American McGee's Alice - Macintosh

The game starts with the usual handholding affair and it's clear the first few challenges are the game's effective training mode for your long quest. Far from being fat and cuddly, the Cheshire Cat is snarling and sarcastic, but the other usual suspects of the Alice stories, already quite darkly presented in Lewis Carrol's books, are about the same here.

The storyline follows a long drawn-out puzzle as Alice seeks to get her loved-ones, previously thought dead, back from Wonderland-- this is all explained in the very first cinematic cut scene.

Once in the game it can be as visceral as Rune, more for the blood shocking you rather than being an outpouring of gore. The music and voices are of similar high standards. Action-heavy gamers won't have heard this much dialogue since Vampire the Masquerade although Monkey Island fans will be used to the role-playing style unfolding the story, and the reasonably hard puzzles that await.

This title brings a nice twist to the usual style of female Tomb Raider antics, although people looking for the sweetness of the White Rabbit and the grin of the Cheshire Cat, had better beware that this incarnation is far from friendly and the words "off with her head" would be better suited. --Kenneth Henry