After thirteen years of stasis, Alan Wake 2 brings the cursed writer of Remedy back to center stage, and a Sam Lake who is increasingly the David Lynch of gaming.
Alan Wake 2 is the game in which all of Remedy’s dialectics coagulates: it is the pinnacle, the melting pot in which Max Payne, Quantum Break, Alan Wake and Control more or less openly meet.
It is not only the summa, but also the final point of a journey for a studio that had expressed itself in a secular prayer like Alan Wake 1, a troubled desire more than a game, and faced with a commercial failure – due to the historical moment of single titles -player, more than his own shortcomings – had doubted his own vision.
Arriving amidst a thousand vicissitudes (that proposal for a sequel rejected by Microsoft is a wound that today, with hindsight, drips less blood) at Quantum Break: ambitious, certainly – a video game with an incorporated TV series is not something for everyone – but more linear in its science fiction exposition.
After that experience with a mixed reception, Remedy went for a do-it-or-break option, for if we have to perish we will do it with our ideas and not those of others, for a real Finnish Final Fantasy: Control. And Alan Wake 2, set in this slice of America that marries Burtonian Gotham and Nordic folklore, is the result of the success of that final fantasy.
Anderson. Anderson Saga —
With a code provided by the publisher Epic Games and the developer Remedy Entertainment, we were able to get our hands on the much talked about separation of careers in Alan Wake 2: on the one hand Saga Anderson, on the other Alan.
The approach to the non-linearity of Saga’s adventure is that of The Last of Us Part II (a production that had a marked influence here, from the color palette to the death animations), but probably on a smaller scale. A “wide-linear” world, as it is defined in jargon: level setting that is not huge but interconnected, with small areas outside the main path which can be accessed or not for extras, such as puzzles to solve and collectibles to find. It is a meeting point between the Alan Wake brought by Intel to demonstrate the power of Quad Cores (it was 2006) and the Alan Wake 1 that was.
With Saga, the management of explorable areas is ingenious: small world, move forward in the story, the world expands to reveal new areas in which to walk. And you can return to it for side activities like puzzles and collectibles at any time, with the gimmick of the car (not drivable this time, and that’s okay). We happened to think ugh, now I have to walk all this way, and even though we wandered around a lot before getting to the point, we ended up opening many doors and finding ourselves behind static pieces of the map that would only come to life later, when we would tell him was the script. A sensation that Final Fantasy XVI had also recently given us.
Like any sequel, AW2 gives up a portion of its uniqueness to become more “gamey”. There are chests to open that are now a cornerstone of modern game design, although – apart from some ammunition in wellness centers or retirement homes – the placement of the loot is less strange than in the aforementioned The Last of Us Part II. And, above all, there isn’t that flood of crafting items that Remedy has avoided.
Saga’s Mental Place didn’t convince us too much as a mechanic: it interrupts the flow of the game (an impression that fades in the second half) and is a bit messy with the controls. Saga’s reflections are interesting to listen to at times but, after finding the various clues, their connection is not immediate. For us, at least: because Saga always knows everything and always solves everything quickly, making connections that are not always obvious and reaching conclusions often without too much substance. There might be an explanation or two, but they come so late and so lightly that you end up accepting it as it comes.
The way it takes you by the hand with Saga and leaves it with Alan can lead to inconsistencies in the level of challenge that the game doesn’t prepare you for, and therefore to some moments of frustration in which you don’t know very well what to do when you access the Location Dark.
Alan Wake. Writer –
Alternate dimensions, loops, time jumps. The new weird side of Control is entrusted to the parts in which we take on the role of Alan Wake, even if the mixes between the two worlds become more and more massive and dangerous as we progress through the story. Alan’s is a new weird that veers decisively more towards horror by exploiting the threat and influence of the Dark Presence, which has its roots in the oldest childhood fantasy in the world: nothing bad can happen to you in the light. In his embrace, the monsters go away.
If you loved the Old Gods of Asgard concert in the first chapter or the Ashtray Labyrinth in Jesse Faden’s trip to New York, you will have something for your money, and always with a rather pandering approach, and always on the line between cringe and B Movie which, moreover, defined the modern consensus on the hard-boiled genre.
The solution of the FMV films, conceptually taken to extremes in the TV series with Quantum Break, is here a cross between that type of experience and what we saw in Control: in fact, the important cutscenes, those played by Ilkka Villi himself, are all like this . The manuscript pages also have live shots, but few and semi-static.
Collecting environmental clues, Alan does not follow the story: he writes it, in order to create an escape route from the Dark Place, and in one fell swoop deceive the Dark Presence and Scratch who want him dead and/or replaced. The other side of his gameplay involves us turning lights on and off to change the reality around him, so as to access new rooms and upgrades. The first part is very creative, the second did not make us jump for joy due to the originality of the idea, already established in Control and, in general, seen elsewhere.
That said, if we consider that there are now two stories, two worlds and various ways of playing – although not all very successful -, we are light years ahead of the basic gameplay of the first which was not surprisingly criticized. There is a further element of interactivity, then, represented by the choice of when to wear Saga’s FBI-branded raincoat and when to wear the writer’s flannel jacket: it is clear when we can switch from one to the other and vice versa, in terms of correspondence chronological and sequential nature of the facts (in many quotation marks), but the story manages to maintain its coherence regardless.
The author has control over this aspect, having positioned the switch between one reality and another only at certain points of the map and of the story: when we were able to choose, we often made the leap to vary the atmospheres (a little oppressive Dark Place, in the long run) and gameplay (Alan’s is a little more bizarre), and it is the game itself that seems to recommend it.
Horror and survival —
Alan Wake 2 does a lot to communicate that it is now a survival horror: Resident Evil-style interface, inventory, having to manually enter items and keys, puzzles, even the sounds in the menus. But, in practice, it is not too different from the first, it uses jumpscares excessively, and a bit like in modern REs the classic safe room is weakened: the game frequently saves automatically, but it is also this – like the hand extended with even greater determination towards the metroidvania – a way of saying “now we are a survival horror”, as well as a tool-point of support for when the various macro-areas, once the storm has passed, open up again All.
The fights are as they were in the first chapter, with unusually precise aiming for a survival horror game: never more than two enemies at a time, so as to keep things quite manageable on all occasions, and perhaps with a greater tendency to throw knives and the like from distance. The game seems to suggest a stealth approach from time to time, but there’s no crouch command; not that it’s a huge need, given that, at least on Normal difficulty, resources are rarely a problem. And, if you were afraid of the map discussion after the studio’s latest exploit, know that this time around it’s excellent (maybe let us add some markers next time?).
On the strictly horror dimension of the pairing, the atmospheres are very thick, especially in the different groves, but it scares mostly only with jumpscare tricks that quickly start to get boring: sudden superimpositions of people screaming, characters that emerge stealthily… Here too, the second half is better , thanks to some settings that lend themselves better to the intent and some mobs that descend into a more disturbing almost oriental inspiration.
Control takes a lot of the artistic direction, between bright reds on the overlaps between real and… well, whatever the other “thing” is, and the increasingly continuous interference on the screen. To the point that sometimes it seems more like a sequel to him than to Alan Wake. If you missed it, it could mean that you miss a few things in the game, in terms of the main story and not just the secondary one: as we saw with the MCU between cinema and series, this is the downside of when you create a universe rapidly expanding narrative.
A piece of history —
In a production that still has multiple peaks, the highest one remains the narrative. Twin Peaks, in particular the third season, had a clear impact on the story (or perhaps, having started their journey from the same starting point, it was inevitable that they would arrive at similar “conclusions”), but especially at the beginning it seems like a game to True Detective, with that hint of hard-boiled Remedy and the setting of Alan Wake 1.
The TV series-style division into chapters remained from the original which, inspired by that era in which we still called them TV series, was the forerunner of their comeback (complete with themed “theme” – by the way, the music of end of the chapter are spectacular, recovering a musical tradition that was already very important in the progenitor).
The relatively subtle way in which the stories of the two chapters are connected is beautiful: the game doesn’t get straight to the point, it doesn’t tell you it’s a sequel, but it makes you participate in the discovery with a completely new case to discover (or almost) together with you. This is also why we said that it seems more like a sequel to Control than Alan Wake, in some respects.
Apart from the theme of the now rampant loop, the story itself is very original and well constructed: on the characters, a lot is always played on the edge of but there is or does there, so the out of place joke can happen, but when it succeeds – well without speaking, how to show you two agents drinking coffee in unison – it’s strong. And it is a story full of MacGuffins underlined in red: where this typical gaming expedient bothers us because these objects, which seem to exist only in video games (“siphon” – but what is a siphon?), are specifically designed to move forward the story are not well placed in the context, here, knowing that they come from the pen of the writer who elaborates them on the spot, the thing is so meta that it goes around.
And there’s as much meta as you want: Sam Lake clearly has an adoration for David Lynch (which we agree with) and, with an amused and entertaining interpretation that goes far beyond the cameo or the Easter egg or the Alex Casey of Alan, is a candidate to be the… videogame doppelgänger as mind, director and face of the game.
Alan Wake 2, the verdict —
It’s perfect? No. Would we have had a hand in something, here and there? Probably yes. But what a journey it has been. Alan Wake 2 is the drive of a writer (whether it’s Alan Wake or Sam Lake doesn’t matter), a gift to those who have always been there, and the attempt to push a cult phenomenon – rediscovered, perhaps just like Twin Peaks, perhaps a little late – to those who missed the train and now can’t wait to jump on it with a new mentality. For both of them, the sign at the city entrance doesn’t lie – it reads: welcome to Bright Falls. Welcome back Alan Wake.