American McGee has recently announced his return to the Alice in Wonderland territory, with a sequel to his quirky third-person horror game from 2000. The game developer showed a lot of confidence, during the EA's press conference held in Tokyo, digging up a ten year-old PC game and reviving it into modern consoles.
The game is entitled Alice: Madness Returns, and it is set eleven years after the first game, where Alice had developed a unique psychosis from her trauma that created the “Wonderland” within her mind, a safe place where she can escape.
Sequels are certainly tricky to pull off. McGee stressed out that every enemy in the game is a puzzle, as players have to find out the weaknesses of each opponent. The player should either have to work hard to seize what makes the opponent thick or build upon it to develop an even better experience, or somehow wipe the slate clean and create something new altogether with a hint of from the original.
The trailer begins in the Veil of Tears, a place full of greenery and flowers that symbolizes a pure and uncorrupted Alice. The peaceful ambiance serves perfectly as a tutorial spot and is aided by Cheshire Cat who still looks like a freaky elongated cat. Alice can get in control with her double-jumping and gliding abilities and has gained the ability to shrink herself at will which is needed to be done in order to crisscross the environment.
The next area shown is the aforementioned Mad Hatter's place. This shady area is filled with mechanical abominations and molten lava. The opponents in this section are the teapots with legs and beasts known as the Ruin that appear to wreck her. According to McGee, the enemies in each level are entirely unique, creating unceasing feeling of change and variety. Throughout the demo, Alice picks up "memories" that serve like the audio logs in Bioshock and fill the player in on important bits of the story.