Published by Nintendo

Rated “E” for Everyone. Contains mild cartoon violence

It’s rare to find a puzzle adventure that will make you “squee” in delight. For the Nintendo DS Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland movie has been turned into an original animated adventure that shares the same story and characters, but expresses them with a graphic novel style that reminds me of Roman Dirge, Johnen Vasquez, Edward Gorey, and Genndy Tartakovsky. It’s macabre cute, comedic in expression and witty in banter. Little Alice daintily prances and smiles behind her bunny protector as he leads her, big-eyed and apprehensive, through dark, purple landscapes with tree branches that reach down like tentacles to pull them through teleporting doors. He calls her silly, she calls him big ears, and they banter and tease each other like school chums as they try to search for other characters and solve inventive puzzles. As a movie adaptation it’s one of the most inspired and as a handheld game, it’s delightful.

The story is Tim Burton’s idea of a sequel to the Lewis Carroll books. Ten years have passed, during which the tyrannical Queen of Hearts has taken over the land using the might of her soldiers and the power of the Jabberwocky to transform the land from a fantasy garden into a nightmare world. As it was Alice that first out-smarted the Queen those many years ago, the animals and characters of the land reach up and pull her back down into theirs to be the hero and save the day.

The game is created by a studio in France, Etranges Libellules (Strange Dragonfly), who have been given a great deal of freedom by Burton to be artists, to match his sensibilities with a wholly different visual style, and to reinterpret his story in their own way. They also created the Nintendo Wii version, where they had the actors’ likenesses and voices and did their best to match the movie’s look and feel. The results are mixed and you can feel that they struggled with the task. With the DS version it’s immediately apparent that they are completely at home in their own world.

In their version the Queen has also torn the land asunder, scattering sections of the land like one giant jigsaw puzzle. The main task is still the same, to find the magic weapons and confront the Queen’s power, but now even as the characters know where everything is, they no longer know where “is” is and as you travel, your task is also to collect the pieces and reassemble the land. Sometimes in ways that make travelling easier.

Tim Burton insisted that Alice not be a playable character and so instead she is the person you have to protect using either McTwisp (White Rabbit) Absolem (Caterpillar), Chessur (Cheshire Cat) or the Mad Hatter. When the Queen’s soldiers appear, she runs off screaming and hiding to comic effect while you deal with them with one of the others, using flicks of the stylus to activate attacks and dodges. If one of the soldiers nabs Alice, they drag her to a portal to be sucked through, giving you scant time to either finish the fight or break away to run over and pull her back.

Playing the rescuee instead of the rescuer didn’t give Alice much of a role in the Wii version, but here on the DS she takes part in the way the characters interact with each other and the world, having fun with wordplay and slang. After their first fight with the Knave, Alice calls him a “big loser” and he responds “well, obviously you cheated”. Alice sums up her task to defeat the Jabberywocky as to “wock the wocky” and when she discusses puzzles, teases MacTwisp with a “geddit?”.

Puzzles are the main activity of the game and the centre around each of the character’s special powers. MacTwisp can control time, speeding up the rate that a worm eats a giant apple so you can get past, or pause furniture caught in a tornado to create a stairway to climb. Absolem can use paths made of mist to reverse gravity, to walk on ceilings and along precarious paths. Chessur can control visibility, making some obstacles disappear and needed tools appear. Hatter uses his strange perception to “flip” the world around in an impressive 3D effect so you can explore its mirror image to uncover hidden paths.

With clock mechanics, rickety windmills, and glistening castles, these puzzles are clever, but never to hard and the way they are combined with platform levels is always rewarding, and again create a constant relationship with Alice and her peers as they have to help her climb ledges and jump gaps using their hats, tails, and out-stretched paws.

Amongst this wild creativity is a fun use of the built-in camera on the Nintendo DSI. Those who use the alternate version of Nintendo’s handheld will find multi-coloured treasure chests. To open them you’ll be asked to point your camera at items in the real world that match. You’re given a time limit to do this and so running around, trying to find something yellow or green with seconds to spare is quite a bit of fun.

If there’s a lesson here for the video game industry it’s that the best games “inspired” by popular movies are the ones where the artists make the game they want to make rather than the one everyone expects. Everyone wants a game with Johnny Depp in it and instead we have a wildly original animated puzzle adventure that could easily lead to its own graphic novel series or television show. I hope that is exactly what happens.