Are any of y'all playing the new Alice game yet?

Because holy crap. I am in chapter 4 of 6 and I am adoring it so hard. Even though I'm pretty crap at platforming and fall to my doom like clockwork. The design is beautiful, the combat is exciting and smooth, the supporting cast is creepy in a very cool way, Alice herself is an awesome character to root for, and I could listen to the Cat purr at me all day.


Also, for all that it looks like they're trying to be EDGY!1!! with the visuals sometimes, I feel like thematically they're doing something really relevant to the original story. It's darker and less silly, but I think that's understandable when dealing with an older Alice. Where the original looked at the controlling systems that kept little girls in line, and exposed them as ridiculous, this game is looking at the controlling systems that kept young Victorian women in line, and indicting them as horrific. It seems very clear from all the hints in the narrative, the parallels between London characters and Wonderland characters, the bonus text on her "treatment" in the hospital, the fragments of memory she recovers -- the original source of her trauma was the fire, but the brutality of the system around her and the predatory attitudes of the people charged with taking care of her are at fault for worsening her condition to the point of "madness."

And I love that the story is about her taking charge of her own situation -- that she recognizes the problems in Wonderland as something that only she can fix, and that Wonderland is treated as a representation of her mental landscape rather than her mental illness: she's not expected to put her Wonderland aside, the way the men in her memories coax her to do; rather, she needs to take care of it and help it thrive, because her imagination is a crucial part of her self.

Where I am right now, we're coming up on a confrontation with the Queen of Hearts, who -- okay, there are a few spoilers in this bit -- seems to be really strongly associated with Alice's older sister; the game has been pointing at predatory male desire for women as problematic for a while now, and especially with the memories in this chapter, and I really hope that when Alice and the Queen come face to face they don't botch the handling of that theme.


In short: I was expecting to like this game on a much more shallow level than I do!