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David Cage's main objective is to make video games more """mature""" (and by mature I mean making a melodrama simulator disguised as a movie disguised as a game).

And to that I say, if every single game was like this one, video games would be terrible, and in that alternate timeline, David Cage would be right!

This review contains spoilers

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall" - Mojo Jojo Cheshire Cat

In a way this is sort of a reflection of many games that suffer from eventually starting to run out of steam or start to get irritating after a while, with (American McGee's) Alice being a very good example of this...

IN FACT, after playing through other games that released after this (particularly Max Payne 1 and 2, Clive Barker's Undying and Prince of Persia The Sands of Time), my opinion on this game was slowly starting to deteriorate over time, where as I originally used to praise this with the "competent, if janky gameplay with good art direction and incredible soundtrack", I my opinion now feels more aligned to this:

"Bad gameplay with good art direction and incredible soundtrack"

And also in a few ways, I start to think more and more that after American McGee left id Software, it seems as though he became more and more someone who has great ideas for stories, AKA an AuTeuR rather than someone who actually knows how to make good video games, which in of itself is fine, Suda51 and Tim Schafer are also other people I could say the same about, the main difference is that their "best" work, particularly Killer7 and Psychonauts respectively, still have generally decent gameplay but have genuinely incredible stories that truly use the medium of video games to their fullest extent, where the more you explore and think about every single bit of imagery appearing, the more information you learn about its characters, their worlds and plots that otherwise you could have just easily brushed off without ever noticing. And this is not even talking about others like Fumito Ueda and Hideo Kojima.

I mean, sure he may not be (and thankfully isn't) a David Cage, where that guy just want to turn games into playable movies, which is just a stupid way of seeing games as "mature", if anything they would just go backwards if that kind of stuff happened, but it seems as though with McGee he tried to do something similar with the people I mentioned in the last paragraph, except that the gameplay (atleast in Alice) is just bad instead of competent-to-good like those two examples I mentioned before, which is baffling because unlike Suda or Tim, he worked on id Software as I mentioned before (as a level designer that is but still, he was one of the OGs), and at the time he worked on id Software, their games were considered the gold standard for first person shooters, particularly DOOM 1/2 and Quake, though to be fair, it was his first attempt in his career not only as the main head behind the game's development, but also his first attempt at doing a game outside the FPS genre so I might be more lenient with some of these issues, but then a few other questions arise:

Did American McGee never play a single good 3D platformer before the development of Alice?

Who in the right mind would use id Tech to make a third person shooter with platforming?

Though the answer for that second question is pretty obvious, since, again, he was once a member of id Software, that and he was working with Rogue Entertainment (one of the developers who had the most experience working with different versions of id Tech alongside Raven Software) as well, so naturally he would probably pick the Quake 3 Arena engine as his choice, doesn't help that another studio called Ritual Entertainment had also used that same engine to make a game with a similar gameplay style called Heavy Metal F.A.K.K 2, so McGee already had somewhat of a basis for what the gameplay of Alice could be.

But now it is about time I started to talk about the game itself, so I shall start with the bad right away, the gameplay... Holy man the gameplay...

Though it doesn't immediately starts out bad, in fact the earlier levels fare relatively well gameplay-wise, even if there are still issues like the impossibly bad melee combat (unlike a Jedi Academy) and cheap death traps in the same veins as the ones present in id Software's Doom, and in fact I don't really mind the ammo for every weapon being tied to a single mana bar (also called Willpower(?) in the game), since throwing the knife Vorpal Blade still deals a relatively good amount of damage against enemies for no cost at the expense of a longer cooldown for each attack (atleast early on), and later on the game introduces even more weapons that are both fun to use and relatively powerful, the Jacks and the Toybox (that's definitely not how it is called but I forgot the name so I will just call it that), the latter in particular is pretty good against bosses since it lights them on fire, making them take damage over time.

But then something happens that derails the combat into the worse, and that point is when you get the Jabberwock Staff, which at first I thought was just the classic McGuffin that would only be used to unlock the path into the Red Queen's Castle and that's it, but it is actually a weapon, a way too overpowered one at that, it throws a huge cock into the weapon balancing, and just about annihilates every single enemy coming at you, combine this with the overwhelming amount of enemies the game throws at you in certain levels after getting the Jabberwock Staff and the relatively low amounts of mana the weapon costs, it makes every single weapon completely redundant and trivializes almost all combat sections.

But combat isn't the only activity you will be engaging with throughout the game, there is also platforming, and again, I still wonder whether American McGee had played any good 3D platformer before the development of this game, because the platforming here sucks badly!!! Even if this game was released only a few years after the first major ones started to appear in the market, Super Mario 64 was released on the same year Quake 2 released, so I wonder why didn't McGee take atleast a few more cues from that game when it comes to the platforming in this game, since at the time it was one of the staples of 3D platformers. Alice's jump is really borked and feels like jumping in the moon, whenever you grab a ledge your camera turns into Alice's back which can really fuck up your jumps at times, and lastly are the certain platforming challenges involving those annoying flying demons that screech at you, pushing Alice into death pits, forcing you to savescum even more than what you would normally do everywhere else in the game, it sometimes manages to be as bad, if not worse than the platforming sections of Max Payne 1.

And I didn't even touch on the level design of this game, because honestly it is just mostly fine (if pretty unremarkable), most combat sections take place in tight hallways, with the boss arenas mostly being just big circles, with only the Red Queen's boss fight particularly standing out (in general I would say) and the platforming segments (when they aren't excruciatingly annoying due to certain enemies) have a fine level design that would have been much more welcome in other 3D platformers with much better controls.

But to be honest, while in terms of gameplay it fumbles pretty badly in certain areas, it is everything else that truly makes me like this game more than I would normally.

I will just start with the art direction first, which is generally really good (heck I love even the cover art). This distorted and demonic version of Wonderland is absolutely brought to life with the fantastic(al) characters and environmental designs, bringing characters from the classic Lewis Carroll story into the nightmarish territory with details that already made them odd further accentuated and new details that make them more terrifying than ever, particularly the Cheshire Cat with its exaggeratedly devilish Chuck Jones's The Grinch-esque grin(ch), and don't even get me started on the environments, making certain levels that would otherwise be very forgettable into something more special, and there is a decent variety of them too, with my personal favorites being the Pale Realm and even the Red Queen's Castle have a really strong visual design to it, mixing the architecture you would expect from the castle of the Queen of Hearts in the original story with the lovecraftian-esque fleshy tentacles devouring it, and those levels are pretty open in space (while still linear) so they have more time to shine, and then we have the Mad Hatter's Domain, mixing the already demonic architecture of this version of Wonderland and further complementing it with the mechanical monstrosities created by the Mad Hatter himself found in those levels. In general the art direction is an absolute sight to behold, and I played this on the original 2000s release, so I can bet that it may look even better on the remaster.

However, if there is one thing that will always sound great regardless is the soundtrack, composed by Chris Vrenna from Nine Inch Nails (originally going to be Marilyn Manson of all people), and I gotta say, unlike the engine used for this game, choosing him as the composer for this soundtrack was the perfect pick, the OST elevates this game to me (alongside the general art direction and story). The soundtrack evokes more Tim Burton rather than Nine Inch Nails in many ways, managing to be both whimsical and haunting at the same time, with the strong presence of the chorus making some songs all the more harrowing, but alongside the chorus there are also a bunch of rather unconventional instruments like clocks and bells, sometimes constantly ticking throughout the song, all in harmony with the main instruments to further contribute to this game's atmosphere, one of a dying mind and world, where hope still persists in the saving of it, and Alice is the key to saving Wonderland. Easily one of my favorite soundtracks in any game ever.

I deliberately decided to relegate the story to way later, since I wanted to get the rest out of the way first. There is a book that originally came with the game that would explain in more detail the events that occurred before the start of the game, but for the purposes of this review I will ignore it, since I find it rather unfair to judge a game's story based on supplementary material.

But even then, the story of this game, while superficially its pretty standard, it becomes more interesting when you start delving deeper into it. Alice's story themes are deeply rooted in traumas and troubled pasts, and her house getting lit on fire, killing her entire family, scarred her for the rest of life, and her mental scars not only turned Wonderland into a devilish and decaying world, but also got carried over to there as well, and this is evident not only by the fact the arena for the first Jabberwock boss fight takes place in a burning house, but also the first level in the Mad Hatter's domain (called Beyond the Looking Glass in the game) taking place in a asylum, and you fight Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, shown to be treating Alice in that horrible asylum, that and its distorted and cerebral design both in visuals and level design further show signs that Alice was abused and mistreated in that Asylum, further contributing to her frail mental state. Its also very fitting that the Cheshire Cat (played by the legendary Roger Jackson) is Alice's main companion throughout the game, since her cat was one of the few survivors of that incident with the house burning alongside her, so for many years the cat was her only real companion.

This game's Queen of Hearts honestly deserves her own paragraph, she is possibly one of my favorite villains in any game, easily in my top 10, there is a lot to her. First of all, one touch I really love about her is that, despite some characters referencing her, you never actually get to know how she actually looks like until the very end of the game, which adds a almost lovecraftian feel to her character. But wait, there's more, she isn't called the Queen of Hearts for nothing, the Hearts part is particularly important, since as mentioned by the Centipede earlier on in the game, you must defeat her to make Wonderland great again, but she is not just the HEART of all the horrors of Wonderland, she is the embodiment of Alice's traumas all into one, deeply rooted into Alice's mind, and to defeat her means also escaping the cycles of guilt and suffering from all the scars that came from the past (scars which are represented by the three frames with the Jabberwock, Tweedle-who and the Mad Hatter, all representing three of Alice's traumatic scars), but traumas aren't that easy to escape from, and it becomes more obvious by what she says before her second phase:

"I rule Wonderland alone.Your interference will not be tolerated. This realm is for grown ups alone; raw, well-ordered, ruthless, careening on the jagged edge of reality. Self-pitying dreamers are not allowed here; they cannot survive here."

"You fear the truth. You live in shadows. Your pathetic attempts to reclaim your sanity have failed. Retreat to the sterile safety of your self-delusions, or risk inevitable annihilation."

"If you destroy me, you destroy yourself! Leave now and some hollow part of you may survive. Stay, and I will break you down; you will lose yourself forever."

But despite everything, she still manages to defeat her, and manages to save both her mental state and Wonderland, while being capable of moving on from the scars of her past instead of clinging onto them for years to come. The last thing I want to gush about the Red Queen before finally moving on is her amazing boss fight (the first phase that is), her boss fight not only has a unique design for her arena, but is also far more challenging while still being fair, having attacks that can be devastating but still be dodged using the pillars present in the level, too bad her second phase is so disappointingly easy (doesn't help that you can get the secret weapon there too, in which you can't in the first phase unless you went through a secret passage way before her boss fight).

I may have been a bit of a asshat towards McGee in those first few paragraphs, but really, despite all of the mechanical failings of this game, he still managed to make something so unmistakably of his own mind, with such a incredible art direction and especially marvelous soundtrack by Vrenna, with a story that manages to have more than meets the eye and is somewhat inspired by American McGee's life, it is very evident he put his heart and soul into this game.

It is a genuine piece of ART, maybe mechanically failing art, but still absolute ART!

Edit: In fact, I take back what I said about I started to slowly dislike this game more and more, I might even like it more and more as I think about it.

This review contains spoilers

(I played this on the CD-ROM version of the game!)

As we see the logo for Cyberdreams, as they are "developing new ways to amaze", we see some sort of strange alien ship reaching somewhere in a alien world, and then the name Dark Seed appears and the alien world is replaced by the image of a mansion, and then we see Mike Dawson getting impregnated by a alien embryo...

After a horrying nightmare, Mike Dawson awakens to the first day on his new house...

And now its up for Mike Dawson to find out about all the strange events happening in Woodland Hills.

HR Giger is one of the most well known artists in history, particularly when it comes to horror, alongside Junji Ito and Zdzislaw Beksinski. He was responsible for many things throughout his career, whether that thing is, of course, Ridley Scott's Alien, ELP (Emerson, Lake & Palmer)'s Brain Salad Surgery and much more. Giger has a very iconic style for his paintings, in this case his beatifully grotesque industrial hellscapes of flesh and steel, where man and machine were combined while tackling other mature themes like death, suicide, sex and more.

Obviously, other people would be inspired by Giger's paintings to create something equally as "RAD" (insert Darkwood here), but then we have Dark Seed, developed by Cyberdreams, a studio which would go on to develop the cult classic I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, based on the short story of the same name by Harlan Ellison, before that though they made this, and unlike I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, this game has kind of fallen into obscurity over the years, and after playing it, I can perfectly see why...

Because it's BAD, I could even say AWFUL!!!

Before I start tearing through it however, I want to start with the positives (which there aren't a lot to be honest):

First of all, visually it looks really good for its time. Initially the game was going to run on the standard 320x200 resolution that most games adopted, but Giger felt like it wasn't enough to handle his art, so he demanded Cyberdreams to increase the resolution to a higher standard (while reducing the amount of colors to 16 instead of the standard 256 at the time), and it shows. The Normal World and the spritework present in there makes Woodland Hills feel like a truly desolate town, separate from the rest of the world, with all the clashing between different kinds of architecture further contributing to it, and then we have the Dark World, coming directly from the mind of HR Giger, and most of his artwork is integrated astoundingly well, giving this genuinely creepy contrast to the Normal World's sterile but at the same time human town. Although it isn't perfect, the Keeper of the Scrolls is just a poor man's copy of Li 2, and the human spritework is somewhat dated, with Mike Dawson sticking out kind of badly in comparison to the otherwise fantastic background artwork, but in general these are rather minor complaints (especially in comparison to the other awful shit this game does). Like, when you look at a lot of the earlier LucasArts point and click adventure games from the 90s specifically they can kind of blend together, but this game's artwork make it unmistakably Dark Seed (and HR Giger), which is one of the reasons why I love games like Westwood's Blade Runner and Machinarium so much.

The only thing I like about the story of the game is the genuine mystery surrounding the Dark World, where even after beating it we still don't know a lot about it aside from the things we met there, but rather than hindering it, further makes the Dark World all the more ominous and otherworldly than it already is when combined with its art direction.

And speaking of art direction, I will say this: The HR Giger stuff is what truly make this game have even a single bit of ACTUAL ATMOSPHERE (since it would otherwise have probably fallen into obscurity even harder), because almost everything else besides these two things (and a few others) range from mediocre to HILARIOUSLY AWFUL!

First of all, the gameplay is abysmal. While functionally it is pretty simple, you have three different actions you can do with the mouse (walk, interact and examine), the real problem comes from everything else surrounding it, which is the embodiment of everything wrong with point and click adventure games: Pixel hunting? CHECK (out that bobby pin)! Moon logic (or should I say, Dark World logic)? CHECK! Dead ends (at jail)? CHECK! Timed events? Well guess what? CHECK! It's just unbearable, and as I mentioned, there are so many ways to get softlocked for commiting a mistake, whether that is not picking a item beforehand, not using a item at the correct time, or for fuck sake, even PICKING a item earlier will punish you. It's truly the "Dumb Ways To Die!" of point and click adventure games!

But if there is one point in the game which is like the EPITOME of bad in this game, what is it then? Well, there is one point in the game where you are sent into jail (because the aliens from the Dark World are controlling the police force in the Normal World, somehow), let me count all the times you can get softlocked just because of all the sections involving the jail (both the Normal World and Dark World ones):

1 - Not getting Delbert's business card (because you didn't buy the Scotch at the shop using the money that you probably forgot even existed).
2 - Getting the gun before getting sent into jail (straight up punishing players for doing certain steps earlier, wowie).
3 - Not putting atleast one of the three items under the pillow (one of those items aren't even twenty pixels large).
4 - Not putting the rope in the gargoyle statue at the Balcony (remember that chest and that crowbar).
5 - Using the invisibility headband at the wrong time (if you use the invisibility headband and reach the entrance to the alien jail, you're toasted).

The first three examples can happen just at that ONE moment you visit the jail in the Normal World ALONE. And a lot of those are plagued by the other problems like pixel hunting or moon logic.

I think that the way the game was designed is that you would ALWAYS lose the game atleast once when trying to beat this game (if you don't use a walkthrough or didn't get spoiled on the """""puzzles""""" beforehand), and you would need to bash your skull against the biomechanical walls of the Dark World over and over and over again until finally beating it, combine this with the slow movement and the atrocious comments Mike Dawson says when entering certain screens for the first time, restarting the game to get back at where you lost is made all the more agonizing by them. Though if I were to praise one thing about the gameplay, is that conceptually the idea of doing certain things in one dimension affecting the other is really creative, even if one of the few puzzles involving this idea present in this game is completely ridiculous and riddled with moon logic and dead ends, but other games such as.... UUUUUUUHHH... I guess The Messenger? (I know that's an nonsensical game to use as example in comparison to Dark Seed, but its one of those games that used a similar concept in much better ways).

Well, finally moving on, while the mystery and intrigue about Dark Seed's setting is certainly interesting, it could have been further enhanced if every single character wasn't thinner than an ant. While I can give the Dark World inhabitants somewhat of a pass since the Dark World does have the benefit of being an inherently mysterious setting (even if they are still shallow) plus their cool as hell designs (barring Keeper of the Scrolls), the characters from the Normal World unfortunately don't get that same treatment, but the worst offender for all of the characters is the unholy Mike Dawson.

Who the fuck is HR Giger?! Mike Dawson is the REAL draw to this game! His character is so asinine it makes the game almost hilarious to watch (NOT PLAY, JUST WATCH), his comments on almost everything is like the most obvious shit imaginable drawn out to multiple lines of nonsense, like, NO SHIT DAWSON, of course that is the inside of a police station!!! And who would have known that books manage to be scarier than a baby doll turning into a biomechanical monster? Well, I guess Mike Dawson is the one! Mike Dawson is somehow more otherworldly than the actually otherworldly creatures from HR Giger's paintings, and the voice of Mike doesn't help at all, even when he is facing those monstrous amalgamations of flesh and steel in the Dark World, he acts like nothing interesting is happening, he is just that much of a dorky chad!

I am almost reaching the end of this review I swear, I just want to talk about the music and voice acting, music is a mixed bag, sometimes ear damaging songs that feel like they came out of a baby show but make even System Shock 1 sound like exploring relaxing soundscapes in a Frutiger Aero world, sometimes they do manage to integrate pretty well into the game, the Dark World ones are thankfully not the Baby Shock (a mix of baby shows from the real TLC and System Shock 1) nonsense of the Normal World bar the cemetery (even that is ear bleeding though), but that's all par from the course at this point. The voice acting is mediocre (aside from the Dark World ones, which may not have good voice ACTING, but they do sound ominous for once, except the cop one, he sounds like a 65 year old man), but so was most voice acting from most games in the early 90s so I can give it a pass, Mike Dawson is GOD though!

I do acknowledge I was perhaps a tad too harsh on this game (heck even my rating is rather harsh), I had just beaten Blade Runner again the day prior to beating this, but one thing I can say for sure, I do not recommend playing this game, even if you want to play it for the HR Giger artwork or the ironic enjoyment of hearing Mike Dawson babbling about stuff, its not enough to redeem the infuriating gameplay this game generally suffers from, and in fact when I think more about this game, this reeks of a case where they had the cheese and knife at their hands, but they threw the cheese in the trash and put their knife in the ass, it may have been great at its time despite all the issues, but nowadays is just a spoiled relic of its time.

Truly a rough start to the studio that went on to make I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream!