An announcement post about Alice: Otherlands & Alice: Asylum

Hello!

Let's call this a love letter, shall we? It's quite long enough to be one.

Tomorrow, you will be getting the finale episode of Alice: Madness returns, the last game that American McGee has blessed us with in his wonderful series. It's a good one, and I am a little sad that I don't have another game to look forward to playing. I am also saddened I was so late to the party on this one, that by the time I got here for the 25th anniversary of the first game I am looking at a corpse of an IP, left in the dust at the hands of EA.

Coming up soon after this finale will be a special deep dive episode that will be around 8 hours and 30 minutes in length, as we go further down the rabbit hole to explore the creative Kickstarter endeavour known as Alice: Otherlands through two animated short films and an accompanying Artbook, and afterwards we will pick apart the Design Bible posted by McGee for everyone to view and share, for Alice: Asylum. This special video will be a reaction, analysis, discussion, and even an audiobook as I completely read through the full proposed narrative, complete with character voices and cutscene dialogue of Alice: Asylum encapsulated all in one episode.

This comes as a bittersweet post, I think this is a very special series that took just over a decade for a sequel, and over a decade once again to try and close out a trilogy only for it to fail to get the greenlight despite such a thoughtfully crafted, well prepared plan for a third entry.

To rant a little, EA would rather throw millions of dollars at other huge risks like Immortals of Aveum, and then layoff half the studio when it fails horribly and then place the rest of the studio on furlough effectively killing a dev team on their first game. It doesn't make sense to me.
They would rather fund a game like Anthem, not even knowing what type of game it would even be during it's development as they scramble to throw together some sort of game demo and then try and make it work, only to completely abandon the failure they promised to fix, and that's from Bioware. And then there's your sports game slop. Maybe if Alice Asylum had a proposed live service battlepass season pass battle royale microtransaction plan, we'd see EA drool all over it.

I understand the complete defeat American McGee would have felt for now over 20 years, I can only imagine the complex myriad emotions of sadness and rage over trying to get your brain child made, only for a publisher to turn you down despite the series being a proven critical and commercial success while watching the other EA projects completely fail and flush millions down the toilet with unproven teams, poor management, and terrible trend chasing.

It has been one of those amazing moments of being moved by a series of games enough to not simply just go oh that sucks the game was cancelled, then look at some stuff off camera and move on. No, I wanted to close out this chapter on the channel with a proper send off to show my appreciation, and we can make it a 25th anniversary special. Please look forward to this episode if you're an Alice fan. If you're not an Alice fan, please become one by playing/watching the games because I think you simply should, and then join us at the table, where we're all quite mad (at EA) here.

A special shout out to Paula, a very long term supporter and member of this community that was the one to inform me that Madness Returns was actually a sequel and not a standalone game and waited a long time for me to play, as I stated back in 2022 I had the game in my backlog. I'd owned the game on my Xbox for years and just hadn't gotten to it yet, and while it took me 3.5 years to finally drop it on the channel after that point, I hope that those that waited patiently with excitement for me to play it feel satisfied with my journey through the Alice series.

Thanks everyone! <3