Heads - and eyes - will roll

In their basic structure, most platforming games seem to be the same — you embody some cartoony animal or plumber, your quest is to save the universe from an evil overlord by solving various jumping and shooting puzzles and there's no blood. Instead all creatures explode into a cascade of collectible sparkles, coins or orbs.

Alice: Madness Returns takes the platforming genre in a new direction.

Alice's dark-haired, sardonic protagonist is a refreshing twist on the Disney ditz, especially as she wields her weapons: a bloodstained blade and white-rabbit bombs. Collectible coins for upgrading weapons are replaced by teeth. And you won't find any quirky sing-along songs here. Instead, the broken piano score blends with a nightmarish quality in the visuals to be downright disturbing at times. This is the moody, semi-psychotic rendition I had expected from Tim Burton with Alice's motivation being to save one thing — her own sanity.

Having witnessed the burning of her family home, Alice is under psychological treatment with Wonderland seeming but a symptom of a tortured mind. Still unable to break out of the pain of her past, her nightmare comes crashing into her reality and Alice is sent back — either in reality or in her mind — to Wonderland.

The narrative unfolds as you shape the shards of Alice's past, delving into repressed memories and revealing the intriguing mystery behind the game. The closer Alice gets to unravelling the truth behind her past, the more twisted Wonderland becomes. This is a game with layers, especially if you see each level of Wonderland as a metaphor for Alice's tormented mind.

The visual styling tastes like a warped, anarchic Fable, with sets looking as if they were forged by the hands of Burton himself with a dash of Guillermo del Toro character design and a sprinkling of a Chuck Palahniuk anti-hero. Now that's good eatin', though it's certainly the most satisfying aspect of the game.

The dream-blended world around Alice borders on visionary and artful while the etched, worn character designs have their own style. This Mad Hatter, for instance, was the kind one could believe and fear, though his unique brand of eloquent dialogue and darkened humour did little to quell the growing sense of repetitive tedium that begins to swell mid-game.

Tragically, there is little balance between the captivating art and captivating game-play. Once you've had your fill of tasty visuals, you're left with the dull aftertaste of a crawling narrative, repetitive combat and pedantic puzzle-solving.

The addition of the Shrink Sense to uncover hidden items and locations does add a new dimension to game-play, but it is still fairly straightforward. And though the score is downright dismal and dreamlike at times, it's often too repetitive, foreshadowing the equally repetitive game-play.

The final souring ingredient in this psychotic soufflĂ© is time. The game is epic in its duration, to the point where one wonders why. As intriguing as the storyline is and though the visuals become much more tantalizingly raw as the game progresses, with enemies also becoming more deliciously designed, the repetitive, seemingly never-ending platforming makes the narrative take a back seat — fatal flaw.

Alice is both the best and worst platformer ever made. Its design and maturity, combined with the layering of characters, allows it to rise in complexity above all others. Alice is mature in everything from its premise to its combat to its vernacular, impressively weaving words like fallacious, pusillanimous and “patina of civility” into the story.

But the fun factor inherent to platformers simply wasn't there. The blending of visual metaphor and gothic, twisted designs makes it beautiful at times but the nauseatingly slow pacing and tedious repetitive platforming make it a bore at others.

When he's not teaching junior high, St. Albert Catholic High alumnus Derek Mitchell spends his free time connected to a video game console.