I play a lot of video games yet I rarely finish them. Normally I get easily frustrated by a particular boss or level being "too hard" and then walk away from the game for a while and then when I do finally return to it I have forgotten the controls and therefore the part that was previously "too hard" becomes "impossible."

This was not the case with Alice: Madness Returns as the game, for me, was simply captivating and just the right level of difficult.

Alice is the Alice from Alice in Wonderland - just to put things in perspective and this game is a far darker version of the classic children's story.

The story begins in the real world, where Alice is traumatized by the memory of her house burning down, an incident that only she survived and believes herself to be responsible for. She is being treated by a psychologist in the orphanage and he uses hypnosis to try to help Alice. In order to deal with the memories she travels to wonderland to escape reality. However, wonderland is quite creepy and warped now and Alice discovers that Wonderland has been corrupted by an "Infernal Train" that Alice must track down the source of in order to restore Wonderland to it's previous state.

Anyone who is a fan of horror is going to welcome the transition of wonderland as the changes from the corruption are genuinely creepy and fun. The enemies are things of nightmares and even Alice herself is quite warped and scary.

Combat is actually very easy to control and just as you would expect you receive upgrades as the game carries on although your main weapon, the vorpal blade, normally remains your go to attack mode.

As the story carries on it becomes evident that Alice is not just solving the problems in Wonderland but it actually discovering clues about the fire that resulted in the death of her family at the same time. She begins to understand that it was not her fault and I don't want to tell you whose fault it is because that would be a massive spoiler.

As far as 3rd person action-adventure games go, this is one of my favorites of all time and comes highly recommended. I would likely give a perfect score but the graphics are a bit dated by today's standards.