'This unmitigated disaster is your doing. And it will get worse. Your Train keeps a hellish schedule. Get moving... The change has begun'
'The train is perfectly capable of terrifying me, Cat.'
Alice: Madness Returns is not the best game ever made, but it is certainly the best in-game exposition of female puberty.
Video games traditionally under-represent women. With a couple of exceptions such as Metroid, Portal, and Red Dead Redemption, women in games are not well rounded. Thinking on the characters that come to mind from this brief list, what makes, Samus, Galdos, Chell and Bonnie different is their overt masculine qualities. Feminine and vulnerable women are generally over-sexed, whiny or difficult. They are foils to the protagonist, that is, if they merit inclusion at all.
Initially Alice circumvents these issues by presenting it's eponymous protagonist as a child. She begins the game in a doctor's office, as she leaves a very young kid enters the office saying: 'It's my turn to forget, Alice.' No delineation, other than height, is made between the teen Alice and the six or seven year old boy. She wears the simple smock of her infantile brethren, and whilst she is almost twice as tall as these strange dwarfish children she is similarly wan and pale. She has been in therapy a long long time. Her vulnerability is her initial personality. Her wonderland seems at best escapist: the game to stop a runaway train is Alice's attempt to eradicate the memory of childhood trauma.
The wonderland we first encounter is captivating, light and absolutely stunning. Whilst helpless in London, unable to so much as jump; in her fantasy she is lighter than air. Her skirts allow her to triple jump across wide expanses of sky. Alice's initial experience of wonderland is childhood fantasy becoming a reality. Careless and and free she negotiates the simple and linear opening level of Madness Returns with ease. That is, until she finds the vorpal blade, and meets her first enemies, dolls and black slime, combined together. Blood, and the shedding of blood, becomes her first taste of dealing with the difficulties and frustrations of an aggravated childhood. Her transformation from child to adult is initiated through these attacks.
As Alice grows steadily more experienced in violence, and aggression she gains an adult understanding of the world. The game's writers links narrative transition directly to character development. As pubescent fantasy, the story is carried predominantly by Alice's sexual experiences. The more blood she sheds, and the more deeply entrenched she becomes in wonderland, the easier it is to re-examine her past. Her childhood, we learn was torn apart by the fire in which her parents and sister were killed, as she struggles to piece together these experiences she battles the horror and fear which all teenage girls encounter. But Alice has the advantage of experiencing these emotions and the difficulties through a fantasy in which she wields a razor sharp knife. Lucky girl.
Perhaps if such monsters were not presented, the knife would be turned upon her own body. Wonderland offers not simple a childish escape but the opportunity for action. As she destroys life, Alice becomes the active character in an inert world. This is emphasised by her encounter with the Walrus. As in the original Alice game, the side characters are unable to escape the clutches of passivity. The Walrus has Alice round up his cast, mutters the inescapable riddles. The side characters, with the exception of the cat, watch the oncoming destruction of wonderland without batting an eyelid. They welcome and submit to oncoming disaster because inaction is so tempting, so easy. They too, seem like children, trapped in the fantasy of wonderland but unwilling to take the action which would allow them to grow.
By continually battling the violent the demons which plague and destroy her childhood wonderland, Alice is negotiating the path to adulthood. Unable to remain as it was, wonderland is a spectre to which Alice clings but can no longer sustain. Either she chooses to forget, to ignore the traumas of her past as her Doctor suggests, (The doctor later reveals his true motives) or she fights through and embraces the trials and difficulties of puberty. In creating this narrative the developers have produced a brilliantly polished character The narrative is driven, not be the illusive and ridiculous notion of a gothic train, but by Alice's desire to grow. The train represents the onslaught of technology and development, these are things Alice does not really reject at all. She recognises that her nostalgia for wonderland is destructive, another kind of forgetting, which would ultimately lead to her own destruction. Whilst all around her cling to the past, she fights for the future. The train is not her enemy, it is merely her means of getting places.
Alice is no longer able to stay in her childhood fantasy, she must except the onslaught of puberty. This is made particularly clear when she comes to the red queen's castle and is confronted with a long heart-shaped passageway. Red and slimy, it drips, it is, after all a vagina. This blood is not limiting, it is liberating. By walking the passage Alice's development continues and culminates in meeting with the red queen. A mirror image of Alice herself or perhaps her sister, the queen decodes the riddle: 'The train is trying to destroy all evidence of your past, and especially the fire.' Through self-reflection, Alice can find the truth. Through individual growth she can save herself. The deadliness of self-reflection is another theme throughout Madness Returns. The potent philosophy of escapism and avoidance is encouraged by wonderland's cast of characters, but Alice must defy them.
As a videogame Alice: Madness Returns thrives because it counteracts the persistent lack of control present in Carroll's novel with interactive gameplay. The game allows that sense of self-control, and engagement which the original story never delivered. As Alice becomes more deadly, and more aware of sex the in-game collectable memories offer a new narrative.
Rather than simply being told things the narrative allows Alice to re-experience memories in a new and sexualised light. She talks of the fluffy undergraduates who fell in love with her older sister. And in one unerring moment of self-consciousness, Alice remembers the advances of one creepy old man whose advances turned towards her younger self. This, is Carroll himself, or rather Charles Dodgson who appealed to the real Alice Liddell, sent his manuscripts and it is believed; asked for nude photos. The writing in this game is astounding, revealing and dangerous. Rather than shirking responsibilities, or being too attached to the material, (one thinks of Burton's Alice) it interrogates the author, and the story.
Madness Returns is a game all girls should play. Alice is weak, she is terrorised, tortured only to be empowered by action. Her puberty is a process of violence, death and emotion. Rather than being tempered, she fights, rather than being sexy she is sexually aware. By smattering the game with sticky juices Alice becomes a gripping and engaging experience, which encourages reflection. Rather than escapist fantasy, wonderland becomes the space in which Alice can investigate her own burgeoning self-awareness. The game offers teenage girls a similar space to encounter the realities of a bloody and violent puberty so rarely touched upon by mainstream culture.
