Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2

Contains spoilers!

“The writer of the first word, not the writer of the last

With the terror of the light and the shadows cast

The third eye now open to project the night

This is the moment to write

This is the ritual to lead you on

Your friends will meet him

When you are gone”

               I played Alan Wake Remastered a while back and I remember having a blast. The gameplay, albeit a bit repetitive and glitchy at times, was fun, the story was linear but engaging and immersive. The first game followed the titular protagonist, Alan Wake, a writer who just needed a long well-deserved break from writing. He arrives at Bright Falls, a fictional town in the Pacific Northwest of Washington State with well-known beautiful landscapes. He is accompanied by his wife, Alice, who gets abducted at the very beginning of the game. Alan follows his wife into the darkness and finds himself in a supernatural world, “the Dark Place”, that unleashes hostile human entities called “the Taken”. The first game ends with Alan being stuck in the Dark Place.

Story

               The second game begins with a stark-naked man, bald and rather overweight, floating on the shore of a lake, facing down. He is mumbling words and panting as he emerges from the water with swift haunting visions of a clearly malevolent figure with the likeness of Alan Wake. There are hikers around who see him, but ignore him on account of his lack of clothing. He marches on with speed but trepidation, as if he knows the place he is running towards is dangerous but still preferable to the one he just emerged from. We eventually find out that he is being hunted by some deer masked people and he gets stabbed multiple times before he is put on an altar with his heart removed in one piece. The gruesome start gives way to Saga Anderson (Melanie Liburd), an FBI agent who has special powers of intuition, assigned to this ritualistic murder in the woods. Saga is driving toward the scene with another agent, Alex Casey (Sam Lake). The whole vibe is very reminiscent of Twin Peaks and X-Files.

 Saga and Alex are dragged into Alan’s loop of a nightmare that is induced, or rather written, by the Dark Presence with the likeness of Alan’s face. Can they escape and re-write the story?

My initial reaction to Alan Wake 2 was that it was too nebulous. The mysterious notes, the loop of loops, the never-ending disturbing flashes of Scratch interfering with the investigation, endless whispers of “Alan Wake” all grow rather tedious toward the end. Everything sounds very confused and repetitive; one may argue that it is just the point but a writer does not dwell on the same point over and over. There has to be deviation, but Alan Wake 2’s plotboard is a mess of tenuous connections. If you can enjoy the atmosphere of getting lost in a psychological battle against “the dark”, whatever that may mean for you, Alan Wake 2 has something good to offer. In this respect, I always kept going, I never once thought of dropping the game regardless of how I found it tedious. You will want to answer the question “Will they escape and re-write their story?” However, I was double frustrated to find that we don’t really get the answer to this question. Some closure is good, you know? Not everything has to hang in the air, as most things seemed to in this game all throughout.

The story is told from the perspectives of Saga and Alan and you can switch between them at leisure (unless you beat one in one go, then you can’t switch). I far more enjoyed Saga’s sections in general, both in story, gameplay and atmosphere for the sheer amount of variety. The wellness center at the nursing home for example had excellent atmosphere with chilling background sound effects and music which added to the experience so much.

Our first encounter with Alice in the Parliament Tower apartment in the upside-down New York City was also phenomenal. It had so much emotional impact and it unraveled the relationship between Alice and Alan. The live-action movies embedded in the game worked so well:

Alice says: “Then Alan hit a block. It brought out a meaner side of him. One I didn’t like. I set up a trip to see a doctor in Washington. I didn’t tell him until we got there. We argued, things went wrong… then he was just gone. Drowned, allegedly.”

After this I paused and felt a shiver around my neck, I can’t lie. Alice was referring to Alan, the writer who drowned, whereas the first game portrayed Alice as the person who drowned first. I never made the connection until Alice uttered the words herself: “Drowned, allegedly”. This… must be a reference to Virginia Woolf. A brilliant author who wrestled with mental health issues due to variety of reasons including childhood sexual abuse, trauma, bipolar disorder, and social events such as war. Woolf drowned herself after she wrote her final letter to her husband:

“Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate.

So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came.

I can’t fight any longer.

I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it.

If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

Not to mention that Woolf has a novel called “To the Lighthouse”. If there were a genuine reference by the writers, I wish the connections were a little bit more explicit and smoothened as opposed to just having “one wacky old writer who went mad”. Why did he go mad, if this is about madness? Although it isn’t and the story still involves supernatural powers, the game could have included better explanations as to why Alan had issues, his past, his relationship with Alice, are all diluted because of all the confused events happening in the present day. I find brevity and easier delivery of the facts are better than this confused mess of timelines and leaving to the gamer to figure it all out. Alan Wake 2 does suffer from avant garde storytelling and in some aspects I do enjoy it but overall the story does become too convoluted and underwhelming. See, Silent Hill 2 does this much better, if one were to think of a tumultuous relationship between partners but here Alice is just felt like a plot element and an art asset than anything else.

Another character that I thought could be promising but ended up being a let down was Rose. Rose, also briefly present in the first game, appears as a helper character to drag Saga into the madness of the place even more. Rose could have been so much more, instead she was used as comic relief. I think in the beginning she could have been much more intense, really questioning your sanity and then, there could be a sharper plot twist where her true intentions are actually revealed to be on your side. Instead, Rose’s face is always one that is falsely dubious, one that you are not wary of so much and ultimately one that you just ignore. She could have been so much more in the setting of an isolated nursing home where things may get way more sickening.

The Wellness Center, one of the best atmospheric places in the game. The sound effects are creepy, and this section is particularly reminiscent of Resident Evil. Gameplay photos from Gamer's Little Playground YouTube channel.

Alan Wake 2 is connected to the rest of the Control universe from Remedy Entertainment. Ahti, the janitor and the Federal Bureau of Control are back. There are mini side games, like The Lake House, to develop the game’s lore. They are nice distractions but it’s nothing groundbreaking.

I’d say the story is good, but it is madness itself. Sometimes perhaps the value in such madness is not recognized at its release but only later so I always strive to be open-minded about the world of such creations. While a future playthrough is warranted, say five years from now, and a revisit may immerse one into the world even more but at this time I would stick to the opinion that the story is more confused than it should have been. Shout out to Sam Lake, though, for going after such a narrative and bringing out the herald of darkness in him.

Gameplay

This is perhaps the least impressive aspect of the game. Alan Wake 2 is mostly exploration. You explore the environment, the atmosphere, the manuscript pages written by Alan Wake etc. While the atmosphere matches the exploration perfectly, the rest of the gameplay is lackluster. The first game was very gameplay heavy, and you had to act or you died (the downside was that every section of the game felt like a linear series of “levels” which could be received badly by some people). Here, the action elements are subdued. I thought the fast-acting shadows (there are many forms of the Taken) would add to the thrill but instead the encounters were few and incorporated poorly in the game. Even in the great spooky environments like the wellness center, the fear of encountering a Taken was just not there. This came as a surprise, because the very first instance of a Taken at the morgue where you had to step out of the light to get your gun and avoid the Taken, was so well done. It was genuinely unnerving but after that just poof.

The plot board, making connections, felt stupid and boring. There was no real process involved, you just click, click and click and the clues went to the right spot. There is no intellectual involvement, or any reward either. The mind place idea is cool but not really part of the gameplay: if it’s taken as part of the story it’s ok. The downside is that you still spend lots of time in it, just clicking stuff which becomes annoying. The rhyme puzzles were also underwhelming and not particularly chilling. They could have been much scarier and disturbing (Silent Hill series has perfect examples).

Graphics

Hands down, the best aspect of the game. The environments are beautiful, the water physics, reflections, everything. Character faces are detailed; you could at times feel the terror in Alan’s eyes especially. Though I still hold the opinion that Jill in Resident Evil 3 Remake has the very best eye movements/gestures among the modern titles I have seen in recent years.

One could include “cinematography” here as well because there are copious instances where the game turns into a live-action film which I absolutely loved. The acting, scenes, dialogue, music, and the cinematography all created wondrous moments of art.

This is a good time to mention that the game is very demanding. My RTX3080 laptop did struggle a lot (averaging 15FPS and thermal throttling) until I dusted the fans and undervolted my CPU which fixed all issues!

One aspect about the art direction that I disliked was the flashes. There were way too many and it made me dizzy. The effect of those flashes is reduced if they appear hundreds of times…

Sound

Sound design was excellent, every sound made sense except the annoying flashes and constant bickering of the shadows shouting “Wake”.

Old Gods of Asgard, the fictional heavy metal band from “Control” returned and produced so many bangers for this game. It’s honestly amazing, the whole scene of Alan running away from the Taken while The Herald of Darkness is playing is a contender for a classic-to-be scene in all video game history. Dark Ocean Summoning, Anger’s Remorse, are all amazing tracks. Honestly the whole album is phenomenal. I have to find out more about Poets of the Fall, the Finnish rock band. There is a Finnish influence all over the game for sure!

Particularly the Herald of Darkness is the epitome of voice acting. Everyone sounds perfect, including the NPCs. Matthew Porretta has an excellent voice and the match between his voice and the body of Ilkka Villi portraying Alan Wake is uncanny. The other actors, Melanie Liburd (Saga Anderson), David Harewood (Warlin Door), James McCaffrey (Alex Casey), Shawn Ashmore (Tim Breaker), Martti Suosalo (Ahti), really everyone is superb. Sam Lake himself briefly appears and it’s so cute and human, I loved it.

Conclusion

Alan Wake 2 is definitely not for everyone. I did enjoy my time with it very much. It does feel more like a movie than a game, in a good way. It is not your typical survival horror-action game. It is beautifully crafted but not without faults. I would give my overall experience with the game a stingy 7.5 and a reasonable 8. I am curious what Sam Lake and Remedy Entertainment are cooking for the next entry. I imagine that they would move onto another parautilitarian for their next game (Control: Resonant incoming!), I could not catch anything in the game that would hint at a future game angle, but who knows. After all, it’s not a lake but an ocean.