Thoughts On...

American McGee’s Alice

PC, 2000

EA, Rogue Software

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American McGee’s Alice is an older PC game (if you consider 2000 old) that I did not play back in the day but finally got around to a couple of years ago. Even after ‘getting around to it’, it sat in my backlog for two more years. This isn’t because it is a bad game, but because it sits in a pile of other games that I incrementally play through, all the while keeping up with new releases. (It’s hard to be a gamer…) I recently finished it, and here share my thoughts.

Mr. McGee’s Alice is a straightforward action game. There is platforming in the game, and you could say it’s part platformer, but this misses the main drive of the game: moving forward and killing enemies.

It’s more comparable to Quake and Quake II than it is to any of the platformers of its era. This is no surprise given the game’s pedigree: Rogue Software made an expansion pack for both Quake and Quake II, and American McGee began his career in games working for id on Doom II.

Alice is built on the Quake III engine and feels like a mod you had downloaded for the game. The model of Alice running around acts how you would picture the Quake marine running, if you were ever to zoom the camera out to a third-person perspective in that game. You cycle through a weapon roster much like you would in Quake. There was even a moment when an enemy gave me an unintentionally helpful rocket jump, by shooting a projectile right at my feet, which sent me upwards to a higher platform.

So the gameplay is accessible action. For the most part, the game isn’t difficult, save for a few sections of tricky platforming, large numbers of enemies assaulting you at once, or maybe one of the boss battles. But the game’s save-or-quick save-anywhere feature, so wonderfully present in most PC games contemporary to Alice, blunts these segment’s difficulty.

So what do you play this game for? It can be fun to ride through a simple action game. And Alice has some strategy, as certain weapons work better on certain enemies and in certain situations. But the main draw of the game for me was being able to play as Alice in a grim fantasy setting. I also liked the characters you encountered: the dialogue of the Cheshire cat, whenever he appears, is usually well done. The Mad Hatter and other characters from the Wonderland fiction also appear, each in ‘messed-up’ form. And the soundtrack has a Quake I atmospheric-‘chillingness’ to it, appropriate as it is composed by a Nine Inch Nails member, Chris Vrenna. So the draw of Alice is the characters, the setting, and the atmosphere. And the action gameplay is good enough to hold it up.

American McGee’s Alice is a “good, not great” game that you should check out if you are at all interested in PC games of the 90s and early 2000s, or in the works of id Software alum. Oh, and, of course, if you are interested in Alice in Wonderland fiction.