Alice: Madness Returns - Game Mod - AESylum (DRM Fix) v.1.0.0 - Download

AESylum is a mod for Alice: Madness Returns, created by Wemino

Description:

A tool to remove the legacy DRM from Alice: Madness Returns.

Disclaimer

The goal of this project is not to enable piracy. Pirated copies have existed for over a decade and none of them went through the trouble of defeating MFortress. The DRM only ever ran on legitimate, purchased builds. What this project does is preserve a specific version of the game that would otherwise quietly disappear. AESylum only works on builds that are no longer sold.

What this is for

There are three PC builds of Alice: Madness Returns that shipped:

An April 7th 2011 CD build with SecuROM. Not worth touching.

An April 18th 2011 build with only a light store wrapper on top. SteamStub on the Steam version, something comparable on the EA App version. Neither layer has anti-tamper, runtime hashing, or anything invasive. This is the build currently sold on both stores.

A May 10th 2011 build, which shipped with a custom anti-tamper DRM called MFortress. This build was sold up until 2016 when it was pulled from Steam, then brought back on January 14th 2022. The 2022 re-release silently swapped in the older April build instead.

AESylum targets the May build. The other two aren't supported and aren't the point of the project; the April build already runs without any help.

The May build is the one worth preserving. It has:

1. Native implementation of the "Weapons of Madness" DLC.
2. More command-line parameters.
3. Correct chapter cinematic names in the Extras menu. The April build has several wrong.
4. Likely various bug fixes and optimizations that went in during the extra three weeks of development.

My guess is that EA lost the source code, or at least lost any clean build of the May version (if those ever existed). Otherwise there'd be no reason to sell the older April build in 2022 rather than a May build without MFortress attached.

This might also explain why Alice: Madness Returns – The Complete Edition isn't sold anymore on PC. It bundled the first American McGee's Alice and the Weapons of Madness DLC, and that DLC doesn't work on the April build. Pulling the bundle is a lot easier than fixing it. Just a theory.

I also needed MFortress gone to run MadnessPatch, a runtime code-patching mod I wrote for the game. The anti-tamper trips the moment anything touches the code, so the mod is unusable on the May build until the DRM is removed. That's the reason this project exists.

• Last update: Tuesday, June 30, 2026
• Genre: Action
• File size: 5.4 MB