SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full of razor blades.

American Mcgee’s Alice is a game I heard a lot about but never played until now. Released in late 2000 as a PC exclusive, until it was ported to the Xbox 360 and PS3 a decade later as an add on for the sequel, it was an instant cult classic. Unique in that it was a big budget 3D platformer for the PC and a macabre take on a children’s classic, it was lauded for its graphics and art direction and praised for bringing an unusual genre to a platform that had very few examples at that point. People also enjoyed the dark take on the Alice in Wonderland story, grounding the fantasy in darker themes of trauma and escape from reality.

In American McGee’s Alice you play the titular young girl who returns to Wonderland after an absence only to find that things have gone very very wrong. The evil Red Queen has seized control over the whole place and what was once a land of talking caterpillars and tea parties is now something much darker. All the old characters are still around but they have been twisted in some way, and even the Cheshire cat who guides you through the game has an element of sinister malice in his famous grin. The game is fully voice acted with a very nice OST and it manages to be incredibly thick with atmosphere for a 3D game from 2000. The levels are made up of very low polygon counts and primitive textures by today’s standards, but they still impart a sense of place and a dark sensibility even two decades later. Games that try to be photo realistic tend to age much worse than games that lean into a specific artistic vision, and American McGee’s Alice is definitely the latter. Its twisted vision of Wonderland with set pieces like a jigsaw puzzle floor that breaks into platforms and rearranges itself as you traverse it, or a chess kingdom that’s rendered in black and red that forces you to navigate puzzles as a chess piece still resonate. The voice acting doesn’t fare quite as well but it’s acceptable and never quite crosses the line into hokey.

What hasn’t aged nearly as well is the gameplay. Alice is a platformer built on the Quake III engine and though I played the Xbox 360 port of the game (via backwards compatibility on a Series X) it controls more like a shooter than a platformer. It’s meant to be played with a mouse and keyboard, since PC gamepads were rare at the time, so your character has no analog control, instead running around at full speed in whatever direction like a Quake character. You also aim your weapons via a reticle and while the dual stick set up works okay it can be a bit touchy in terms of proper aim, especially along the Y axis. It's very easy to aim at enemies on the same level at you but if anything is above or below it can be quite a challenge. Overall the controls feel clunky in a number of ways (ledge grabbing and pulling yourself up is especially touchy and badly done) but work well enough to get through the game, even though they never quite sat right with me. By 2000 we were well into the 3D platformer era, having already seen titles like Banjo-Kazooie and Spyro the Dragon that controlled great, and I think this game would have been clunky even for the time. There were a lot of frustrating jumps that sent me hurtling off into bottomless pits or just back down into the level when I felt I should have made them.

Alice is not just a platformer though, and in some ways the combat has aged even worse than the traversal. You get about 10 weapons in the game, ranging from the vorpal blade to a powerful blunderbuss that’s the game’s equivalent of a Doom BFG, but only a few of them are actually useful. Melee weapons can be used as often as you want, but other weapons draw from a shared ammo pool that represents Alice’s willpower. This means that there’s almost no reason to use most of the weapons once you get better options, since you can’t conserve ammo for a better weapon by using a worse one. The first two weapons, the aforementioned Vorpal Blade and a deck of cards that you throw as projectiles, were so underpowered that I seriously considered just giving up on the game because combat was so unfun. Fortunately about 45 minutes into the game you get a croquet mallet that has a powerful melee attack and a relatively easy to aim projectile as its alternate fire (all weapons have normal and alternate attacks.) I used this for a good chunk of the game until I got the jacks, which act as a sort of mid range homing damage over time and can kill almost any enemy, including bosses, with a few hits, even though it takes some time. Towards the end of the game you get a powerful staff but it’s very easy to kill yourself with it so I tended to stay away from it, and many of the other weapons just felt like a waste of time, or very situational. For example you get a jack-in-the-box that acts as a time bomb (or a flamethrowing turret) but enemies move so fast that it was very hard to use effectively. There’s also a pocket watch that stops time and that you can apparently only use once. I didn’t know that and used it up to freeze platforms for a jumping puzzle. Oh well.

Once you get the croquet mallet and especially the jacks combat isn’t super hard, but it’s extremely clunky and never feels good. The game tries to make up for its clunky nature by having every enemy drop both life and ammo in various amounts and so you end up tanking a lot of hits and firing your weapon a lot because your resources are constantly being replenished and there’s no incentive to preserve life or ammo. It’s all kind of a mess. There’s a reason you don’t see many third person shooters with an emphasis on platforming, at least without some kind of lock on mechanic, and it’s because the control styles for the two types of games don’t generally mesh well. Here the platforming mostly works but the combat is sloppy and bad. Boss encounters are especially dumb. There are little ammo and health pickups that spawn after a delay and so you spend most of your time shooting the boss until you’re out of ammo and then running around gathering ammo and refilling your life until it’s time to shoot again. It’s not fun or satisfying, and the centipede boss is especially bad because he has a tiny vulnerable spot on his underside that’s rarely exposed and the fight takes a very long time while being extremely boring.

The main reason I actually finished this game is that, being a year 2000 PC game, it features saving at any time, including during boss fights, so I was able to save scum my way through, focusing on each individual challenge until I got past it. So when there were areas where the clunky controls made a platforming section over a bottomless pit into a nightmare, or where a bunch of enemies were swarming me, I could save right before that area and practice it until I got past. If I had to deal with checkpoints I would have given up way before finishing but the ability to avoid repeating sections I had already mastered was enough to keep me engaged.

There are those who will argue that this isn’t really a horror themed game, but I disagree. It’s true that the first few areas aren’t really explicitly horror, though there is significant gore and the Boojums enemies are legitimately unnerving, being flying skeletons with horrible cries that can appear from nowhere and shove you off platforms and that you aren’t well equipped to fight when you first encounter them. But the later areas of the game are more explicitly horrific, with enemies that lean more into phantoms and twisted monsters than more innocuous baddies like giant flowers or playing card soldiers. And there’s some pretty disturbed imagery including biomechanical horrors and plenty of tentacles that would have been pretty spooky at the time. The backstory of the game, where Alice has been driven insane by the horror of losing her family in a fire, also leans into psychological horror so I think it’s fair to call this a horror game even if much of it is about chasing a fluffy bunny down a stream and through a magical forest. It’s just a bit of a slow burn.

I went into Alice thinking that I probably wouldn’t finish it but wanted to see what it was about before I played the sequel (for which the port I played was a piece of free DLC during the days of the “online pass.”) I ended up playing the whole thing, mostly out of nostalgia. I had a lot of fun with early 3D PC games and American McGee’s Alice captures what was enjoyable about that era. It’s kind of a mess and its storytelling is clunky, but it’s also wildly creative in its aesthetics, and its unbalanced and clunky gameplay are unlike anything being made today. The combination of this time capsule effect and the fact that I could save scum my way through was enough to get me to finish the game, and I’d say overall that I enjoyed it. I can’t, on the other hand, really recommend it to anyone else because of all its issues. This is a game that has aged poorly in a way that makes it interesting and preserves the value of its best parts (the very creative visuals and some of the level design) but also magnifies its flaws.

Schlocktober rating: Expired Schlock. If this game were Halloween candy it would be a chocolate bar from 10 years ago that hadn’t gone rancid, but where the chocolate had long since separated out and gotten all powdery and light colored on top like chocolate does. It won’t make you sick, but it doesn’t taste nearly as good as when it was fresh. Maybe it’s a kind of chocolate that they don’t make anymore and you can enjoy it for that reason (as I did) but you have to look past the chalky texture and stale flavor to remember what it would have tasted like when it was fresh.