Oh Look I Have New Alice: Asylum Ideas
*skids into frame and crashes into the wall* Okay yeah, this isn't Forgotten Vows Friday related, and I've already done a post on how I would do the Alice: Asylum game myself, but I was on the Alice Wiki recently, looking up the Ash Dress and reading through the current summary of how the plot might roughly go, based on what’s been shared so far, and I was suddenly smacked in the face with an idea and I kind of have to share it with all of you:
-->Okay, so my original idea was a survival horror/puzzler sort of thing, with a slowly-growing older Alice dealing with fiery monsters chasing her through a maze version of Rutledge. Let's keep that, but intersperse it with the Wonderland chapters McGee's got going. We follow the 5 stages of grief (not trying to shove it into 7 or 8 like McGee's trying to do) -- Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
-->I like "Denial" being the "happy Vale of Tears kind of Wonderland where everyone says everything's fine, but you can see the growing cracks, as exemplified by the dress that's perfect in the front but all burnt and bloody in the back," and Bargaining being "Hatter's Domain in the process of being fully mechanized as he works to save his injured friends, only to start losing sight of why he's doing it." I think the proposed Moon level (you know, the one that was cut out of A:MR) would work well for Depression -- fleeing everything to try and hide in the dark and cold, feeling like nothing could ever be happy or good again. I'm not sure what the "Anger" level would be yet -- but I know it's not McGee's proposed one, where Alice ends up plunging back into the fire. Why?
-->Because that's going to be "Acceptance." Sort of. . . you see, Alice goes into the burning wreckage of her house to confront her memories of what happened that night and to deal with her grief. And as she walks through, she starts having visions of the people she's lost. Except. . .except the house seems bigger than it should be. Grander. And while we see an adult male figure, it doesn't look like Alice's father. And there's no sign of Alice's mother or sister at all. There do seem to be a lot of little kids, though, asking what happened, why they couldn't escape. . .and as she is questioned by these mysterious phantoms, Alice starts ranting about how "she" let them die, "she" let them burn, this is all "her" fault -- in a way that makes it obvious she's not talking about herself. . .
-->Now, to pull back for a moment, one of the enemies (an important one, according to McGee) of the proposed Alice: Asylum is Shadow Alice. (Actually, from the wiki write-up, there might be two Shadow Alices, but let's concentrate on one for now.) From the concept art I've seen, she kind of looks like a bunch of tentacles with an Alice suit. (Ew, yes.) In my version, you'd be fighting this Shadow Alice periodically throughout the Wonderland levels, though you'd never really "best" her -- she'd always disappear after a while. You could also see her lurking in the various landscapes. Her final appearance is this: Alice spots her at the end of a hallway in the fiery house and runs toward her --
