3D shooters are a genre long and particularly afflicted with 'just so' game design; Half-Life popularized a reload mechanic where you tap a button and wait to have your gun refilled from a pool, and this became a defacto standard for no particular reason over not having reloading, or reloading that actually has gun magazine management, or dozens of other one off systems meant to represent a games ethos. Halo introduced a two-weapon system that, along side a nuanced weapon selection forced you to always accept a trade off, games without nuanced weapon selections copied it wholesale, usually resulting in defacto one weapon system because you really need to carry the M16 at all times to get anything done. Halo Infinite in turn has a sprint button with so little effect that you need a stopwatch to tell if it makes you faster- because Halo doesn't benefit from a sprint mechanic but Shooters Have Sprint. Helldivers is perhaps the only studio published 3D shooter in half a decade if not more where there is no 'just so' game design, from meat and potato mechanics like your gun's recoil being semi-deterministic to help you avoid the regular concern of friendly fire, and your gun being loaded from a small pool of disposable magazines, to fun details like running out of spawns but completing the mission objective still constituting a victory.

The funniest gag in Alan Wake is that Alan Wake is supposed to be an author of such boundless imagination that a nameless eldritch force is awakened solely by his presence and longs to use his singular talent to destroy the world or whatever, but then the excerpts of his writing that we're treated to (and there are many) are like sub-Dan Brown level hack garbage. I don't think this was intentional but I like to give Remedy the benefit of the doubt where I can. Anyway Alan Wake II better be the best fucking game of the year if it made me revisit this tedious piece of shit so I can remember the lore.