•
Rating: We are always faced with the age-old problem: can video games represent, alongside their obvious "function" of entertainment, a new form of art? Can they (finally?) free themselves from the stereotype of the genre as has already happened with cinema and is currently happening with comics?
Perhaps it is a bit premature, but the seeds to achieve this are there.
Everything is a product (music, films, video games), but some products provide suggestions that we might call "artistic" (the graphics of Far Cry 2, the stylistic inventions of The Path, the cinematic story of Fahrenheit...), while others have become a true cultural phenomenon (in different ways and times, one can name: Super Mario Bros, The Sims, World of Warcraft, Tetris, Tomb Raider, etc...).
American McGee's Alice falls, in my opinion, into the first category. Not so much for its innovation or for any sort of graphic merit, but for the extraordinary inventiveness of its creator in recreating a world (Wonderland) that, after Alice's first two "paper" adventures, has become dark and perverse (does it remind you of something? We’ll talk about it later...).
This game, developed by American McGee's studio (yes, there is a guy with that very name...), a great level designer of Doom II and III and Quake, was released by Electronic Arts in October 2000.
The game is introduced by a long cutscene in which we discover that Alice, after her visits to Wonderland, has become a teenager (she is conceived as a parody of Lizzie Borden, the American murderer from the late 1800s) with several mental issues (and understandably so...), has no friends, always has a catatonic and absent look, and, as if that weren’t enough, after her parents die in a fire (a fire maybe caused by her) and following an attempted suicide, she is locked in an asylum (in the cutscene, we see Alice increasingly alienated and curled up in a fetal position shaking her head mechanically while reality around her seems to shatter). At the end of the cutscene, Alice (always suspended, like us, between reality and dream) is contacted by the Cheshire Cat: Wonderland is under the rule of the Red Queen who has bent the entire realm to her perverse will, and Alice will have to find a way (by reaching the elusive and annoying White Rabbit) to save the situation.
From this point, the actual game begins: a third-person action-adventure with not too difficult puzzles scattered here and there, very fun to play (although with a gameplay not free from flaws, like controls that are not always precise and immediate (oh, the frustration of certain platform sections!), although quite "standard": to give an idea, think of a Tomb Raider style of play. The battles with the various bosses, which must be faced by finding solutions other than straightforward "physical" confrontation, provide an extra edge.
What makes the difference is the characterization of Wonderland and its inhabitants. Starting from a punk/dark version complete with tattoos, piercings, and sardonic grin of the Cheshire Cat (who will act as "advisor" for most of the game, delivering lines like "The uninformed should fill their gaps... or die", "Only some find the way: some do not recognize it while they walk it... others, however, do not want to walk it...", or "Only a fool would believe that suffering is the rightful reward for those who are different"), to Alice’s various weapons Alice (who wanders around with her standard white and blue dress, though dirtied with blood, and with skull-shaped buttons and wielding the indispensable butcher's knife, the Vorpal Blade, the "Vorpal Sword that slays..."), passing through an exalted and perverse Mad Hatter in his mad scientist version, a confrontation with a very sick Duchess, and the generally sick and corrupt atmosphere, representing a "dark double" of the original Wonderland. Everything, however, is constructed with Lewis Carroll’s work firmly in mind and attempting to maintain its "climate": nonsense, wordplay, humor, generalized absurdity remain but are turned towards the dark.
Locations are the strong point of the video game: scenarios (all very accurate and original) make an impression, including the "Looking Glass Land - Pale Realm" where Alice enters the world of "Through the Looking Glass" which has been transformed into black and white and where Alice herself must move on the chessboard as if she were a Bishop, the psychedelic "Behind the Looking Glass" with the Mad Hatter's obsession for clocks and experiments on human subjects (and the grand battle with the teapot-wielding tea drinker), the monstrous Jabberwock, and the chromatically disturbed "Queensland".
The musical department is also very good: both the never annoying ambient effects and the beautiful accompanying music (I particularly remember the "magical" atmosphere of the first level with waterfalls), curated by ex-Nine Inch Nails Chris Vrenna.
So, the game is an immersive revision of the literary classic "Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass" tilted towards horror, and a comparison with Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" sees the latter heavily defeated (try searching for videos on YouTube, and you will be fascinated): where Burton seems to "hit the brakes" and create a cinematic product that is a slave to special effects and intended to be a children's tale, McGee and his team provide us with a mature, entertaining, and distorted version.
The video game, therefore, is a masterpiece of the adventure genre, visually appealing (mind you, those used to the latest generation graphics might struggle to appreciate a game from 2000), innovative in parts of the gameplay, offers a captivating story, but most importantly it is devilishly fun and "catchy" (how many times did I think "one more game, one more level piece, then I'll go to bed," and, of course, I'd stay up late!).
Loading comments slowly
