Alice: Madness Returns

Is it worth 25 hours? Yes. Provided you accept it as an indie artwork bearing the marks of its era. The 2011 development conditions make its level reuse glaringly obvious. By today’s standards, its texture resolution and camera logic certainly demand a bit of patience to adjust to. Yet, through its remarkably cohesive art direction and sound design, it successfully tucks all those technical shortcomings away inside its atmosphere.

It doesn’t chase the “seamless experience” expected of modern AAA titles. It lets you fumble, lets you lose your way, lets you get tripped up by narrative fragments. This very clumsiness, in fact, becomes part of its character. Like the occasional skip or crackle on an old gramophone—imperfect, but authentically real.

If you’re picking it up now, don’t measure its systemic depth by today’s standards. It’s better experienced as an interactive dark fairy tale. You’ll deal with control quirks, and you’ll hit rough patches of fatigue from repetitive enemy encounters. But when you finally push open that last door and hear the gears click back into place, all those flaws will quietly recede into the background.

It didn’t change the industry. But it did fuse “psychological horror” and “action-platforming” into a distinct flavor that’s incredibly hard to replicate. 25 hours won’t leave you feeling shortchanged. It buys you a wet, dripping dream.

A dark fairy tale worth diving into.