Alan Wake II is an Object of Power
“It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean.”
Alan Wake II is special. It drips with the sweat of its creators at Remedy Entertainment, its sleeves proudly emblazoned with stuff from Twin Peaks, The X-Files, True Detective, The Lighthouse- a collage of modern psychological horror and pop-surrealism. It must only exist because some number of people desperately and genuinely wanted it to- this sequel to a beloved game from 13 years ago that wasn’t a big commercial hit but achieved a more word-of-mouth-based level of success. Remedy had received much acclaim for their last game, 2019's Control, but there’d been a fire burning in the belly of Alan Wake fans for over a decade now- would Alan return from The Lake with answers? Would a sequel finally be dredged from the depths of that inland sea?
In 2021 when Alan Wake II was announced, I was unequivocally excited. Alan Wake had been memorable and distinct even if it wasn’t one of my big favorites. It could be completed in a couple of days, and it was a little cheesy, but there was nothing else quite like it. It was a real “dude, the sequel could be awesome” type of game.
Alan Wake 1 was certainly a project handicapped by technology of its era. We know this based on Remedy themselves, speaking to the original scope and how it was cut down- we can see it in early previews.
Wake was touted as a tech-showcase open world game with cutting edge graphics, a groundbreaking project for videogame storytelling that would push the Xbox 360 to its limit. If this initial hype sounds more striking than my assessment of the game from the last paragraph-it was. Wake was announced in 2005 and finally launched five years later in 2010. It was solid, it was compelling, many who played it enjoyed the story, but it didn’t fully live up to the grand vision the project had been sold on. It was creative, flawed, and charming for it- its scope cut down to fit on the hardware. Even for Twin Peaks heads who would glom onto its references- I’m not sure it fulfilled the promise of that legendary show’s fascinating weirdness.
So, Alan Wake could be heaped onto some pile of aughts overhype next to Fable or Too Human- but it was genuinely good. The promise of something even better was always there, in its story, in its ambitious creativity- Remedy’s pedigree of walking their own path.
Alan Wake II revives the spirit of its predecessor as a genuinely groundbreaking combination of technology, art and storytelling. It’s a semi-open world supernatural detective mystery game with mixed-media elements (test-trialed in Control, improved here) and an uncommon eye for environmental detail strewn lovingly across a cascading paranormal odyssey with its own mythology and rules. A mesmerizing game about stories and a story about writing that story of stories. What’s amazing is that it conveys these layered narratives and meta-narrative elements so earnestly and unblinkingly.
Meta-narratives are no longer novel on their simple merits, but the secret here is that Alan Wake II is so sincerely dedicated to the humanity of its characters, what they’re doing, and where they’re going. The meta elements are not here to cash in cheaply on a fad, but because they were always part of this story, and they belong in it. It balances that act with all of the wild shit which it plays completely straight whilst also sort of going “ehyyyyy this is pretty cool huh, bet you’ve never seen this before” in choice, cheeky moments that are effective because it’s so hard to disagree. Don’t let all the pretense fool you- this game is scary, wacky, and fun. It’s deadly serious, it’s perfectly honest, and it’s also one of the most hilarious and surprising games I’ve played in years. This unique range of different tones sprawls across its multiple realities and gives them identifiable character- the balancing act works well and suits the assignment.
All the world’s a stage, right? While us actors play our parts, the gods, aloof, look down in amusement at our performances. Such is the structure of Alan Wake II’s cosmos as we strip back levels of videogame to the point where the real creative director of the game is speaking directly to us in full-motion-video talk show format. It’s silly, it’s funny, and it’s existentially horrifying from the imagined perspective of a character within that video game. There’s a sinister edge to the joke that never fully recedes, like the humor might rotate on axis back to horror and cut the main cast at any moment. Metanarrative goofs are low-key existentially threatening to characters within the standard narrative which never sacrifices its own seriousness or gravitas. These characters matter. They have ample internal dialogue given to them- more than in most video games of this budget and caliber.
Where the first Alan Wake drew from Twin Peaks for inspiration, Alan Wake II draws equally from Twin Peaks: The Return. Alan has been exhumed from The Lake and transformed to become something grotesque and greater, with a grody Dave Grohl haircut and the hard worn callouses of a lost decade. Neither Alan Wake II nor Twin Peaks: The Return are attempts to recreate prior works- they are twists. Excavations that drill down, rather than loops of what came before.
What they are drilling down on exactly, is where it gets interesting. Is Alan a captive of his own story whilst also being its author- and if so, how can he escape? What is the greater force binding him to that fiction and causing it to manifest as reality?
AW2 and The Return deal heavily with the nature of reality/un-reality, and both play with the reality of their own fiction- they are profoundly about themselves, about the viewers and about the creators. Necessarily to these themes, they also feel personal. Twin Peaks: The Return often feels like David Lynch is reflecting on his work, his relationship to it- and our relationship to it. Conversely in Alan Wake II, Sam Lake is speaking to us. Sometimes what he’s saying may be simply “isn’t this funny?” or in a roundabout way “hey, it was really hard for us to make this game,” but again, it feels earnest. Alan Wake 2 is a game about the making of itself, and it’s also a story about these characters- Alan Wake and Saga Anderson.
Twin Peaks: The Return and Alan Wake II also both employ this self-conscious meta-narrative with a knowing emphasis on the experience of the consumer. These themes aren’t only there for us to fastidiously decode, they’re markers leading us towards the creator’s feelings and pushing us to reflect on our own, perhaps in abstract or personal ways. Guard rails of plot-exposition are present so that we understand what’s going on, but this isn’t a game trying to be perfectly understood so much as strongly felt and experienced- I think. We spiral as Alan spirals, and as Saga spirals, further into the mystery. We feel like the characters feel, confronted with a strange universe. We frequently understand exactly as little as they do. Hard confirmations of truth are light on the ground as we navigate the unrealities of Remedy’s worlds, but rules are demonstrated frequently enough to lend framework. It's a narrative supernatural playground and some fun lies in traversing it by touch, finding out where our hearts and minds end up.
The player’s experience is the point. We could describe this as a vibes-based approach if we wanted to do so with fewer words. These works aren’t telling us directly what they’re about on that metatextual level- they want us to sense it in our bones before we can formulate the full thought. They don’t want to tell us exactly how to feel or what to think, but for that lurking impulse to scratch at our brains as we put the pieces together in uniquely personal ways.
One could say they want to put you in the driver’s seat of the mystery, but let’s call it “the experiencer’s seat.” That makes it sound like a UFO abduction, and Alan Wake II is a UFO-abduction of a game that will terrify and fascinate its players whilst taking them somewhere they never expected to go. It’s just that these Finnish aliens are surprisingly fun and like to dance.
Meta-modernism is a concept I’ve written about before. Something I love about Twin Peaks: The Return is how absurd it gets in its many muffled-laughter-inducing bizarre moments. Alan Wake II performs a similar dance, and the meta-modernist oscillation of tone (or the earnest / self-aware goof pendulum) is here, too. A veil of deep and foreboding sincerity is pierced by moments of gleeful absurdity, and they weave together to draw us deeper.
“As a metaphor, you can imagine that… Alan Wake is Remedy.” — Sam Lake, Creative Director of Remedy Entertainment.
Both of these ‘Return’s contain echoes of their production cycles; shadows cast by real life events. Alan had been trapped in the dark place for 13 years since the release of Alan Wake 1, as two full console generations passed and sequel plans floundered, postponed. Near the end of Twin Peaks’ original run, Laura Palmer said “I’ll see you again in 25 years.” Lynch, miraculously, made that date with The Return, in what has to be one of the greatest called shots of all time.
As the characters in these works dissociate from their fictional reality, they sometimes seem to reach out towards ours. There’s a moment in one of Remedy’s older titles- Max Payne, where Max realizes that he’s in a video game, and it’s a horrific realization. The ending of Twin Peaks: The Return, is another dissociation of itself- a revival of its own mystery with no clear answer and a full stack of foreboding omens for fans to ingest and speculate on for another couple of decades.
It fits that both stories are deeply concerned with Forteana and the paranormal, the idea that our real world might be overlapped or superseded by forces we don’t understand. A rich folklore of cryptids, the occult, and extrasensory powers informs both casual conversation and bureaucratic files in these worlds, as astute observers try and fail to decode the high strangeness.
It’s a smorgasbord of references, implications and speculations that fans can dive deeply into if they choose. In Remedy’s Control, there is an extra-dimensional entity called “Polaris” guiding our protagonist, Jesse. If Polaris were interpreted as the player (we are also guiding Jesse,) then the dimension from which it hails is our own. We are Polaris. Or at least, we might be. The game’s narrative is aware of us, but in a way that’s novel and thoughtful rather than snide or trite. That’s the point I’m trying to drive home with a lot of this- Remedy is doing meta-narrative stuff that really justifies itself in interesting ways.
If we’re playing along with these overlapping realities, should we be so hubristic to assume that our reality is the end of the line? The headspace of these stories is a Matryoshka doll where we look down upon the fiction, and the fiction within the fiction, and only speculate about who may be looking down on us. There are moments in Alan Wake II where these deranged, dirty shadow-men tackle Alan and scream “you’re a character in a story!!” It’s one of so many wild and terrifying little things that caught me off guard while playing.
Sometimes, barriers between realities crack and break beneath us- the game realizes it’s a game. The characters do stop and wonder if they are characters. In Twin Peaks: The Return, there are climactic moments where it feels like, perhaps, the fiction has ended for the players in this story-they’re somewhere else now, and we’re left to wonder along with them. Mystery is its own lifeblood that must be summoned naturally. There can be no total explanation, only reflections and interpretations that speak to us. So, the relationship between the story, the artwork, and the viewer or player- can expand to fill that space. A space of possibilities and the thrill of unknowing. The experience of being inside a mystery.
These are heady spaces for a big-budget commercial videogame product to venture into, and that’s why I love Alan Wake II- because it aspires to do new things with this medium. There’s no way it could’ve been made like this out of anything other than genuine love for its own ideas, influences and style. That clarity of vision is exceedingly rare in games at this scale.
So, whether it wholly succeeds its Lynchian / A24 Horror / True Detective pedigree is a question I can’t and honestly don’t need to answer. I do think it does a hell of a job at lovingly evoking those feelings, transporting them to a new medium and demonstrating why they’re cool in the first place. It gets the mystery, it gets the immersion, and Remedy does this stuff in a way that only they can. Is it cheesy sometimes, like the first one? Yes. Is it my favorite game I’ve played this year? Also, yes. Is Alan Wake III now the thing I want most in the world? Maybe.
Video games are a youthful format with so much boundless potential to surprise us, and games like Alan Wake II should help culture at large to truly understand that they can be so much more than time wasters or face-value sandboxes. Alan Wake II’s game engine, Northlight, was originally billed as the Northlight Storytelling Engine. Remedy has since dropped that branding in the interest of simplicity, but they weren’t kidding about the storytelling engine part- and that’s what games are. What they can be.
Alan Wake II takes crucial strides towards that great potential of the artform- a real Object of Power with abilities to influence, shock and inspire those who come into contact with it.
It is, above all, something to be experienced.
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