Alice Madness Returns. Madness Returns takes place eleven years after the events of its predecessor, the same amount of time between the two games’ releases. Alice was released from Rutledge’s Insane Asylum at the end of the original game, and now lives in Victorian London under the care of a psychiatrist, where the traumatic memories of her parents’ deaths in a fire continue to haunt her. Although she seemed stable for a decade, she now begins to experience previously repressed memories that indicate that the fire which claimed her parents’ lives (which in the original game was seen to have been caused by a cat knocking over an oil lamp near the fireplace) may not have been as accidental as she remembered; these memories will take the form of retcons to the existing backstory.