"When Alice answers a distressed summons to return to Wonderland, she barely recognizes the befouled setting. From the fungal rot of the Mushroom Forest to the infernal chemistry of the Mad Hatter's Domain and beyond, Wonderland festers to its core. Undaunted by the diseased ambiance, cavernous confusion, and mortal danger that surround her, Alice must undo the chaos. Equipped with courage, a keen appetite for the bizarre, and a lethal array of transmogrified toys, she'll penetrate the strongholds of her enemies, confront the forces of evil, and put the wicked Queen of Hearts in her place."
I originally got this because the authoring tool we use for class is also based on Alice in Wonderland, and this looked pleasantly subversive. Try the demo yourself.
Technical
While preparing this article one of the first things I noticed is that it's stable! I was able to run the game in a window and toggle between Paint and Word. This was a lot more difficult with Gunman Chronicles.
Changing Settings
While consistent with the dementia theme, the phrenology chart on the left makes it difficult to quickly choose what you'd like to change, and users aren't going to memorize the numbers. The mirror image of Alice on the right doesn't do anything except on the Controls page, where the controls you adjust make Alice move appropriately. Changing weapons commands shows the attack animation without having a sense of the pros and cons the weapon, so it's hard to determine how to remap keys. The mirror image could be used when changing video settings to preview changes, but otherwise it sets up expectation that it will be used for something.
Load/Save
The overarching problem on this page is a lack of direct mapping. The larger screen on the right provides a better image of the saved game as well as the scene name and timestamp, but gives no way for the user to know which thumbnail it's enlarging. Complicating matters, if the user clicks on a blank thumbnail spot the large screen reloads with the last valid saved game s/he was looking at. Also users can't rearrange or rename thumbnails because Alice stores saved games in the next available slot, making it difficult to organize files when two users are playing the game concurrently. Having the timestamps helps somewhat but it would be nice to scan them all at once.
In the lower right corner are the letters LSD (for Load Save Delete). It's cute, but confusing and unnecessary to abbreviate. Also, the buttons look similar to the decorative divots. Making the thumbnails themselves clickable and removing buttons would reduce redundancy and confusion. Having multiple pages only adds to the confusion.
Alice prompts you before deleting saved games, which is commendable--interfaces should support an undo function or warn the user if they're going to do something irreversible. Conversely, there is no error message if users try saving a game before they're actually playing one. This is mostly a moot point since it will probably be only discovered by cranky people who like to break interfaces.
Controls
Rather than using Up to Climb, Alice uses the Enter Key by default, which is difficult to reach and not consistent with most games. Similarly, Change Weapon is [] by default, not the mouse wheel, and is difficult to reach when your left hand's out at the default WASD movement keys.
The Controls page has two buttons: Back and Reset. The three other setting pages have Apply and Cancel. Back and Cancel bring the user back to the Setting page without changes, while Apply brings them back with changes. Reset, however, resets not only the Controls, but also Video and Game controls (not audio for some reason), and brings you back to the Main Menu. I expected Reset to change only the Controls, and not anything else.
Interface
The health/magic bars are on opposite sides, making it hard to scan. Also there's no context for what weapons are available since it only shows the currently selected one.
Gameplay
The intro is long--it's 20 seconds for the title alone and a minute until you even see Alice, with 1:50" total before the sequence finishes. Then it starts loading the next sequence--and it's 22 seconds through that until you can even play. There isn't much consideration for the limited attention span of users. More frustratingly, users can't skip the intro - hitting Esc repeatedly only gets you to the Main Menu. Later, users can skip sequences; I think the intro isn't skippable because the whole level was a cutscene. This inconsistency in handling sequences led me to believe I could skip them later. No, actually I tried skipping some of the Chesire Cat monologues later to no avail. Suck. Speaking of which, the Cheshire cat is annoyingly patronizing, much like Microsoft Assistant.
Sometimes there's weird or cheesy dialogue: "You have the key! Very resourceful. Rabbit's confidence is not misplaced. He is no fool." This isn't any better than "All your base are belong to us," and they can't blame it on poor translation.
Consistency wise, there's already blood on Alice's apron in the intro, and there's no explanation of why she's in a asylum where books float, large tentacles abound, and a white rabbit appears to break down the walls.
Some of the puzzles seem arbitrary and not very One puzzle turns you into a bishop where you had to maneuver about a chess board floor with obstacles like spikes and holes.
Jumping puzzles suck. However, when you fall off some ledges into the abyss the game puts you back where you fell off without any damage. This is nice because it gives the sensation that this isn't supposed to be frustrating. It's not nice when you have to wait for the flying floor to reset itself. In one jumping puzzle, they stopped me in my tracks with a lollipop which made a portal appear in a cutscene! I don't understand the correlation between lollipop and portal, and was frustrated that I'd have to redo the jump.
Why are there rotating footprints when you look at the ground? They keep spinning without orienting you to your next goal, which I thought they might do.
The alternate attack for the knife is throwing it, with a delay before it reappears. This is cool and makes sense to balance weapon usage. The Jack in the box bomb/flame rules.
The flying ghoul felt prepackaged from Quake. Also the color design to differentiate between the different card types (black spades for melee only, red hearts for firing) felt uninspired and much like changing the elemental types in Final Fantasy games. "Now face the ICE version of this boss!"
When you fall into water, the current pushes you down the waterfall and back to the beginning of the level. While the current was a nice touch, having to start over wasn't. Thus I used quick save often, but this shouldn't be used as a crutch for frustrating level design.
In homage to Indiana Jones, the user must run away from a large round rock down a spiraling path. Unfortunately there's no sense of realistic physics; the rock stays on its same circular path without running up the sides or gaining speed. At the end of the path the user picks up a cricket and drinks from it, mutating and growing wings in a game-pausing cutscene, sometimes with the rock frozen impotently in the background. The user is then confronted with a large chasm and has no chance to experiment and see what their new abilities are. I often jumped to the wrong spot because I didn't have time to adjust to the new jumping style.
The ending was really cool and left me wanting more, which is exactly what you want a demo to do. Tweedle Dee (Dum) flys in and slams the floor around you, and you fall into a pit, presumably to fight.
|