A brilliantly addictive detective game which makes you feel like a genius. Methodically going through each scenario and deducing exactly what happened was so delightful. Every single case in the game (especially including the DLCs) sunk their mystery hooks into me, and I was more than happy to be reeled in for the 10 hours-and-change it took to complete.

I don't rave that often, but, if you have any passing interest in detective games, I would press this into your hands immediately, no question. And, to those of you who played Obra Dinn and wondered, "Why don't they make more games like this?" THIS GAME IS ONE OF THOSE GAMES THAT THEY DON'T MAKE MORE OF LIKE THIS! A MUST PLAY!

BUREAUCRACY MANIFEST

Governmental buildings are rigid things, staffed with stiff moustaches and an efficiency so blunt and clipped that you eventually start to find hours within minutes and decades within seconds. They’re all the same, and yet look nothing alike side by side. Society needs these unorthodox cathedrals to keep the wheels of society turning; to double stamp and cross-reference and double check that said wheels are also the correctly regimented wheels for the said job of turning said society. We worship these places, these structures of order, though we are never consciously aware of doing so.

I am consciously aware of the fact that I admire this game. I mean, it’s not perfect. In fact, it can become downright boring! But there’s something enthralling about its atmosphere, of chaos straining against order with neither really coming out the victor.

As Jesse Faden, you investigate The Oldest House, a para-FBI organization dedicated to the containment and study of “paranatural” phenomenon, in search of someone, and guided by a second-person entity who may or may not be YOU, the player. We realise that The Oldest House is invisible to the pedestrians outside, that the House itself is alive in some metaphysical sense, and – luckily for us – is in the middle of a hostile invasion by a terrifying “paranatural” force. Already a brilliant setup, and the game gets a ton of mileage from the concept of a bureaucratical house of mirrors.

I am finding that Remedy, the game’s developers, are talented narrative designers – perhaps especially Sam Lake, if he did indeed pen most of the game’s narrative and dialogue. The main story isn’t really anything to write home about by the end of your 20 or so hours with the game, but the construction of certain key moments is what stays with you the most. The supplemental materials acquired throughout the game add wonderfully to the overall atmosphere, although some of the scattered reports you find are rather hit-and-miss in terms of written quality or interest. I’m an enthusiastic proponent of the use of FMV in this game, and it's here where the writing quality really shone for me. Every time I unlocked a new Casper Darling (Head of Research) video earnestly explaining why a 1980s floppy disk MUST be kept in secure containment at all times and how it had once telekinetically launched a coffee cup, I set my controller down and breathed a contented sigh.

Same with the Hotline calls. Early on in the game, you gain access to lore-crunchy conversations accessed through an ethereal Bakelite telephone, wherein dead or “paranatural” entities may converse with you. The writing of these are also evocative, and sometimes cryptic enough to tempt you down a lore-forum rabbit hole, a la the best games of FromSoftware. There’s the odd clunker in there, too, of course. Ex-Director Trench’s calls have a rather tiresome “I guess that’s what the whiskey’s for” kind of hardboiled edginess at times, but are still wonderfully performed (by Max Payne’s voice actor, James McCaffrey, no less! The Remedy Connected Universe awakens…).

The gameplay itself is fast, loose, frenetic, and contains the Best Telekinesis in Games (TM). Shooting office chairs at your enemies at the speed of sound does get somewhat repetitive after 20 hours, but it never feels less than satisfying. The modding of weapons I can take or leave, however. I dislike extremely incremental upgrading systems of any sort; you know, slot this into your weapon to gain 0.5% movement speed? And I never paid much attention to the system apart from breaking apart the mods in order to get more experience points in order to upgrade my earth-shatteringly dangerous telekinesis. By the end of the game, I felt like Jean Grey on a phoenix migraine, I was THAT powerful.

What can be said of the game’s enemies? Dubbed ‘The Hiss’, they are original in the sense of being a “hostile resonance” able to takeover and puppet any organic matter for their own purposes. They are incorporeal otherwise, and without adequate protection, it is made starkly clear that anyone within the Bureau could be corrupted and turned. Again, kudos to the narrative design for this startlingly original antagonistic force, that, similar to Alan Wake’s Dark Presence, can invade at a moment’s
You Are A Worm Through Time
The Thunder Song Distorts You
You’ve Always Been The New You
You Want This To Be True
We Stand Around You While You Dream

********************************************************************************************************************************************************

END OF OFFICIAL F.B.C. TRANSCRIPT OF O.O.P #21, dubbed by debriefed personnel as ‘The Review’.

FULL REPORT AS FOLLOWS:

THE REVIEW (OOP9-KE)

CONTAINMENT PROCEDURE:
No unique containment procedure required when bound. However, copies MUST NOT be made and any duplication MUST be reported to the Head of Research immediately.

DESCRIPTION/PARAUTILITY:
A video game review written for the video game review and cataloguing site ‘Backloggd.com’. It contains 741 words, written in a somewhat diffuse and overwrought style. It purports to review a video game called ‘Control’, a video game which does not exist, but which, alarmingly, according to the scant details of this review, paint an accurate picture of our organization, The Federal Bureau of Control. Whether this is an isolated copy has yet to be determined. Our researches have determined that other copies may have escaped into the internet and our Head of Communications along with Dr Darling are currently investigating.

The object can cause violent reactions in any who attempt to read it. In some cases, as in the [REDACTED] incident, the violence/mania can infect others close by. After half an hour, the violence and mania subsides, leaving the victim in a subdued and catatonic state. After another hour, the victim will fully regain cognitive faculties with one marked difference: all their closely held opinions and morals will be completely reversed. As seen with Person A, a small town preacher, who [REDACTED] and is now being held at a secure facility in solitary confinement.

When bound, the object allows parautilitarians to affect public discourse surrounding a popular product (such as a video game or movie), effectively rewriting reality through their para-linguistic skills.

A similar effect was seen in the Bright Falls AWE incident, when another writer [REDACTED]. [SEE DR. CASPER DARLING AND THE HEAD OF INVESTIGATIONS FOR FURTHER READING INTO THE BRIGHT FALLS INCIDENT.]

BACKGROUND
The object was first discovered on a video game website: ‘Backloggd.com’ as stated above. Bureau agents in the Investigations Sector were alerted to its existence after the Bureau’s computer security system flagged certain key words used in the review as a possible secrecy breach.
An agent was tasked with shutting down the website, deleting its content, and uploading the OOP review to a secure Bureau USB which was then subjected to the usual containment procedures before being moved back to the Research Sector for further study.

The agent who initially contained the review has been transferred to Maintenance for peace of mind.

Further Note
The strange chant at the end of the Review OOP continues to elude explanations. The current hypothesis is some sort of dream logic mantra or some sort of metaphysical intrusion. We are currently cross-referencing 'The Hiss' with any known para-natural entities and will keep this file open.

End report

EPISODE 1: KALEIDOSCOPE

Twin Peaks was a great show – maybe one of THE GREATEST shows. It certainly influenced the heck out of subsequent shows, even the likes of ‘The X-Files’ or ‘Lost’, and probably most prestige dramas around the 90s to the early 2000s. It showed people that you could have a singular style while messing around with the audience’s expectations, especially in regards to genres. With Twin Peaks, genre was a concept that was almost eschewed: we’re watching a soap opera; no, a crime drama; police procedural; no, a supernatural horror; no, a comedy. In actual fact, we were watching a deconstruction of all these genres.

FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, possibly the main protagonist (although with such a large, bubbling cast, it’s harder than we might presume to stick that label with absolute conviction on him) is not written as the atypical FBI crime drama type agent. He’s straight-laced, yes, in some ways, and wants to uphold Justice, but in the same way that a police officer in a children’s cartoon does. Cooper is serious and idealistic and fanciful all wrapped up in one package. He loves Tibet, transcendental meditation, and is an open channel for the supernatural, dream-like experiences which inform his investigations as much as the mundane forensic clues of the physical world do. At no point are we meant to believe that Cooper is a REAL person. He’s a deconstruction of an archetype, chopped into pieces, put back together, and shot through the lens of a madman (David Lynch). This can be applied to any of the Twin Peaks cast. All the characters are deconstructions of specific genre-bound characters, and ultimately, this is what I believe leads to the satisfyingly uncanny feeling of the whole series.

This is accentuated by the strange, sometimes seemingly-on-purpose amateurish acting. Which isn’t amateurish AT ALL, but merely presents itself as that way during moments when Lynch’s “genre lens” swings more to SOAP OPERA colour. Think of it like a kaleidoscope of genres which can be switched at any moment, affecting the reality of the show itself, and even down to the meta-level of the actors’ performances. Sometimes the colours overlap. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but that’s a fraction of my beliefs on why Twin Peaks was so zeitgeistingly influential.

So, to monochromatic Alan Wake. I remember the days of 2010 when this game came out. I was still in University, studying some English degree or other, and not particularly keeping an ear to the ground for new games, apart from listening weekly to the GiantBombcast, when I heard some murmurings about this game being Great but also slightly Disappointing given the not-insignificant amount of hype prior to its release.

I remember reviews talking about the linearity and the lack of variety, despite the story being well-told and intriguing. I had no seventh gen console at the time due to being a penniless arts student, but I was piqued enough by the discourse cloaking the game to watch a walkthrough on Youtube. It was the story I was most interested in, you see, although I hadn’t, at that point, even watched Twin Peaks. I was an avid Stephen King reader though, so the way that the horror worked in the story seemed somewhat Kingian to me: regular guy, who also happens to be a famous writer and asshole, caught up in supernatural shenanigans. I found that very Kingian indeed, apart from one caveat: Alan Wake doesn’t FEEL like a REAL enough character such as in King’s novels. In fact, we are never graced with any real details about Wake’s life prior to the start of the shenanigans.

And this MIGHT BE FOR THE BEST. Because the story takes a meta-turn, wherein we learn – AND HERE BE MASSIVE SPOILERS – that Alan Wake himself MAY be a character written into being by another in-game writer character decades ago, and who is only now enacting the plan set in motion by this 1970s writer. This would be, if true, a narrative coup de grace. In fact, the game laudably lays out the puzzle pieces leading to these conclusions and yet shows restraint by letting the player mostly decide what to believe. Even the ending is ambiguous regarding Wake’s actual fate, although the DLCs do add more post-game crumbs. The game can have its delicious cake and eat it, then, when it comes to this sort of meta-textual reading. Think Wake’s the most boring and irritating protagonist since Bubsy the Bobcat? Well, he’s literally WRITTEN to be that way – blame the Dark Presence for bringing him to life; after all, he’s just a conduit so Thomas Zane (the other in-game writer responsible for apparently unleashing and thereafter somewhat sealing the BIG BAD of the Dark Presence) can finish what he started in the 70s.


See, it can get weird like that. It’s probably the best narrative in a game from 2010, and worth the price of entry, even if there happens to be, unfortunately, a slimy video game wrapped around it, its choking tentacles intruding upon the intriguing meta-premises. Keep reading for a further dissection of this clunky kraken.

END OF EPISODE 1

PREVIOUSLY ON THE ALAN WAKE REVIEW:

“I was writing a review about a video game from 2010. It had seemed like a good idea.

But the review was slowly taking a life of its own. My sentences of praise slowly became twisted as I progressed, revealing negative gulfs in the pristine product. Gulfs filled with a squirming unconscious mass, blind and deaf to mercy.

I had to keep going.

I had to purge the game from my system. Before IT could purge me.”

EPISODE 2: DARKNESS

What Alan Wake is, as a video game, is a straightforward third person shooter of a somewhat generic bent. You are armed with a perpetual flashlight in one hand and some sort of unexciting weapon in the other. A revolver, a couple different shotguns, flares, flashbombs and a flare gun are all the tools the game bequeaths you to destroy the incarnations of the Dark Prescence, which is the malevolent force trying to claw its way back into reality by warping Wake’s story.

The Dark Presence, even though it can literally throw girders and large ships(!) at you, has decided that, no, the best way to dispatch the writer is to possess random humans and then have them jump out of bushes to do battle. This happens through the whole game. Wake is walking through the forest and then suddenly a squealing violin sting rips the air and the camera swings madly around to show the player the location of an emerging Taken (the proper noun the game uses to classify these possessed humans). The camera being wrenched from your grasp to show these dark goblins coming at you poses a few problems: one, if there are many enemies, chances are you will get clonked by one before you have the chance to recover from the impetuous camera. Two, it removes the element of surprise and horror. True, at the start of the game, it’s somewhat startling to hear the violin stab, punctuated by a shuffling shape coming at you, but after the fiftieth time, it produces more a sigh of resentment rather than a gasp of horror.

You use the torch to burn away the darkness cloaking the Taken so that you can then dispatch them with your actual arsenal. Or you could shoot a flare gun round or lob a flashbomb, which almost instantly kills most Taken in the area due to their extreme aversion to light.

But isn’t there something all-too video gamey about this whole notion? The idea that a sinister Lovecraftian horror can be shot to death after burning away its darkness cloak? And most enemies even follow the old Nintendo one-two-three, and that’s it – tango neutralized. There’s just something inelegant about shooting an intangible evil to death, but then it’s a video game. But imagine if Special Agent Dale Cooper rocked up to the Black Lodge with a wheelbarrow of AK47s, proceeding to shoot all the metaphysical entities IN THE HEAD before they can even make a backwards quip, and you begin to see why I describe the Alan Wake gun-solves-all mentality as being somewhat inelegant.

What would I propose instead? Either enemies that are defeated ONLY with the light-based weaponry, or having no enemies at all, but in the same vein that P.T (Silent Hills demo) had “no” enemies, if you get my drift. Killing them with just light seems truer to the narrative.

This is especially glaring when you start to notice that most of the difficulty of these encounters comes from getting rid of the Taken’s darkness cloaks before they close in on you. Once the darkness is dissipated, enemies can then be stunlocked to death with your guns – even the biggest enemies. Shoot, stagger, shoot, stagger, maybe up to five or six times for the Big Boys and then you’re done.

The rest of the combat is positioning. Getting yourself into a position where you’re not going to get clocked by a whirling axe (a la Resident Evil 4 Ganados) or shanked in your ass by a particularly mean-spirited spawn on the game’s part. Some encounters are extremely frustrating in this regard because it only takes one stagger for subsequent enemies to start forming a line and clunk you to death afterwards. Some enemies are somehow allowed to HIT YOU TWICE before you’re allowed to try and run away. Like Wake refuses to allow such a thing as testosterone to spur his escape after being stabbed in the side by a shambling gremlin man. The point is, it gets frustrating pretty quickly and some encounters become a matter of luck or practice, particularly in the back half of the game, where finale tension seems to equate to calling in a truckload of fresh Taken every few steps.

Sometimes, the game gives you a car. The cars feel soapy to control, but are mostly used in one-off sections where you need to drive down a road about half a mile before getting to a blockade necessitating the abandonment of your car and returning to your untrustworthy feet.

Much has been said (probably) about the god-awful running in this game, and the fact that Wake can’t seem to go a few meters without slowing down to a panting crawl. His lungs must be made of papyrus, his legs of lead. From a gameplay perspective, it’s clear they don’t want you to Usain Bolt your way past all those “delightful” encounters and so have deliberately driven these steel nails through Wake’s ankles. You know, to create more combat tension. It’s not good.

JUST WRITE YOURSELF SOME BETTER LEGS, AL!

There’s a dodge button. Possibly the most imprecise dodge I’ve ever played around with; after playing 15 hours of the game and its DLCs, I still don’t really know how it works. The best advice I can give is that you need to dodge when you see an enemy start moving its weapon. If the weapon is already slashing down on you, it’s usually too late to dodge. You need to dodge more on the wind-up of their attacks. Which is very imprecise and difficult to do, seeing as, you know, the enemies are cloaked in DARKNESS, masking most of their movements and tells.

There aren’t many enemy types to plough down, either. Most are deer-hunter looking things, with the occasional Big Boy or boss character thrown in. The bosses are just regular Taken, more or less, who take slightly more damage to dispatch. That’s it.

Then you have the possessed objects. Things like barrels, girders, and vehicles which have been corrupted by the darkness and throw themselves glitchingly in your direction. These also get hugely frustrating – a particular offender being a bridge section deep into the game’s last chapter. You see, the objects hurt you on contact and sometimes can keep hurting you if you stand too close. And if many of them are hurtling towards you, you can easily get pincered into a corner, bonked by a barrel and goodnight. The idea is cool, but the execution (or their execution of YOU) gets tiresome. Less enemies would make this a far snappier experience in general…

So the gameplay falls short and fails to light up the fun synapses of my brain. If you enjoy it, all power to you, but for me it’s too much too 2010s.

END OF EPISODE 2

PREVIOUSLY ON THE ALAN WAKE REVIEW:

“I was writing a review that was slowly taking a mad life of its own.

‘You gave it three stars, man! This reads more like a ONE!’

I had to hurry. I could feel it writhing at the dark edges of my consciousness, trying to worm its way further into the world.

I couldn’t let that happen.

But I was winning. I could sense it.

The pressure was lessening. The purging was working. I had to continue this ritual, had to keep opening that valve, until everything drained.

Until everything made sense.”

EPISODE 3 – FAÇADE

As an atmospheric work, the game definitely does all it can to cling to that atmosphere until the end credits roll. It’s interesting enough to hold your attention through the clunky fights, most of the time. Trudging through the forest for the first time, torch in hand, hearing the wind whipping through the creaking branches above while making for a pinprick of light emanating from a gas station in the distance feels good. Feels appropriate. The first few levels begin with showing you a remote landmark and then zooming back to Wake saying something like “Well, that’s where I need to go” for the benefit of someone or other. Your path inevitably takes you through forests, forests, and more forests. Occasionally you will take refuge in a cosy cabin (still creepy, but cosy by virtue of being some sort of enclave from the monsters outside, most of the time) where you may come across a radio broadcast or, better still, a television, which runs episodes of ‘Night Springs’ an in-game Twilight Zone homage, each of which only runs for a few minutes and tells a compacted be-careful-what-you-wish-for type story. Some are good, some are really good. They all use live action actors, which is something else that distinguishes Alan Wake, introducing real life into the video game. There’s a moment much later where you’re forced to watch a talk show featuring Alan Wake, played by the character’s actual actor in a real-life talk show setting. This is the kind of mixed media mind bending I really wanted to see more of, and am surprised that not many games since have picked up the gauntlet of mixed media storytelling. This is one of those situations where you think Remedy was really, really onto something interesting if only they could have tied it even more into the meta-narrative. Compelling stuff.

The town of Bright Springs is rendered in great detail, cribbing again from Twin Peaks: the Sheriff station is a virtual simulacrum of the one in Twin Peaks and there’s the obligatory Double R Diner stand in. The outskirts of town and beyond are also stunningly realized and quite chunky. Sometimes you will traverse what seems to be miles across forested landscapes, seeing small cabins and farms here and there. The Episode where you end up in the farm is a definite highlight that showcases this scope to its sumptuous extreme – the drive there, and the subsequent concert battle are core memories for this game.

You do feel a little sick of forests once you get to the back half of the game and realize that we’re all-in on this environmental style and that’s it. But at least it’s an environment done well, even if variety is not the order of the day. The gameplay is again at fault: having light based mechanics necessitates that most action happens at night, as that's when the ghouls also emerge.

There are set-pieces set during the day. Walking around a clinic for suffering creatives is another highlight here, and seeing the sun dip into a storm during that section was an artful experience, even if the other characters struggle to stand out. Even the villain of that particular section is bland. He’s no Nightingale, that’s for sure, the crooked FBI agent chasing after Wake and descending into madness as he realizes he’s trapped in a REAL story. Abusing Wake with the names of authors: “Got you now, H.P. Lovecraft! Get ‘em up, Edgar Allen Poe!” is one of the funniest “running gags” in the game. And there must have been deliberate comedic intent behind that character.

Surely.

END OF EPISODE 3

PREVIOUSLY ON ALAN WAKE:

“I was writing a review of a video game from 2010. Trying to keep the Writhing at bay.

The images were broken heaps now, but they could still muster the strength to overwhelm me.

I think I’d purged everything. I think I made the justifications REAL. I hoped.

Now the ritual was almost complete.

It would only take one more act of authorial intent to banish the Writhing presence for good.

They knew what I was about to do. Their screams of rage almost killed me, but I smirked as the symbols of my freedom formed. Three simple symbols that would banish the Writhing, would give me back my freedom, although I knew another would eventually have to take up the torch.

This was the end.”

3/5