Disney on Deck: Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland

Welcome to a new semi-regular feature for this blog. I acquired a Steam Deck OLED in the last few months and hey, a lot of Disney games are verified or listed as playable, and not just the latest Marvel and Star Wars games, a lot of older games can be played on this popular powerful portable platform, some very surprising ones, so I figured every so often I will try these games out the Steam Deck and see how they perform, I have a decent selection to try already but also maybe when something goes on sale I’ll pick it up and see how it plays.

And this brings us to what I think is a very surprising option to play on the Deck, the 2010 Alice in Wonderland game based on the Tim Burton film. It’s in fact listed as “Great on Deck” which doesn’t necessarily indicate the quality of the game itself but that it does run pretty perfectly on the Steam Deck.

And to its credit, yes Alice in Wonderland does perform perfectly well on the Steam Deck. There is some noticeable stuttering in cut scenes but that’s just how it runs on various platforms otherwise it’s very smooth in performance without having to tinker with any of the base settings.

But is Alice in Wonderland actually a good game? Sadly no. It’s not the bottom of the barrel when it comes to licensed games but there are just a lot of odd choices made here. Firstly, though Alice in Wonderland takes place in a fantastical world, most of its characters don’t have special powers, and yet the game gives some of the characters powers like The White Rabbit can control time and The March Hare has levitation abilities.

You gain numerous companions through the course of the game with various abilities, but these abilities aren’t nearly as useful as they should be. I.E. you can stop an enemy for a few seconds with The White Rabbit’s time abilities but when facing a whole group of enemies, especially speedy ones, it’s not very helpful. Some, like the Door Mouse, are completely redundant because while she is supposedly “good at fighting” everyone else can fight just as well and usually has a special ability on top of that. On top of that, the combat is just fairly repetitive and dull.

But honestly, the biggest sin of Alice in Wonderland is relegating its title character to a non-interactive supporting role. You never play as Alice. Your job half the time is protecting Alice, which is an insult to the character of Alice, a fiercely independent and brave girl in virtually every version of the material there is so even if you are a fan of Tim Burton’s pretty divisive take on Lewis Carroll’s classic tale and wanted to play a video game based on that, I’d imagine never getting to play as Alice and just a bunch of secondary characters instead would leave you even more disappointed than it did me. So yes, Alice in Wonderland runs surprisingly well on the Steam Deck for a 15-year-old licensed movie game, but it’s still not a particularly good game and you probably should not waste your time on it.