Contrast is critical. The dark can only be as deep as the light. Which is why "Alice in Wonderland" makes such a powerful vehicle for exploration of the underlying topics contained in Alice: Madness Returns.
Truth is, the story in the game is very much "me." The abuse I suffered as a child is directly translated into many concepts and scenes found within the game.
Start with the premise: I got handed chaos early, especially as a kid. And somewhere in there I figured out that the chaos wasn't only damage. It was raw material to be used in a sort of alchemy. A catalyst for change.
And I know I've cleared a trauma when I can laugh at it. Not before. The laugh is the proof. (Freud had a version of this, humor as the ego flipping off the universe and refusing to flinch. Frankl, writing from inside a concentration camp, called it one of the soul's weapons. Both of them basically saying what I'm saying: the joke means the thing doesn't own me anymore.) Call it gallows humor if you want a label. I just call it the proof.
The worldview that comes out of it. This is the part I never had a clean word for. Nothing means anything in the cosmic sense, and that's fine, actually that's the good news. Camus got there too, looked at a meaningless universe and decided to be cheerful about it anyway. (Sisyphus, rock, hill, forever, and we're supposed to imagine him happy. I imagine he'd also be sarcastic and dark and funny.)
Frankl had his own name for it, "tragic optimism." Saying yes to the whole mess, suffering included (suffering especially?). If I had to pick one phrase off the shelf for what's rattling around in my head, that's the one. Tragic optimism. And that is a lot of what you see in Madness Returns. Beautiful, surreal, absurd... slowly being invaded by the tragic truth.
Chaos as a gateway, not just a wound. The disorder didn't only break things. It built something. (There's a fancy term for this, antifragility (Taleb), stuff that gets stronger from getting kicked.
And there's the Japanese pottery thing, kintsugi, where you fix the broken bowl with gold and the crack becomes the best part of it.) We're even making a Plushie Dreadful on this theme now.
The throughline. Dark humor, horror, sarcasm, the whole aesthetic, none of it is for show or really for others*. It's my operating system. It's how I transformed the early chaos into something I can actually use, and arguably into a better future than the one I'd have gotten without the chaos in the first place.
*I highlight this because I've seen more than a few people over the years mistake my "operating system" (as described above) as rudeness or callousness. It's neither. And those who have traveled this same path understand that. The rest... probably haven't played Madness Returns all the way to the end ☠️