Few things are so despised among serious gamers as movie tie-in games. Quickly and shoddily made, they take the movie’s characters, put in some generic gameplay and throw in random scenes from the movie that are meaningless out of context. So while the action-adventure game Alice in Wonderland is not the best game to come out for the Wii this year, its developers, Étranges Libellules, deserve praise for making a sincere and often successful attempt to make a real game with a real story out of a film.
The Story: An Adult Alice Re-Enters Wonderland
Like the Tim Burton-directed movie upon which it is based, Alice follows the story of a young woman named Alice who is lured into a strange, underground world by a white rabbit. Once she arrives, the characters argue about whether she is the Alice they have been searching for. She has no idea who they are or what is going on.
Games usually give you the basic premise of a story and then skip from moment to moment, creating an incoherent mess (as has been the case with Harry Potter games). Often it seems the developers are afraid to give away the story of the movie. But in Alice, you are given a reasonably complete, if truncated, retelling of the movie from the point at which Alice runs away from an unattractive suitor and into a rabbit hole. If you play the game, you actually will know how the story unfolds and how it turns out. Since the movie was rather forgettable to begin with, the game is probably just as good a way to enjoy it’s rather clever premise.
The player does not control Alice, instead being in charge of the White Rabbit and the other characters she meets, who include the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry, a stand out among the several members of the film’s cast who repeated their roles for the game).
Gameplay: Talented Companions Tackle Easy Puzzles
These characters have various special powers that allow Alice to bypass obstacles. The White Rabbit, for example, controls time, stopping whirling objects or rewinding the calendar. The March Hare levitates things while the Cheshire Cat can reveal hidden doors and objects.
The Mad Hatter has the most interesting power. He can look at things from a different perspective, making him able to look at two objects from a perspective that will make them one, useful object. It actually isn’t used as interestingly as it could have been, but it is a clever idea.
The game is a mix of generally simple puzzles and generally simple combat, both of which require use of the powers of Alice’s friends. The only time I got stuck in a puzzle it was because the game required the player to call Alice, a technique that had been introduced hours before but was never needed until that moment. This is a huge design flaw – you always make players do something a few times early on so they have it in their mind, and you don’t introduce a technique that’s only needed once in an entire game – but eventually I hit the right button by accident and continued on. For the most part, though, puzzles are pretty obvious, and the game throws huge numbers of hints at you in case you are ever in the slightest doubt about what to do next.
Combat: Too Much of a So-So Thing
Combat generally involves playing cards coming out of portals and attacking. While Alice’s companions can simply hit the cards, they acquire various combat powers through the game that are more interesting. The Mad Hatter, in typical skewed perspective fashion, can hold his hand up in front of a card and crush it as though it were a normal playing card. The March Hare can lift up an attacker and hurl it to the ground.
While powers are fun, for the most part you can just use them interchangeably, so there’s not much in the way of strategy. I generally used the White Rabbit’s handy ability to made enemies follow their footsteps backwards to re-enter the portholes, using other powers only for the sake of variety. Unfortunately, battles are repetitive and far too common.
Conclusion: An Above-Average Movie-Based Game
While the gameplay is generally conventional, some of it is quite fun. I enjoyed a traipsing through the desert following a ribbon that sometimes disappeared into the sand and was quite entertained by the final boss battle, in which you have to use your various techniques to help Alice kill the Jabberwocky.
I probably enjoyed the game more than many players would simply because I’m a huge fan of the Alice books, which I have read countless times. The gameplay is fun but forgettable and the story, while rather clever, is served up with middling cut scenes and indifferently written dialogue.
But then, that can be said of 99% of all movie tie-in games, and I give the game credit simply for trying to be something more than a slapdash title relying entirely on its namesake’s popularity. The success of movie tie-in games does not, sadly, rest with the quality of the game, but only with the success of the movie itself, so realistically the developers could have put far less effort into their game and made the same amount of money. Compared to the great games of this world, Alice is a very slight endeavor, but compared to other film-based games, Alice is as magical as Wonderland.
