Alan Wake

Alan Wake 2 Thoughts

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Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. This weekend I decided to take a break from my Path of Exile and Audiobook norms and play through Alan Wake II. Currently, the game is available on consoles or for PC on the Epic Game Store… given that EGS helped publish the game I am questioning if it is ever going to make its way to Steam. I guess some background… while I enjoyed the story of Alan Wake, I did not suffer through playing it all the way to completion until the Control DLC hooked me enough to want to see it for myself. I had issues with some of the fiddly gameplay more specifically the flashlight gunplay. At this point I have played Alan Wake Remastered, Quantum Break, Control… and because I was super hooked on the Remedyverse Alan Wake II was probably the game I was looking forward to the most this year.

Does it stick the landing? Yes very much so, but I will warn you the beginning of the game is a bit of a slog as you are going to be back in Bright Falls fumbling through the twilit darkness with a pistol and a flashlight. This time around you are alternating viewpoints between Saga Anderson an FBI agent and partner to Alex Casey (aka Max Payne but Rockstar owns that character), and Alan Wake while trapped in the dreamlike malleable reality of the Dark Place. You can in theory play ALL of the Saga segments aka “Initiation” or all of the Alan Wake segments aka “Return”, but I chose to shift back and forth between the two of them… essentially doing one Saga and then the next Alan Wake until I reached a point where the game warns you that you are reaching the end segment.

One of the things that Remedy has been playing with in all of their games, is the seamless integration of full-motion video with rendered action sequences. Alan Wake II is the game that finally nails this formula as you are constantly subtly blending video and game sequences constantly. Sure there are still world televisions and projectors showing short-form video, but the game goes so far beyond this. Unfortunately, I can’t really give you the most concrete example of this because it would likely spoil the experience. There is one Alan Wake level that might be the best thing I have ever played through in any video game. The Ashtray Maze from Control was a thing of beauty and a real masterclass in level design… but the “We Sing” mission takes this to a whole new level. It will be an absolute shame if this game does not take home several awards at the “Keighlies”.

Remedy learned a lot of lessons while creating Quantum Break and Control and you can see these out on display here. Sure the gameplay isn’t necessarily as tight as a dedicated shooter, but it works so much better than the fumbling attempts made in 2010 with the first Alan Wake. The set design, however… is phenomenal. The Alan Wake segments center around him attempting to rewrite a book in order to find his way out of the Dark Place. As a result, he can go to his “Writers Room” and change set pieces and motivations, which then trigger transformations of the scenes that you are playing through. While extremely surreal, this leads to some truly interesting puzzle-solving behaviors as you are trying to figure out which version of the world you need to be in to progress past obstacles.

Saga has something similar in the form of her “Mind Place” a spot you can return to at any time and sort through details she has collected. You place these on the wall in the stereotypical thumbtacks and red string manner, but correctly placing elements end up unlocking dialog elements and changes your current in-game objectives. This is either going to be something you find really cool or something that frustrates you endlessly, because without placing certain items on the investigation board… you won’t have specific interactable objects appear in the world. There are dialog prompts that will not appear unless you have done the work in your Mind Place in order to reach the logical leap that triggers Saga to ask it. I do somewhat wish there was an “autoplace” option, because if you have somehow fumbled your way to a solution without using the investigation board… the game will do this for you to close out a case.

The best thing for me personally about the game is that it continues to expand out the shared Remedyverse. For example, there is a lot of involvement in the plotline by the Federal Bureau of Control, which gives hints towards the current state of that game universe as I am sure we are heading to Control 2. There are plenty of name-drops from the history of the past games… and I am pretty certain that Sherrif Tim Breaker is supposed to be Jack Joyce from Quantum Break, and similarly Warlin Door is a reference to Martin Hatch from that game as well. The awkward thing about the Remedyverse is that some of the ties will always be a bit tentative because Remedy does not own the rights to a handful of games. Max Payne for example is owned by Rockstar and Quantum Break by Microsoft… and while everyone is pretty certain that Alex Casey is Max Payne that revelation will never quite be as concrete as we might want.

The highlight of the game for me however is the return of Ahti the Janitor. In Control, we ended that game pretty sure that Ahti was some sort of god or at least a multi-dimensional being. Alan Wake II does nothing to dissuade us of this line of thinking as Ahti appears both in The Dark Place and Bright Falls interacting with Saga and Alan. Ahti is a hero from the epic poem The Kalevala (also name-checked in the game) and Ahto is the Finnish god of the sea… so I feel like the Ahti we interact with is somewhere between these. In Control Ahti talks about wanting to go on a much-needed vacation, and I am wondering if the events of Alan Wake II are in fact that “vacation” because he knew he was needed here to see both sides of this tale to its conclusion.

So the question I have been asked already is whether or not I feel like you can enjoy Alan Wake 2 without having played through the rest of the Remedyverse. On a surface level yes, I think you could enjoy yourself or at least enjoy it from the aspect of a very well-designed game. However, it won’t mean as much to you as it has to me, given that you will be missing a bounty of subtle references to the greater Remedyverse and the events of the past. I don’t think this game requires the understanding of these to make your way through the story. It explains enough detail as needed because a lot of your perspective comes from Saga an outsider to Bright Falls and Alan Wake who has had his memory damaged and is very much an unreliable narrator. What you are left with is a very well-crafted and honestly scary game, but if you have bounced off other remedy games… then Alan Wake II might not be for you.

While I am taking this break from Audiobooks, I plan on playing through a handful of other narrative games but for the moment… this is absolutely my game of the year. I mean as I said before I am already sold on the Remedy style of storytelling and feel like this is probably their best game to date. While I enjoyed the action combat of Control more, the storytelling here is phenomenal. They really have nailed blending live-action sequences with game sequences and making the combination greater than the parts. The game as a whole is very much an experience that needs to be played to be truly appreciated.

The Well-Lit Room

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Last night I put the wrap on Alan Wake, and I have to say the longer I played it the more it grew on me. I still don’t love the conceit of shining a flashlight at shadow demons in order to drop their invulnerability and then having to figure out some other way to actually kill them. I think the game should have gone for one or the other. Either we kill them with mechanical means… or we use the flashlight to burn them away but the combination of both just feels awkward. When you get to needing to burn away shadow manifestations like possessed objects and the ever present shadow goo… that feels way more synchronous with the setting.

I think my biggest complaint is still the sheer number of times the game resets any advantages you have and forces you to go fumbling helpless through the dark. Now I get what the game was going for. This is literally a horror story being acted out by you the protagonist and the game tells you that directly. The story is about all of the near misses and times you were placed in danger along the way, and in order to do this the game keeps taking tools away from you only to force you to fumble around until you replace them. However… holy crap Alan… learn how to secure your gear because exiting a vehicle should not cause you to lose all of your shit. You would think if you need these things to survive you would be less careless than most toddlers.

The thing I am learning about Remedy through playing these games is that they are really damned good at setting up some pretty cool visuals. There are a lot of sequences in the game that are very memorable and designed in such a way as to give you an interesting vista while you are struggling through them. This is very much the case with Control, and given that I somehow completely missed playing any of the games from this studio. In theory I should have played Max Payne, but I think at the time my PC wasn’t quite sturdy enough to really tackle it and I had strayed away from consoles. All told it took me about eight hours to play through the main campaign of Alan Wake, and I am glad that I did. I have no real interest in playing through the two DLC episodes however.

I do this thing where I hyper fixate on a specific franchise, or connected franchises. Two years ago I burned through almost all of the games by the developer Spiders, and now I am seemingly revisiting anything that might be connected to the Control universe. I wrapped up Alan Wake pretty early last night and started Quantum Break which is the game that came between those two titles (three if you count Alan Wake’s American Nightmare… which does not appear to be canon). First up it is a gorgeous game, and dealing with some very different subject matter. However it appears that Alan Wake is a television show in this universe which I find interesting. I have no idea if this one is going to grab me but I figured I would give it a shot.

Blue and Rainy

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There are times when I suffer through something that I do not otherwise enjoy… so that I can achieve greater understanding. There have been many times where a sequel has hooked me on a franchise and then I find myself obligated to go back and try and experience the original game so I can fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Alan Wake is one of these games, and to be truthful… this is not the first time I have attempted to play the game. I can think of two other times where I have installed this game and made a vague effort to get engaged. The first was due to the critic acclaim the game received and the second was an attempt to prepare myself for playing through Control. In both cases I bounced pretty hard because I have to say the game play… is not exactly endearing.

In Alan Wake you spend most of your time playing freeze tag with a bunch of shadow monsters… that apparently they call “Taken”. I am wondering if Bungie sniped this term at all for the very similar shadowy reflections of baddies in the Destiny universe. Essentially in order to destroy one of these shadow clones you have to burn away the darkness with the flashlight and only then can you actually harm them with the array of guns that you pick up along the way. Guns mind you that you seem to constantly be misplacing because multiple times during the game have I found myself whistling in the breeze with nothing to protect myself. The only really satisfying weapon… is the flare gun which is effectively a one hit kill… but there is never more than a few rounds at any given time so you ration it heavily.

Why I am sticking around however is that the story is really damned compelling. The entire game is divided up into multiple episodes and presented like it were a television show. At the beginning of a new episode the game gives you a “previously on Alan Wake” segment replaying the highlights of the previous section. Another thing that is super interesting about the game is how it utilizes full motion video, which I am guessing is a hallmark of a Remedy game based on how much it happened in Control. I find myself stopping to watch whatever happens to be on television or listening to each radio broadcast before moving on with the game play.

At this point I am committed… but honestly had I known then what I know now… I maybe would have just watched a lets play series on the game. I don’t really find myself enjoying the actual game play at all, and quite honestly… HAD I played Alan Wake first, I maybe would not have played Control. All said I am glad the events went down in the order that they have, and I am hoping that Alan Wake 2 ends up feeling a bit more like Control. It isn’t that this is a bad game, it is just a game that is doing a gimmick and has fully committed to said gimmick. It succeeds in doing the thing that I think it set out to do… which is making you feel outmatched and mostly useless at every turn. Side note… I don’t love the horror games where you find yourself fumbling around with only an iPhone knock off to protect you. I want to face evil with guns a blazing… or at least a really good bullwhip that has a knack for making candles produce power ups.

Last night I wrapped up episode four and if my reading is correct that means I have two left to go until the official end of the main story. I am deeply uncertain I will stick around for the DLC, especially if it is more of the same. Great story however, so ultimately I guess that will be the determining factor if the writing and narration can keep me hooked. I mean I get why this game was heralded, because I am sure at the time it was doing something wildly different to what the rest of the games were offering. However steam is now full of hundreds of fumble around hopelessly in the dark while something stalks you games, and that is not really my genre. It is interesting however piecing together what happened here, because the AWE DLC in Control only gives you the vaguest of overviews. For now I am going to keep my head down and push through so I can see the rest of the story.