 From conception to design, from narrative to atmosphere, American McGee's Alice is a work of profound passion; a game designed to express so much more than its technical elements and medium might suggest. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the score, which is a thing of disturbing, ambient beauty, A strange and obscure beasty this time around, my loves, but one with a fervent and abiding cult following, of which I happily count myself a part: American McGee's Alice hit the PC in the latter 1990s/early 2000s, back when PC gaming was flourishing, becoming not only a viable platform, but one where innovation, wild experimentation and revolutions in the medium were the norm. Marketed as a bleakly psychological sequel to Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland, the game finds an older, teenage Alice confined to a Victorian insane asylum following a fire that destroyed her home and claimed the lives of her family. Catatonic since the event, she recedes deeper and deeper into a version of Wonderland that is slowly warping and decaying as her mind turns in on itself. Familiar settings and characters become Jungian metaphors for aspects of her psyche; components of the mental disease slowly corrupting her mind. Once the manifestation of her childhood imagination, Wonderland is now a place of bizarre horrors and arbitrary cruelties. Shattered, broken “...careening on the jagged edge of reality,” Alice must navigate the distorted dreamscapes in order to defeat those parts of herself that are slowly poisoning her, and restore some semblance of sanity to a world on the edge of collapse. The game distinguished itself not through revolutionary technicals -though it was graphically impressive for the era-, but via its conception, atmosphere and design, all of which conspire to create a Wonderland quite unlike anything that had been seen before. A place of inconstant, twisting, hallucinogenic horrors, the subtle wit of the game lies in its taking of familiar characters, tropes and archetypes and suffusing them with disturbing thematic qualities. The Mad Hatter, for example, beloved by fans of the original books and Disney cartoon adaptation, is here an obsessive and unpredictable lunatic, fascinated with clockwork, time and mechanical contrivances. He himself is a distorted grotesque; gigantic, spindle-limbed, clockwork augmentations protruding from his back and limbs, he accuses Alice of “dawdling” and never having a grasp on time. Likewise, the Jabberwock, manifestation of Alice's guilt over the fire that claimed her parents, is a steampunk, bio-mechanical monstrosity; a draconic horror that assaults Alice emotionally as well as with its fiery breath, snarling accusations that see her collapse in near-total abjection. The game is well remembered for its delirious settings, that are as sincere a manifestation of a diseased dreamscape as might be found in a video game, and the lustrously gothic flourishes in its design. Whilst incongruously cute, it's also twisted, nightmarish and disturbing, that dichotomy escalating and escalating to the game's eventual climax, when Alice finds the very heart of her malady in the body-horror hellscape of The Queen of Heart's realm. A palace of living flesh and bone, it is here that Alice encounters the face of her insanity, and finds that it is her own. Whilst the game is visually impressive and vividly recalled for incredible visual work and visionary design, Chris Vrenna's score is equally worthy of note. Without it, the disturbia of the game would be much reduced, as would the sense of urgency that escalates as the story progesses and Alice's mind tangibly collapses around the player. Beginning with distortedly jaunty, warped nursery-rhyme tunes, the score soon descends into distressing, industrial tones that wouldn't be out of place on a Nine Inch Nails album. Throughout, Vrenna flourishes the soundtrack with moments of discord and incongruous cries, moans; voices in lament or pain. It's a truly beautiful, unsettling piece of work that more closely echoes the likes of Silent Hill or Shadow Man than other fantastical contemporaries.  Arguably one of the most notable tracks accompanies the lacrimose “Veil of Tears” area; a fog-shrouded realm of Autumnal streams and rivers fed by the tears of crying statues, it is the manifestation of Alice's grief over her lost family and the life she once led, but also the fey and dallying childhood that no longer exists, the Wonderland that can never be again. Here, the score dips into slow and resonant elegies; strains of slow violins accompanying voices that weep and moan exclamation, suffusing the entire area with a palpable sense of oppressive despair. Later, in the Mad Hatter's clockwork, industrial realm (where Alice's subconscious experiences of the asylum itself have melded with her imaginary world, creating a condition that is neither waking reality nor the realm of her dreams), the score's industrial elements ramp up; sounds of clockwork, cogs, steaming engines married to distorted musical boxes, broken instruments and fizzing, hissing electricity. This is arguably the point where the true extent of Alice's malady becomes apparent in both the score and setting, both of which paint a picture of a fractured mind slowly falling apart under the weight of its own grief. When Alice finally breaches the gates and labyrinths that protect The Queen of Heart's land, the score swells into a bleakly epic state, choral yet cancerous, celebratory yet horrific. Here, Alice walks the depths of her subconscious mind, where the very darkest of her drives and impulses have congealed and become manifest in The Queen of Hearts. Whilst undoubtedly horrific in design, the score accompanying Alice's confrontation with her inner-self is a masterwork of sublime horror; a throbbing, arterial strain that incorporates motifs from all of the game's prior environments and encounters, communicating without ambiguity that here is the heart of all darkness, the very root of the sentient cancer spreading throughout her imaginary world and slowly unraveling her sanity. From conception to design, from narrative to atmosphere, American McGee's Alice is a work of profound passion; a game designed to express so much more than its technical elements and medium might suggest. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the score, which is a thing of disturbing, ambient beauty, that elevates the final work into the condition of a delirious fever-nightmare, as obsessively engaging as it is bizarre, and more than worthy of the abiding passion it receives from its advocates, all these many years later. Check out Part One of Thirteen for Halloween here HORROR SOUNDTRACKS - SHADOW MAN THIRTEEN HORROR SOUNDTRACKS: THE MIST CHECK OUT TODAY'S OTHER ARTICLES BELOW  THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR PROMOTION WEBSITES Comments are closed.
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