American McGee's Alice

I played it out of pure curiosity because I remember seeing the game's box in a store decades ago. The image of Alice with blood was striking. I played with the HD textures mod.

The music is good, but it repeats a lot. There's not much variety. One of the tracks has a sound that reminded me of the ringtone from the Japanese horror movie "One Missed Call." Another has a clock tower bell sound that reminds me of something, maybe FFVIII, but I can't remember what. Overall, the music fits well with the gothic horror atmosphere. The children's voices in the background reminded me of "Pink Floyd - Another Brick In The Wall, Part Two," and also the horror effects from the movie "It."

The art is fantastic. It's not like the Disney-style children's movie Alice in Wonderland. It's a melancholic, somewhat psychotic interpretation that seems influenced by the creator's chaotic early life. A hippie mother who likely was on drugs. The health bar isn't health; it's sanity. The mana bar isn't mana; it's willpower. The theme is really cool and has a fanbase of Alice admirers because there's no other game quite like it. Who would think of a psychotic Alice with a knife and blood on her hands? The enemies follow this macabre style, with demons along the way. The settings are very surreal and cool.

The only interesting puzzle was the first one. The levers and the sound follow a Do Re Mi sequence, and you have to pull the levers accordingly. The rest are very confusing. The challenges where Alice transforms into a chess piece were at least interesting, although very short.

The voice acting is good. At least most of the voices have personalities and aren't tasteless. The narration by the cat is great. I could listen to an entire audiobook with it.

[Rage mode]

Alice in Wonderland. Yeah, this game would be wonderful if I were evaluating it only artistically. But the gameplay is so trashy that it should be called Alice in the Land of Disasters.

The animation for grabbing a ledge and climbing is ridiculously slow. My god! The weapons are all slow and bad. The diabolical dice are one of the worst weapons ever created! If you hit, you summon a demon. If you miss, which happens most of the time, you lose mana and time. The jumping animation is horrible, and the movement is grotesque. Alice slides, gets stuck in the geometry, and is terrible to control.

After the ant boss, I activated god mode and just progressed through the levels. I didn't want to explore anything else. In some parts, I went straight to the end with noclip.

It's understandable why EA Games shelved this series. The theme is good, but such a bad game only leads to losses.

[/Rage mode]

Design and spoilers

Old games often have compatibility issues, starting right with the installer. When I started this game for the first time there was no sound. I found out that the installer simply didn't install the game's sound drivers. I don't know what kind of stupid error that is, but you just needed to copy the folder from the CD to the game's folder.

Another bug is that it resets the video settings every time. I discovered that you could play in fullscreen and control the gamma through the Nvidia's control panel.

The game doesn't explain that you need to climb the vine using the action button and pressing up. Worse, I didn't see how to go down, if that's even possible.

The game doesn't explain that a weapon is a weapon. After getting the knife, I picked up two more weapons and didn't know they were weapons. They looked like items or objectives. Only later did I understand that I had picked up new weapons. It seems trivial, but the cat kept speaking in riddles like the Riddler from Batman, and I thought that was something to open a passage or something. Especially since this game doesn't have the classic introductory tutorial.

The limitation of all weapons consuming mana, except for the knife and the club, was a terrible idea. It limits all weapons and leaves you without weapons to attack most of the time. Worse still, the weapon that works underwater is the knife.

The animations are all slow. The enemy dies and takes an eternity to disappear and for the crystal to appear. This totally ruins the experience.

The power-up animation is cool only once. After that, every time you pick up the item, the game being interrupted by a mini cutscene becomes annoying.

The weapon's sounds are very generic and don't even sound like the chosen weapon. It seems like they were chosen randomly from some sound bank.

In Prince of Persia there are upgrades and, as the game progresses, the health bar increases. The skill bar too. I don't know why they didn't implement this basic progression in the Alice's game. The explosions from enemy shots towards the end of the game also make it very difficult to see what's happening on the screen.

The level design starts off good but deteriorates towards the end. In the ice cave I got lost because the path leads to a dead end and traps. Then you see a frozen enemy that does nothing, and there's nothing there. You go back to the beginning and see that the path is an unlit passage. Enter there, and a rolling stone comes at you. They started making maze levels that ruined the game and the experience. They are a real pain. In the steam jets level, I fell several times. I activated noclip and went straight to the end. In the gears level, the same thing. In the water and pipes level, it was a hassle finding the way amidst those deadly turbines. With Alice getting stuck on any corner and sliding around, the game becomes more difficult than Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The slow and inaccurate weapons only make the game even more boring and difficult. In the Queen's castle, they started hiding paths in corners.

In the hedge maze, there's a gate you step on a button to open. But when you step off the button, it closes. In Tomb Raider, you would just put a box on top of it. This game doesn't have boxes to push around. By luck I've found out that the ice weapon freezes the button in place. In the second maze, another closed gate, and I got lost thinking there was a trick. There wasn't. The path was through the water until you reached a lever that opens up the gate. There's a difference between level design that invites exploration and a maze that leaves you lost, having to guess what to do.

For the teacup puzzle, I had to guess that I needed to climb onto the cubes. I only passed it using the noclip cheat. Seriously, the collision in this game is so terrible that I couldn't jump and climb onto the teacups. I resorted to cheating.

In the part where Alice is shrunken, there are beetles throwing bombs. It's annoying because they throw the bombs, and you can't see where they come from. There are parts where the path is out of the player's view because you have to look up. The jumps over the magic mushrooms are hard to control.

In the mirror maze, the objective is to break a clock. The hint is that at the beginning of the level, it shows a clock breaking. But how was I supposed to understand that was a hint? That's why modern games have markers or glowing highlights. Even more, they have dialogues explaining what to do. Then there's a corridor with those laughing and crying mannequins. There are two identical corridors that end in platforms behaving like seesaws, which you can easily fall off of. At the end, a locked door. I had to guess that in the corridors with those mannequins, each room had a clock to break. It was another puzzle that the game didn't hint at. Only then do the doors unlock.

The final puzzle of the game is very strange. Bizarre. You climb onto a platform and face a giant door. This platform also has a gap where the player can fall and die. There's a hall with three paintings and a mirror. A lever rotates the mirror. The mirror faces a painting and shows a reflection of a card's symbol. The giant door guarding the boss, right in front of the lever, doesn't open. I kept turning the mirror, not understanding what to do. Going back to the previous room, there's a steam jet behind a wall that leads to a corridor with three doors. These are the doors the mirror opens. Each has a walkway and an arena. Completely dark with a light in the middle. You go to the light, the environment changes, and the three paintings appear there. If you stay still, the screen turns red, and you're teleported back to the hall of paintings. If you move out of the light, the paintings disappear after a few seconds. Then you go back to the hall, and a painting has disappeared. Repeat until the paintings are gone, and the final door opens, allowing you to face the final boss.