Category: Video Games

Back in the day, SNK was one of gaming’s biggest names. King of Fighters and Fatal Fury were hugely popular beat-’em-ups in the 1980s and ’90s, while Metal Slug helped define the side-scrolling action game genre, and the company’s high-spec console, handheld and arcade hardware were the envy of many.

After two tumultuous decades in the 2000s, SNK received investment from Saudi Arabia’s Electronic Gaming Development Company in 2020 and was fully acquired in 2022. The investment has come under scrutiny due to Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, which includes allegations of unfair treatment of women and the LGBTQ community. In the aftermath of the acquisition, an SNK lead insisted that the studio’s new ownership “doesn’t affect us in any way.”

Shortly after the opening of a new development studio in Singapore in April, IGN spoke with SNK President and CEO Kenji Matsubara about the company’s vision, which includes becoming a Top 10 global publisher.

If Alice: Madness Returns was dead on arrival, that would at least be aesthetically consistent.

The 2011 sequel to American McGee’s Alice went even deeper into Alice in Wonderland’s red guts than the first game, pulling out the most nightmarish aspects of the Victorian children’s story and tying their shadows into a neat action-adventure. But it suffered from abysmal launch sales, with reviewers and fans both being disappointed by what they felt were rough controls and level design.

Still, game designer American McGee wasn’t giving up.

McGee, who created the series after being fired by id Software, hoped to gather enough community support for a follow-up, and the most diehard Alice believers gave it to him in spades. But after a decade of this cutting fan pressure, publisher EA finally made a decision in 2023: there would be no more Alice games. They blamed the “analysis of the IP” and market conditions.

Was it all over? Would Alice have to lie facedown in the graveyard once and for all? Not exactly. Alice: Madness Returns doesn’t just live, it thrives.

“Even though EA was going to let Alice die,” says 33-year-old Twitch streamer Foxfire47, who has been a fan of the series since the first game released in 2000, “the fans were absolutely not.”

She credits Madness Returns’ lively online fanbase to McGee himself. He began working on a proposal for a potential follow-up, Alice: Asylum, in 2017, and encouraged fans to contact EA directly to show their support. His now retired Patreon contains all the other ways he incentivized fans to deepen their obsession, like referring to the fandom as “Insane Children” and eventually posting an Alice: Asylum design bible bursting with art.

His otherworldly design is at least one reason why fans could never truly abandon Madness Returns, or the Alice series in general. They are a gorgeous testament to the fact that anyone can survive the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.

Friendships and bonds

Foxfire47 discovered Madness Returns’ online fan base through McGee’s Patreon in 2018. She remembers feeling McGee’s excitement for Asylum bleeding into her preexisting enthusiasm for the series, and it did the same for everyone she met over Patreon and Discord.

“Friendships and bonds were made through Alice: Asylum,” Foxfire47 says.

When EA ultimately passed on the project, they were also rejecting an entire community that had put years and money into materializing a shared dream. But McGee had trained his fans to become personally invested, and an IP issue seemed small in the face of their dedication.

“After [EA rejected Asylum],” Foxfire47 says, “I feel that, as fans for Alice, we wanted to keep the spirit of the games alive. With the camaraderie of this community, we are always going to show our love for these games.”

The community now sustains Madness Returns through YouTube videos with millions of views, pouty TikTok fancams with hundreds of thousands of likes, detailed cosplay, tattoos, and other tangible methods of worship. All of this online word-of-mouth has helped Alice fans succeed in an unprecedented goal. They are actively collecting new fans for an abandoned, 24-year-old franchise telling the strange horror story of an orphan teenager, Alice, who retreats into an hallucinated Wonderland.

“I bought Alice: Madness Returns, and I’m playing the first one for the first time because of your cosplay!” one commenter recently told popular TikTok cosplayer Jessilyn Cupcake. In recent years, she’s made and shared several Alice cosplays with her eager followers, including Alice’s ultramarine tea dress and the yowling Hobby Horse hammer from Madness Returns. She first found Madness Returns in 2011, telling IGN that she “fell in love immediately.”

“It still feels modern and a fresh take despite being 15 years old,” Jessilyn says. “I think [its] hack-and-slash-style gameplay with multiple weapons, costumes, and abilities is one of the best examples in a game, ever.”

The game is an intoxicating blend of deadly and delicate, much like its most famous weapon, the lace-patterned Vorpal Blade – a chef’s knife for short-range combat. In Madness Returns, traumatized 19-year-old Alice must take on the child sex trafficker and psychiatrist Dr. Bumby, who tries to trick her into madness in order to commodify her body. But Alice learns to wield her fragile power against any abomination.

Alice’s ability to work through her pain and tackle any problem, from baby dolls that vomit to dangerous men, is part of her underdog appeal. And McGee accessorizes Alice’s hypnotic visions with touches like the creamy, white bow behind her bloodspattered apron, and the crystal-blue butterflies in the misty, tree-covered Vale of Tears.

At this point, I’ve now played The First Descendant in three or four different beta iterations, and each time I’ve felt no more or less certain whether this would be something my friends and I would want to play, or just another sci-fi shooter in a sea of similar games vying for our attention. After more than 45 hours sunk into a pre-launch preview build over the past week, I’m only slightly closer to answering that question – but I’m certainly not having a bad time. I’ve got a whole lot left to play, including the all-important endgame, for instance, so as of now I’m still not sure if The First Descendant will be my next looter-shooter fixation, or yet another one that misses the mark.

Nexon’s free-to-play third-person multiplayer game plays in the same space as Genshin Impact, complete with cool-looking characters to unlock and countless currencies and materials to grind, all of which can be bypassed by those simply willing to cough up their hard-earned cash. And, like some of its polished contemporaries, there’s a pretty decent game here in spite of a UI that requires a PhD in RPG hogwash to decipher and an irritating monetization model that does crazy things like make you pay real money to increase your inventory capacity or get RNG consumable dye packets just to change the color of your gear. Running around with friends while shooting enemies and unleashing interesting supernatural abilities upon alien armies is an undeniably good time (as it is in Destiny, Warframe, and Outriders, to name a few) and the deep RPG mechanics and loot systems are a spreadsheet-loving nerd’s dream. It’s also a fairly pretty game that feels a lot more premium than one might expect from the free-to-play space, despite the occasional framerate dip or crash (at least in its pre-release state). That said, the free-to-play model is every bit as eyebrow raising as it might sound, the story and dialogue is laughably bad, and much of the campaign is packed with filler that can be a real snooze.

I’ve split my dozens of hours dashing around small hub areas completing repetitive chores in between much more substantial missions and boss battles against robotic kaiju called colossuses. Those self-contained missions and boss fights are exactly the kind of thing I hope for in an action-packed cooperative game: Some seriously awesome combat that rivals its peers, interesting enemies to take down, and a loot system that had me regularly trying out the latest shiny weapon I pulled from some shmuck’s corpse. If The First Descendant would just let me mainline that part, we’d be onto something and my mind would be made up.

Unfortunately, so much of it is kept locked behind sections where you complete a series of really dull errands, like defending a piece of tech from waves of enemy assaults, gathering items from fallen baddies to deposit into a collection robot, or just killing stuff until a miniboss spawns for you to take out. Not even dope combat can stave off boredom when it has you hanging around for a few minutes while you wait for small groups of enemies to spawn until you’re told that you succeeded, then being directed to the next spot on the map to do it again. These sections account for a pretty big chunk of what you do during the main story, too, seemingly to pad out the adventure so you don’t burn through the more interesting activities too quickly. Worst of all, there are only a few flavors of these kinds of quests, so you’ll find yourself being asked to repeat them multiple times in between every boss battle or more meaty story mission.

While I’ve only played through half of the campaign, so far it’s really not looking great, fam. Absolutely brimming with nonsensical sci-fi babble like “dimensional walls,” “inverted data codes,” and “unleashing Arche,” it’s one of the sillier stories I’ve seen in a while. Most of the dialogue is absolutely atrocious: At one point I burst out laughing when a bad guy menacingly declared, “Qliphoth will engulf Ingris. The roars of the Vulgus will fill this land with fear!” In another section I shook my head as an antagonistic character named Jeremy (a grown man with the voice of a whiney, spoiled teenage brat), showed up to be the most annoying person in the world and was mean to me for no reason while I ran quests for him. It’s truly heinous stuff, but some of it is so bad it’s pretty amusing – I eventually found myself looking forward to cutscenes, eager for the next hit of sci-fi gibberish and butchered voice performances. (On top of the absurdity, the English voices rarely come close to matching the lips of the characters speaking. That’s fine if you enjoy watching anime dubs, but I find it pretty distracting.)

Thankfully, the most interesting characters are those you can unlock and play as, like the unflappable electric speedster Bunny (my personal favorite), or the sarcastic and smarmy grenade-chucking soldier Lepic. Some of the cast do still seem a bit shallow, largely because you get only a little backstory and character development for most of them, but hearing them cheer as you blast monsters to bits and seeing their charming animations – which clearly had much more effort put into them than those of the NPCs – is quite nice. Only one of these playable characters has an actual questline associated with them (with more planned for the future), but the bits of that story I played were some of the better content available in The First Descendant at launch, so here’s hoping they at least deliver on that front.

Actually learning to play as them is great too, although I still have plenty more characters to unlock before I’m able to take them all for a spin. One character might control the battlefield with explosive AoE attacks, while another covers enemies in devastating ice-based debuffs. Bunny does insane DPS by running around as much as possible to generate electrical energy, then unleashes it in powerful blasts. Since each of the characters has their own style of play, switching between them offers a markedly different experience, like how Ajax, a heavy tank with protective abilities is all about standing your ground instead. Most games with playable characters as its main chase live or die by how compelling those unlockable avatars are, and so far The First Descendent seems like it’s loaded with distinctive options that are absolutely worth going through the trouble to obtain.

Similarly, the weapons, equipment, and upgrades you earn while shotgunning your way through levels are awesome. Loot drops constantly, most weapons feel distinct and satisfying to play with, and watching the numbers go up as you modify and upgrade every new toy in your arsenal makes The First Descendant hard to put down… until it forces you into about 15 separate menus to juggle dozens of materials and so many different systems that you might want to keep your inhaler at the ready. This kind of thing is pretty typical for looter-shooters, granted, but even by the already gag-inducing standards of the genre, this one’s especially obnoxious to learn – especially since the tutorial robot who shows you the ropes in the social area explains things to you in a series of texts that pass by quickly enough to challenge your speed-reading skills.

Even after spending dozens of hours with this pre-launch preview build, I’ve got plenty more to play and an endgame to dive into once it launches properly next week. Check back in the coming weeks for my final, scored review.