed” after EA rejected his community-backed proposal for a 3rd sport.
Although McGee as soon as welcomed followers’ ardor whereas recruiting help for his Patreon, EA’s rejection has understandably reduce down his endurance for it. He at the moment treats followers’ eagerness like he would a slack-jawed Frankenstein – a creation that might by no means meet his needs and desires.
“Alice followers are likely to have issue studying what I’m saying on the subject of how a lot I DO NOT wish to make video games anymore,” he wrote on Twitter on April 24.
Followers have realized to deal with his chilly shoulder. Many of the that means they derive from Madness Returns is private anyway.
“Lots of the energetic followers I’ve seen on-line are ladies,” says Maria, “and American McGee’s Alice goes via loads as a younger girl rising up in a world working in opposition to her.”
“I believe each girl can relate to some facet of [Alice] in a approach,” she continues, “that feeling of one thing taken from them, that feeling of not seeming such as you’re in management […] as a result of you’re a girl.” So followers are grateful for what already exists. “If there’s one factor I need individuals to remove from taking part in [Madness Returns],” says Jessilyn, “is that working via trauma — irrespective of how laborious or silly it’s — will be value it.”
“If one thing is true, it’s true all the time,” Brann says. “If the sport resonates with individuals and helps them work via and go away behind a few of their turmoil, understanding themselves extra and what they’ve been via, that’s received to be an excellent factor.”
Ashley Bardhan is a contract author at IGN