Easily one of my favorite games of all time, the graphics/controls were ahead of their time and still feel like they've barely aged a day. The writing was fantastic and combined with the unbelievably strong art direction, the whole game has such a strong atmosphere that draws you in and keeps you there. Playing this game for the first time age 15 felt like I was discovering catharsis; Alice is a fantastic protagonist and was a lone gem to me at the time, a mentally ill, wilful and abrasive girl who suffers from abuse and mistreatment on all sides, whose gameplay loop revolves around destroying manifestations of her trauma - and who despite the dark themes of the game she originates from is miraculously unsexualised. The hysteria mechanic was fantastic and genuinely inspired, there is no mechanic I can think of in a game that made me feel the same way; every time the game wanted you to feel powerful, you did. There is a lot I could say about this game and how profoundly it affected me as a psychotic teenage girl with an unhappy home life and frequently useless or harmful doctors. Horror games with themes of insanity or asylums are generally terrible in their representation of the mentally ill, either woefully ignorant or actively harmful, but this game never felt exploitative even once; instead it felt like a vindication on the side of the victim, all at once giving you healing, justice, accountability, sympathy, satisfaction and revenge. It also got everything about the 'horror' of the situation right - in that the outside world's stigma of the mentally ill, the horrors of institutionalisation/medical abuse, and trauma are where the fear comes from, not the person going through these things. Combined with the excellent gameplay, character design, soundtrack, and gorgeous level design, I could gush about this game for hours and never stop. It's something I can come back to over and over again and one of the most important games of all time to me. The only tragedy of this series was how many problems there were during creation due to the greed and restrictions of EA that almost led to its cancellation and have led to its very promising sequel being cancelled. This was the game that got me into games.