Scattered thoughts on the Alan Wake series (and Control)

Bobby Schroeder Bobby Schroeder

Here's a series of informal posts I made on Cohost as I was playing Alan Wake 2, a game I ended up really adoring after some ups and downs in the early hours, as well as the games that led up to it. These were the most detailed and substantial thoughts I shared while playing these games, so they're worth preserving here as a journal-style post with some light formatting revisions.

Alan Wake

January 9th

I played through Alan Wake for the first time. Here are some things I loved along the way:

  • The literal first words spoken in the game being "Stephen King once wrote..." as Alan tries to gas himself up as a writer
  • Alan only being able to jog for a little while before getting tuckered out because you're playing as a novelist
  • Alan feeling the need to point out an extremely obvious The Shining reference in his narration
  • You put the lime in the coconut
  • All of the random shit the taken say, but in particular Stucky going on about his hot dog rankings
  • Looking at the novels on Alan's shelf and realizing how fucking huge he made his name compared to the actual book titles
  • All the episodes of Night Springs, but in particular "The Quantum Suicide" and "Absence of Creativity" ("Is that too moronic, indeed? Who can tell? It's a fine line between the stupid and the sublime... in Night Springs.")
  • Barry's puffy red jacket being the brightest, most saturated color present in any scene he's in
  • Agent Nightingale being a direct inversion of Cooper from Twin Peaks, who HATES small pacific northwest towns, AND having to work with their sheriff's departments, AND their coffee, AND their trees!!
  • The never-ending list of author names Nightingale will call Alan
  • The evil bulldozer that tries to kill you, foreshadowed earlier by the manuscript page "Wake Attacked by a Bulldozer"
  • One of the patients at the lodge being a game dev and Hartman going "He works on... video games. It's trash, of course. But it does involve some small creative effort."
  • When you're talking to the Old Gods of Asgard at the lodge and Tor is routinely smacking the table with his squeaky hammer the entire time
  • Alan and Barry driving with the cardboard cutout of Alan in the back seat
  • The rock concert segment
  • Alan jumping like this
  • The Dopefish poster upstairs in the bookstore
  • The camera panning over during the live action talk show bit to reveal that the other guest sitting next to Alan is Sam Lake himself, who does the Max Payne face when prompted by the host
  • The fact that this game has driving segments and you can do donuts and drift into enemies
  • And, of course... the Energizer and Verizon product placement

Great game.

 

Alan Wake's American Nightmare

January 9th

I did also play like the first hour of Alan Wake's American Nightmare, but honestly I'm not even sure I wanna finish this one in spite of its short length. It's so weird. The gameplay is definitely refined over the first game, but it's just not at all what I want out of this series. The vibes are completely off. It feels like an attempt at rebranding the series as a little more badass and irreverent, almost like they wanna frame Alan as like... an Ash Williams type? Like they thought that'd make it more marketable after the first game underperformed? Its story is tonally disconnected from the first game, leaning all the way into B-movie camp in a different setting with a simple "Alan has to track down Mr. Scratch" premise, but also that simple premise is depicted in such a convoluted way that I can't imagine it making any sense to someone who hasn't played the first game.

tbh I might just watch the cutscenes for this one on YouTube and then start Control.

(spoiler: I did do that)

The thing I do have to give the story in Alan Wake's American Nightmare is that it throws me for a loop to see this game from 2012 do a thinly veiled version of the whole "Evil Cooper got out of the Black Lodge and did evil stuff in the real world before Regular Cooper could escape and stop him" plotline with Alan and Mr. Scratch five years before the actual Twin Peaks revival got to follow up on that cliffhanger.

Control

January 14th

I have in fact been playing Control since finishing Alan Wake 1. This may shock you to hear, but I'm finding that Control, the game I've been wanting to play since it came out because everyone says it kicks ass, does in fact kick ass.

Random memo in the base game of Control: "we've been seeing way more altered world events since 2010 for some reason"

Me: "ah I see my new favorite mediocre airport novelist has been keeping busy"

The only thing I'm less keen on in Control right now (as of the main story mission "The Face of the Enemy") is that it feels like a bean counter at Remedy or 505 was like "can we include some loot shooter elements for Broad Appeal?" I just ignore all the randomized quests that are like "kill 15 enemies in this sector with this gun to get a weapon mod that gives you something like +5% damage against shielded enemies. " That is not an interesting mission or an exciting reward for me. I ignore the random limited time alerts that tell me to drop what I'm doing and go do a random task in another sector. These feel like padding added on to trick normies into thinking they're playing Destiny instead of a 3D Metroidvania.

Thankfully, so far it feels like there's been zero penalty for me ignoring these things and just focusing on the good stuff. I don't feel underpowered. I'm not hurting for loot at all.

January 15th

I had assumed I wouldn't be able to start the AWE DLC until I beat the main game in Control, especially since I already knew the first expansion was postgame content. And then upon approaching the first objective for a quest that I thought was just a base game quest with a cheeky Alan Wake reference name I got a jumpscare from Mr. Wake himself. He just appears in a vision and starts narrating Jesse's actions right away. I thought they'd string me along and make me work to get the Alan Wake content, maybe not even directly showing Alan himself, but instead they just announce through the largest possible megaphone THIS IS THE ALAN WAKE CROSSOVER DLC

January 18th

So I finished Control!! It was great for all the reasons people have been saying it's great for the last five years. I think I am officially a Remedy fan now.

The thing that's kind of surprised me, though, is hearing that the one thing a lot of people didn't care for in the game was the combat - specifically the gunplay. Because I really enjoyed it. Maybe part of it was that I was coming off of the clunkier, simpler Alan Wake 1, but I found the way the guns handled satisfying throughout, and it only became more fun as I unlocked my other abilities. I like the way your gun automatically reloads over time, encouraging you to cycle between shooting and using your powers as you wait for your gun to reload, whether that means hurling props at enemies or pulling up your shield or dashing out of the way or trying to possess one of them.

The encounter design can get a bit repetitive, sure, but the excellent pacing meant I never got bored of it. Where Alan Wake 1 was a game where every episode felt a bit too long, every mission in Control feels just right in length, with a few short bursts of combat interspersed with lots of exploration, the occasional puzzle or platforming segment, and stopping to read documents and watch the optional FMV videos. If anything, the game is so chock full of that multimedia worldbuilding stuff that I'd almost suspect I spent more time reading and watching that stuff than actually shooting my gun.

Maybe part of my fun with the combat was just thanks to the fact that I really liked the gun's pierce mode. I used that as my main weapon for most of the game, especially after finding some good mods that made it a one-hit kill against most common enemies in the base game. I just always thought it was fun to charge up that shot as an enemy runs at you and then BLAM. Maybe that's the Mega Man fan in me talking lol

(Admittedly I did eventually end up reducing enemy damage to 50% via assist mode in the postgame because the mold area was frustrating me, and I left it on so I could just get through the DLC stories a little quicker and get to Alan Wake 2. But I got through basically the entire base game without that, and also with very few health upgrades since I was prioritizing offense on my skill tree.)

Ask: "how did you feel about the story in Control? I personally enjoyed all the side missions a lot more than the actual main plot."

I definitely think the side missions (and the collectible text and videos) were where they had the most fun, but I did like the story overall. I always felt compelled to see where the main mysteries were going next, and the way everything came full circle was fun.

I actually didn't know until recently that Control had been designed from the ground up to be a shorter and less expensive project for Remedy after Alan Wake and Quantum Break both ended up taking years, but having played it now I can definitely see that. (This is not necessarily a bad thing - I long for the return of the mid-budget, mid-length AAA game.) In the story the one area where this limited scope seems to have hurt a little is the ending of the base game. It feels like things end kind of quickly and without proper closure. Like, Jesse's arc is that she becomes the new badass boss of the shadowy government organization that tortured her brother for years, and Dylan's arc is that he gets possessed and ends up in a coma. It's... a bit odd?

I think the Foundation DLC tied a much nicer bow on these things, though, by saying that:

  1. The FBC serves a necessary function for society, but they need a new leader like Jesse who hates the old guard and the old way of doing things to enact meaningful change there, and
  2. Jesse does not trust the board and will likely try to rebel against them in the future

Really, a lot of it feels like a proof of concept setting up things that can be expanded upon in the future, since they didn't have the resources to go all-out the first time around. But I think the world they've crafted is already really fun and interesting, so I'm left feeling excited for Control 2 rather than feeling like Control 1 is undercooked.

Alan Wake 2

January 20th

Started Alan Wake 2. The first few hours with Saga were cool - I like the detective stuff and the act of piecing together clues in the mind palace. While the opening chapters are a very slow burn buildup, I felt like it showed a lot of creative confidence to let the investigation carry the first two hours of the game with basically no combat whatsoever. (By comparison, Alan Wake 1 drops you right into a tutorial level in the form of a nightmare so that you don't get bored.) But once the action started to pick up a little I also kind of felt like I was just playing a Resident Evil game. It felt very straightforward in terms of modern survival horror games, and as someone with no attachment to that genre it wasn't doing all that much for me.

And then I got to the first Alan chapter. As soon as I saw that first extremely meta live action talk show segment I was like "we're so fucking back."

January 21st

My main hurdle with Alan Wake 2 is that, as a lifelong coward who doesn't touch much pure Horror Media, this is probably my first time playing a full blown survival horror game for myself (as opposed to watching someone else play or talk about them). And I'm not sure I particularly like the genre.

It's less that I find it too scary and more that I find it tedious. The long stretches with no combat whatsoever followed by an encounter with one or two enemies that can very easily kill you while you're struggling to reload. The fact that most of the item stashes now require you to decipher some kind of puzzle or hunt down a corresponding key. I know this is, like, typical resident evil stuff, but I'm not an RE fan and the first Alan Wake (while far from spectacular in terms of gameplay) didn't play like this.

I'm still enjoying the story and the atmosphere and the Weird Shit, but I definitely feel like it engages me the least when it's in this traditional survival horror mode (which is a lot of Saga's side of the story so far - I just got done with Return 3, which felt like a VERY long chapter). I'm debating switching it over to the easier "Story" difficulty mode, but I worry that decreasing the tension of the gameplay and making everything a breeze will weaken the intended tone of the story - though on the flip side I ALSO worry that the constant tension is making it harder for me to sit back and enjoy the Weird Shit. idk!

(Spoiler: After writing this, I did end up bumping the difficulty down and having a much better time with the game overall.)

January 22nd

I am now mad at The Game Awards for spoiling Alan Wake 2. Initiation 4 would have hit me like a truck if I didn't already know a sequence like that was in the game.

January 23rd

Barry doesn't directly appear in Alan Wake 2, but it would be really funny if the little snippets of what he's been up to were actually hinting at him appearing in Control 2 instead. There's enough there that I could believe this. I'm rotating it in my mind.

January 26th

Mildly annoyed that I didn't realize I was up to the point of no return in Alan Wake 2 and now it's going to be pitch black outside the whole time I'm gathering up things I'd missed on Saga's side

January 27th

Well... I beat Alan Wake 2. Boy, that sure was something. As i've been saying, I wasn't COMPLETELY sold on Saga's side of things for a lot of my playtime, but I think it came together pretty nicely. There's some clever stuff in Saga's final playable sections. And of course the Alan side of things continued to be like 50 mindbending layers of metatext stacked on top of each other, which I love.

... I can't believe I'm saying this, though, but I'm. Actually considering immediately going into the new game+ mode that adds some a little new dialogue and apparently tweaks the ending. I could just go watch the ending on YouTube, but idk, the story wraps around on itself in so many interesting ways that I think going through it again with knowledge of the twists could be rewarding. Also I don't have to spend time hunting down all the cult stashes and rhymes and whatnot this time, I can just run through the story.

It says a lot about how interesting the story is in this game that I'm even considering this.

January 28th

I am, in fact, doing new game+ on Alan Wake 2. The most fascinating part of the game to me is still just the way it plays around with the mishmash of in-engine and live action scenes for the story. This is a stylistic signature of Remedy's at this point, but this is definitely the game where they go the hardest with it and do the most creative things with it.

This style adds so much to the surreal quality of the game. The live action segments feel both more real and less real than the in-engine stuff. It's more real because, I mean, you're looking at actual footage of the actors who lent their likenesses to the characters. These are real human beings on real sets, not 3D models. It IS real. But it's also not. It's clearly visually different from the standard gameplay, the default reality of the game. The protagonists will receive strange visions of the live actors. You often get to the fully live action cutscenes by projecting Alan's consciousness into a TV or a film projection, framing them as works of fiction within the world... but this is a story where works of fiction become real. The dubbing effect from certain characters having different physical actors and voice actors is more noticeable in the live action segments, but instead of trying to hide it they draw attention to this disconnect. Alan literally has someone else's face with a different voice coming out! And Saga's side of the story, which is the one much more grounded in the "real world" of the game, is told primarily through in-engine cutscenes, while Alan's side in the reality-warping dark place has WAAAAYYYY more live action. I would assume that if you went through every cutscene, a majority of the time that we're looking at Alan's face, it's in live action.

There's just nobody else making games quite like this right now. I'm so fascinated by this stuff that I feel like I have to play Quantum Break at some point.

February 1st

Okay! I beat Alan Wake 2! Twice!! I finished the new game+. Here are some final(?) scattered thoughts, including spoilers for the whole game (including The Final Draft).

The Final Draft

So, the Final Draft ending isn't HUGELY different from the original ending... but it's different enough. It hits different. But I don't think it would've hit the way it did if it had been the ending you get just for beating the game once, and it DEFINITELY wouldn't have hit the same if I'd just gone and looked it up on YouTube right after beating the game the first time.

For one thing, I think you need to sit with the tension of the original cliffhanger horror ending (which evokes the abrupt, unsettling ending of Twin Peaks: The Return) in order for this presumably "true" ending to feel cathartic. You also need the tension of going through the canonical time loop another time and worrying about if things are actually going to turn out better, only to get that last second relief. AND you need to go through the twisty, complicated story a second time and understand everything better this time through, to better put yourself in the shoes of Alan, who feels a sense of clarity in the new ending that he didn't before. I cannot believe they pulled off making me play the game twice in a row, but the narrative framework supports that loop, and it felt rewarding to get a better grasp of the story.

(It also helped that I was able to ignore almost all of the collectibles this time and use the overpowered hunting rifle throughout Saga's story, which cut my second playthrough in half.)

I don't entirely know what to make of Alan seemingly attaining nirvana or going Homestuck god tier or whatever at the end though lol. I guess this is Remedy connected universe stuff. idk. I have a hard time believing they'd be eager to set up an Alan Wake 3 when this one took 13 years to make, but maybe Sam Lake is just that crazy.

Anyway the real most important thing added in The Final Draft is the pair of Dr. Darling videos. I can't believe he's off sleeping with Thomas Zane in the Dark Place. I can't believe Alan has a new stepdad now. I guess that explains Thomas Zane writing Alan into existence as a person with his face and Darling's voice? Is that literally canon now???

Saga's story

Having now completed the game, I definitely maintain my earlier criticism that Saga's side of the story isn't as interesting as Alan's. I do think Saga's story goes some fun places, and the climax in the Mind Place is one of those game design moments that makes me go "man, I love game design." Using the mechanics to tell the story! It's great!

But I think what lets it down is just that... Saga isn't all that interesting? At least not compared to how much Alan has going on.

I like Saga, don't get me wrong, but I think she's more of a character who has interesting things happen around her, whereas Alan being a tortured celebrity novelist is what drives almost everything interesting about both games. A straightforwardly competent FBI agent investigating a small town mystery just isn't going to be as unique as that, even if they do reveal that she's a little psychic and also that she's related to everyone's favorite elderly metal band. It almost feels like they intentionally made her much more straightforward and reactive as a character so as to not overwhelm the player. She's the breather you get between Alan's repeated timey-wimey mental breakdowns where he reshapes reality around him. She's a vehicle for the stuff about the cult and the Old Gods of Asgard and the FBC, and an excuse to revisit Bright Falls while Alan is still stuck in the Dark Place. But she doesn't have a particularly rich inner life. (While I love the Dark Place Mind Place scene on a mechanical level, it's kind of hilarious how easily she shuts down her doubts by going "oh that's right, my life is actually fine. this is all made up.") In just about any other game she'd be a solid protagonist, but here she's got some stiff competition.

I think the other thing that kind of lets Saga's side of the story down is hinging everything on whether her daughter lives or dies, when we don't actually see or interact with Logan. Saga's daughter is just a voice on the phone in a few scenes. Otherwise she exists entirely off-screen. But I also have to wonder if this is intentional? Like... Logan is, quite literally, not a direct part of this story, but Alan drags her in anyway. The question becomes if Alan can truly change events outside of the view of The Story (ie: the game). This is kind of interesting on a metanarrative level, but idk, it still made the stakes of Saga's story feel lower.

But again, these critiques aren't enough to stop me from loving the game overall. I beat it twice in a row. I never do that!

Misc.

  • I would've liked to see Barry, but I don't think the story needed him. The lovable goober quota is sufficiently filled here between the Old Gods, Ahti, and the Koskela brothers' Tim & Eric-ass commercials
  • Somehow Sam Lake managed to insert himself all over this damn game without it being cringe. Maybe it's the precedent set by Max Payne, which is the whole thing they're riffing on. Or maybe it's the fact that he wrote himself into a whole elaborate song and dance routine that he had to learn the choreography for. That's dedication. (also the part where you almost have to murder Sam Lake is so goddamn funny)
  • I don't think anything in this game is quite as scary as the body horror shit they pulled with Hartman in Control but I'm fine with that because I probably would have shit my pants
  • Can't wait for the DLC

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