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From Shadows of the Damned (Image courtesy Electronic Arts)

In a year full of samey sequels and remakes, three new videogames offer a refreshing departure from the status quo, taking players on wild rides through Wonderland, space … and hell itself.

These games come from some of the medium’s true auteurs, designers who put their singular marks on everything they touch. Released right after this year’s E3 Expo trade show, which showcased a series of safe bets on shooters and existing franchises, these new Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games serve as a palate cleanser to wash out any lingering aftertaste of Duke Nukem Forever.

Since these creative titles came in such a rapid-fire burst over the past two weeks, I haven’t had more than a few hours each to spend with them. Here are my quick takes on some of the most fascinating games of the summer: Shadows of the Damned, Child of Eden and Alice: Madness Returns (see screenshots in the gallery above).

Shadows of the Damned

This team-up between iconoclast Japanese designers Suda 51 (No More Heroes) and Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil 4) is precisely what you’d imagine if you’ve played their previous games. Shadows of the Damned (Electronic Arts, $60) plays like Mikami’s excellent zombie shooter while looking and sounding like Suda’s funny, action-packed, ultraviolent homages to Western cult cinema.

You’re Garcia Hotspur, a trash-talking Latino demon hunter with full-body tattoos and a purple leather jacket who mostly speaks English (except when he’s calling malignant spirits things like cabrón and pendejo). The evil king of the underworld has made a sex slave out of your girlfriend, and all you have to go up against him is your buddy Johnson, a flaming British skull on a stick who can turn into a variety of guns that shoot bones and teeth.

What transpires is Resident Evil on crack.

What transpires is Resident Evil on crack: You’re putting shotgun pellets into the crania of the undead and exploring a gross world full of dead bodies, but you’re also listening to Hotspur and Johnson’s profane witty banter. Shadows doesn’t use vulgarity as a substitute for comedy; the lines are surprisingly well-written (especially for an English translation of a Japanese game).

Aside from several mood-lightening mini-games, like a scene in which you ride on a giant chandelier and smash light bulbs by swinging it around, the gameplay departs from the Resident Evil over-the-shoulder shooting formula in one overarching way: You must try to keep the world lit up, because darkness helps enemies and saps your health (which you restore by chugging booze). You can shoot barrels of light or set off fireworks to do this, but the most common way — of course! — is to find and shoot goats’ heads, which permanently irradiate the world around them.

Thus far, Shadows of the Damned has not tried to explain any of this, nor should it have to: The gameplay is so immediately arresting that you barely think to ask, “Why the goats?” Or the teeth, or the stick.

Child of Eden

Don’t let the name throw you off. This is the long-awaited, proper follow-up to Rez, the game that Sega would have commissioned long ago in a perfect world. Child of Eden (Ubisoft, $50) is a next-gen version of that game’s basic concept — a simple target-shooting game, but rendered in surreal, trippy graphics and set to the rhythm of hypnotic music.

The big draw, besides the fantastic visual light show and excellent music by creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s band Genki Rockets, is support for the Xbox 360’s Kinect peripheral. (A PlayStation 3 version will be released later this year.) The game plays roughly the same with the motion sensor or the controller; the former just lets you move the onscreen cursor with your hand rather than a joystick.

Child of Eden is an absorbing experience.

Either way you play, Child of Eden is an absorbing experience. There’s nothing else quite like its imaginative, surprising levels, filled with strange visual designs like dividing cells, future machinery and illuminated space creatures.

Creating these fascinating levels was clearly no easy task, since as far as I can tell there are only five of them. Clocking in at about 10 minutes each, that makes for a remarkably short game. Or it would be, had developer Q Entertainment not taken a few steps to lengthen the experience.

I found playing the game with Kinect to be maddeningly difficult. I would have thrown my controller on several occasions had I been holding one. Lose (which can happen in a split second if you miss a cluster of enemy projectiles) and you are unceremoniously dumped out to the game’s main menu with nothing to show for it.

With a standard controller, the difficulty curve is more surmountable. But even so, you can’t advance to the next level simply by playing the previous one — you must play each 10-minute bit two or three times to get enough “stars” to unlock future stages. This is an easier pill to swallow in Child of Eden than it would be in other games, though, because it’s that damn good.

Alice: Madness Returns

This may in fact be a straight-up sequel to an older game. But not only has it been more than a decade since American McGee’s Alice, this follow-up has little to do with the gameplay of the 2000 PC game. (A version of the original release — a twisted take on Wonderland starring Alice as a mental patient with serious issues — is included with this Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sequel.)

Whereas the original took most of its gameplay cues from PC shooters, Alice: Madness Returns (Electronic Arts, $60) goes for a more Nintendo-like design, with refined platforming segments and lots of hidden items tucked away in the corners of its levels. Early in the game, Alice gains the ability to shrink in size, an ability that lets her nip into hidden crevices but also see hidden messages and pathways.

Alice’s weird weapons include a vorpal sword, pepper and a deadly hobby horse.

When she finds herself in combat with the creatures of her nightmares, Alice has a variety of unique weapons. She can slash away with the vorpal blade of Jabberwocky fame, fire pepper, smash with a deadly hobby horse or leave a decoy in the form of an exploding rabbit. Although the combat sequences can at first appear to be rather ruthless, I found that proper use of each of these weapons was key to success.

Alice is brought down a bit by some structural flaws. In contrast to Child of Eden, Alice feels longer than it needs to be, using a whole lot of repetitive platforming when half as much would do. It certainly possesses a wide variety in its level design but could use more and different gameplay elements to break things up.