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Whilst drawing characters and settings familiar to most of us from Lewis Carroll's work, Rogue Entertainment have twisted Carroll's Wonderland into a dark and foreboding place. As depicted in the opening cinematic and the wonderfully designed Casebook (alas, reduced to an electronic rendition in the budget release), a young Alice manages to survive the blaze which claimed her parents. Unfortunately for her, the experience proved too much, and she finds herself consigned to an eighteen-hundreds mental asylum. The entire game therefore takes place within Alice's tortured mind… and it's a deeply disturbing place indeed.

Despite using well-known characters, the amount of creative effort evident in Alice is astonishing. From the design, modelling and animation of Alice herself, to the varied environments in which she finds herself, this game is very well presented, though lacking the technical flashiness of later releases. Whilst Alice's enemies and allies alike have received similarly high qualities of treatment, the creative effort shows most clearly in the nine separate environments Alice finds herself in.

Although some visual themes run throughout the game, each area has a distinctive look and feel, coupled with a high degree of internal cohesiveness. The eerie, monochromatic environment of the Pale Realm, for example, contrasts strongly with the malevolent trees of the Wonderland Woods. Though I would be hard-pressed to describe much of Alice as "logical", the transitions between areas tend to fit the plot well, as opposed to a convenient device to change the scenery. This trend is broken from time to time, however, but this is a very minor complaint.

The weapons - or toys, as they're known - are varied, and in many cases are twisted parodies of children's toys and games. They're a very good fit with the distorted nature of Wonderland and Alice's mental state. As the Cheshire Cat puts it, "When is a croquet mallet like a billy club? I'll tell you: Whenever you want it to be."

The gameplay, however, is fairly standard for the genre. Whilst Wonderland is full of tricky puzzles and ingenious traps, the game progresses in a very linear fashion. Alice also makes fairly heavy use of the boss encounter convention: place the player in a room with a powerful enemy, health which respawns on a timer, and no exit without first defeating said enemy. Whilst much of the gameplay in Alice is "tried and tested", the boss encounter has been tried a few many times before for my tastes.

The varied settings and characters do help keep things interesting, though, and there are enough twists on the basic theme to keep players involved. Some puzzles involve searching for items, some mazes, and sometimes the answer is to fight your way through - but unfortunately, apart from a few secret areas, there's only one answer to any particular puzzle and one path through the game. This reduces the replay value - once you've completed Alice, you will have seen most of what the game has to offer.

Alice's story, as revealed through the Casebook and her in-game conversations with the Cheshire Cat, is fascinating, and reveals a few vital pieces of knowledge more or less required for successful completion of the game.

Technically, Alice is a little dated these days, being based upon the Quake 3 Arena engine. However, the graphics are still quite beautiful, if not quite as technically stunning as later games. This also means that Alice will run quite satisfactorily on computers which are a few years old: a brand new gaming system is not a requirement here. What Alice lacks in pixel-perfect shadows and bump mapping, it makes up with some very detailed models and artwork.

The controls for Alice are similar to most first- and third-person games: keyboard for movement, mouse for aiming and shooting. If you have the coordination to use both, you'll have no trouble here, and unlike most first-person games, twitch responses are not an absolute requirement. Whilst doing battle is an important part of Alice, thinking on your feet will keep you alive more often than lightning reflexes.

Apart from an icon representing the selected weapon and meters representing Alice's Sanity and Will, equivalent to health and mana bars in other games, there's not much in the way of user interface displayed during gameplay. A targeting indicator is provided, which is a little more fluid than the standard crosshair, and the jump target indicator is a welcome addition: stand still for a moment, and a pair of footprints will show where Alice will land if you have her jump. This can help ease the frustration of the occasional jumping puzzle to be found in Wonderland.

The voice acting, for the most part, is impressive, as is the overall quality of the sound effects. But any prizes for the aural experience must surely go to the musical score: composed by Chris Vrenna, founding member of Nine Inch Nails, the background music plays a huge part in evoking the dark and foreboding atmosphere of Wonderland. Whilst key themes do run throughout the entire soundtrack, the score is varied enough to avoid too much repetition, and certainly creepy enough to add a great deal to the appeal of the game.

Overall, Alice is an impressive single-player game, offering perhaps sixty hours of play. Whilst formulaic in places, the overall experience is highly enjoyable, and the dark yet familiar setting makes a welcome change from the ranks of clear-cut movie and book tie-ins. Alice makes a wonderful choice for those dark and stormy nights, and as it has now been released as a budget title, it is well worth picking up, whatever your gaming tastes.