It would have been easy to take the Disney route and create a twee kids game about Alice in Wonderland, but by drawing on darker interpretations of the text, McGee and developer Spicy Horse turn her into a symbol of strength. She's just a sick girl armed with nothing but a grinning Cheshire Cat, but as he guides her through a fraught psychological minefield, she turns her perceived weakness into the power to defeat it. She's not a superhero, she's not an archeologist with military-grade combat training, and she has no real powers. Aside from being one of the rare unsexualized heroines of the 2000s, we know Alice to be both flawed and strong. The trauma framing Alice's perspective is another reason she was way ahead of her time. This is because in Alice she is meant to be more childlike – her weapons are referred to in-game as 'toys' – and although she's 19 in Madness Returns, Alice still has a childlike mindset as a result of her trauma. Her contemporaries were scantily-clad female action heroes, as evidenced in some earlier titles among the best Tomb Raider games, but the Alice games have no interest in objectifying their heroine, whether that be in her clothing or the camera angles. While McGee's detailed settings offer a timeless take on a literary classic, Alice as a character was totally ahead of the curve. McGee's art style doesn't fail to create a timeless magic, one that encapsulates a joint sense of childlike wonder and imminent danger.