This review contains spoilers
This story is a monster.
Kill your darlings.
The moment I fell head over heels for this game comes very late in Alan's half of the story. The titular author is still trapped in the Dark Place, visualized now as a cracked mirror version of New York City that is ever shifting, full of restless spirits, and submerged in impenetrable darkness. Alan's goal, as was his goal in the previous game, is to write his way out of the Dark Place, to craft a new manuscript that will save him and those he cares about. Through gameplay, you find points of interest in the Dark Place that inspire Alan to write, and his ideas shape the world around him, allowing him to access parts of this inverted reality that will bring him closer to his escape. After each draft of his new manuscript is complete, he is urged toward a replica of the apartment he and his wife, Alice, lived in before their fateful trip to Bright Falls. It is here that Alan learns what became of Alice in the 13 years since his disappearance.
Alice became a photographer. Well, she had been a photographer for years, but Alan's star had always eclipsed her own, and without him and his emotional abuse around the apartment, she was able to create for herself again. And then one day, Alan returned. Meaner. Colder. Not quite who she remembered. Not quite who she believed. This new torment led her to create an exhibition of candid photography she had taken of "Alan." Her nightmares made manifest. But the pain was too great. Her first exhibition was to be her last.
Alan - the real Alan - blames Mr. Scratch, a dark presence within the dreamlike void that has assumed his form, becoming corporeal to wreak havoc upon reality, rewriting it at his whim. Alan confronts Scratch in his writer's room, shooting the doppelgänger in the head before he can finish his next world-altering manuscript. When Alan checks the pages to see what damage has been done, he recoils, realizing that these are the pages he (and by proxy the player) have been writing while in the Dark Place. In typical Alan Wake fashion, the eponymous horror hack narrates this revelation: that he and Mr. Scratch are one and the same. There was no greater force at play to manifest Alan's id, no dark presence that was corrupting the world. It was Alan. "It was always me," he croaks.
It's this scene that sold me on Alan Wake II, from Alan finding his wife's suicide note played before a photo roman of her actual death to Alan confronting himself in the personal hell he had trapped himself in 13 years prior. The mixed media - cycling through film, photography, FMV, and interactive game - does as much to unsettle as inspire, and I exhaled harshly when I realized the chapter had come to a close, unaware that I had been holding my breath for the entire cutscene. Alan, repeating the torment, coming to grips with the monster he had created to escape the monster he was, trapped in that attic at the bottom of an oceanic lake. I thought to myself, for all of Sam Lake's cribbing of David Lynch, he finally made a successor to Fire Walk With Me... and I love it. The meta-narratives, plot heavy sequences, camera winking, and tie-ins to Remedy's connected universe were a smokescreen, a way of disguising the palpably human thrust at its center. Alan Wake is a bad author. A bad husband. And he nearly destroyed the world trying to convince himself he wasn't. Game of the Year material if ever there was.
In the next chapter, the other characters shoot Alan with a big spirit gun powered by rock-n-roll light switches until Mr. Scratch is separated from his body.
And that's the moment I lost interest in this game.
Kill your darlings.
The moment I fell head over heels for this game comes very late in Alan's half of the story. The titular author is still trapped in the Dark Place, visualized now as a cracked mirror version of New York City that is ever shifting, full of restless spirits, and submerged in impenetrable darkness. Alan's goal, as was his goal in the previous game, is to write his way out of the Dark Place, to craft a new manuscript that will save him and those he cares about. Through gameplay, you find points of interest in the Dark Place that inspire Alan to write, and his ideas shape the world around him, allowing him to access parts of this inverted reality that will bring him closer to his escape. After each draft of his new manuscript is complete, he is urged toward a replica of the apartment he and his wife, Alice, lived in before their fateful trip to Bright Falls. It is here that Alan learns what became of Alice in the 13 years since his disappearance.
Alice became a photographer. Well, she had been a photographer for years, but Alan's star had always eclipsed her own, and without him and his emotional abuse around the apartment, she was able to create for herself again. And then one day, Alan returned. Meaner. Colder. Not quite who she remembered. Not quite who she believed. This new torment led her to create an exhibition of candid photography she had taken of "Alan." Her nightmares made manifest. But the pain was too great. Her first exhibition was to be her last.
Alan - the real Alan - blames Mr. Scratch, a dark presence within the dreamlike void that has assumed his form, becoming corporeal to wreak havoc upon reality, rewriting it at his whim. Alan confronts Scratch in his writer's room, shooting the doppelgänger in the head before he can finish his next world-altering manuscript. When Alan checks the pages to see what damage has been done, he recoils, realizing that these are the pages he (and by proxy the player) have been writing while in the Dark Place. In typical Alan Wake fashion, the eponymous horror hack narrates this revelation: that he and Mr. Scratch are one and the same. There was no greater force at play to manifest Alan's id, no dark presence that was corrupting the world. It was Alan. "It was always me," he croaks.
It's this scene that sold me on Alan Wake II, from Alan finding his wife's suicide note played before a photo roman of her actual death to Alan confronting himself in the personal hell he had trapped himself in 13 years prior. The mixed media - cycling through film, photography, FMV, and interactive game - does as much to unsettle as inspire, and I exhaled harshly when I realized the chapter had come to a close, unaware that I had been holding my breath for the entire cutscene. Alan, repeating the torment, coming to grips with the monster he had created to escape the monster he was, trapped in that attic at the bottom of an oceanic lake. I thought to myself, for all of Sam Lake's cribbing of David Lynch, he finally made a successor to Fire Walk With Me... and I love it. The meta-narratives, plot heavy sequences, camera winking, and tie-ins to Remedy's connected universe were a smokescreen, a way of disguising the palpably human thrust at its center. Alan Wake is a bad author. A bad husband. And he nearly destroyed the world trying to convince himself he wasn't. Game of the Year material if ever there was.
In the next chapter, the other characters shoot Alan with a big spirit gun powered by rock-n-roll light switches until Mr. Scratch is separated from his body.
And that's the moment I lost interest in this game.