There are pages upon pages that I could write about this game, how it makes me feel, what it makes me think, and I knew that I would have difficulty putting the pen to paper even before getting halfway through the game. Every turn left me with something to ruminate on, every session leaving me with more spiraling thoughts than the last. I want to keep this as spoiler-free as I can, since I think that this is an experience best had blind as possible, so it may not seem as long or as thorough as I'd like. Maybe I'll make an extended version with spoilers galore, who knows. To make it easier, let me just start with the big statement:

Alan Wake II is a monumental achievement in video games. It is the magnum opus of a team of developers that have worked tirelessly for 20 years to push, expand, bend, and break the boundaries of what the medium of video games can do, before the idea of "the medium of video games" was even a concept in the public consciousness. It carries with it the weight of decades-old Chekhov's guns that have slowly had their hammers pulled back further and further with every new game or expansion under the Remedy name, all firing at the player throughout the story; some of those guns are 9-millimiters, others are 12-gauges. It may seem odd to fixate on the 13 years spent letting this game come to life, but there is an undeniable weight to the fact that it is the culmination of years of buildup, put together piecemeal with every new game in the Remedy catalog, every passing year making it shift and evolve and mutate into a supernova, a point of no return for both Remedy and for AAA games as a whole.

Alan Wake II is a game that needs to exist. It feels like a thunderous wake-up call to every game developer, large and small, to see what can be done with the technology that we're able to create with at this point in time. I'm sure we've all groaned at numerous hardware manufacturers' insistence on "the power and capability of the X" and "the new era of DLSS RTX FSR AA" leaving us with nothing much to think other than "huh, that sure is a game with good graphics", but I must stress that this is not the case when I praise this game's technological feats. The game uses every tool that modern hardware seems capable of to create visually stunning images that sear themselves into your brain, to shift realities with the press of a button, and to blur the line between full-motion video, pre-rendered CGI, and real-time cutscenes; a sleight of hand that could only be achieved if the graphics were clean enough and the transitions smooth enough to make you believe that it was all one continuous story flowing through multiple avenues. Not only does it do all this, but it succeeds in doing this by having exceptional art direction, not one scene or environment feeling generic, with even the most miniscule of details given a touch of love from the game's artists. This is the point that needs to be focused on; it uses this technology to express a clear, but sprawling artistic vision, not the inverse-- that being funneling a vision through the lens of parading technical ability.

The game has been referred to, quite frequently in fact, as the closest video game equivalent to Danielewski's House of Leaves, and I feel as though that is an apt description. As mentioned, I'm avoiding all spoilers in this review, but the way the narrative constantly folds in on itself with deeply postmodern meta references to both in-universe and external details, combined with the overall premise of "a horror story becoming reality", I feel like the comparison is a given. That being said, I wanted to bring it up to succinctly describe how extremely impressive the story is, not just for a video game, but as writing in general. As much as people might like to be reductive ("it's confusing, so people think it's smart!"), it's painfully obvious that creating something like this takes mental power that I, nor most people playing it, could even imagine having. Were it not for this magnificent, expansive, recursive, twisting narrative, then Alan Wake II would indeed be what the detractors call it; a tech demo. However, the art direction being used to bring this story to life is what, in my opinion, completely nullifies any chance at those arguments holding water.

For now, I think I'll leave it here. This is one of the greatest artistic experiences I've ever had the immense pleasure of bearing witness to, and one that I hope will be remembered as this generation's Half-Life 2 in terms of being a high watermark of what can be achieved with the technology that great creative minds can channel their visions through. I firmly believe that if this does not cause a titanic sea change in the field of AAA gaming within the next 5 years, then gaming as a medium will be showing itself to have grown stagnant and comfortable in the expected, in the norm. Every generation needs a game like this to remind us of the power and magnitude that exists within our favorite medium, one that inspires us to follow in its footsteps and create something great ourselves.

This game should not exist.

It does not feel like there was ever a time before Resident Evil 4, yet it certainly feels like we are all living in its aftermath. To say that this game is "confident" with its design might be the biggest understatement I've ever written. It doesn't feel confident, it feels like concrete rules of game design being rebuilt right in front of you. It takes as many cues from the series' roots with its core gameplay philosophies as it does rail shooters a la House of the Dead with its perpetual forward motion and linear map design; "every room feeling like something new." I've seen this game described as a new age of Resident Evil, a reinvention of the series, ushering in the "action era" of the series, but I think that's selling it short.

Auteur theory is something that I am personally at ends with, as I do think there are creative visionaries who leave a thumbprint on all of their works, but it still feels like I'm drastically reducing the tens, hundreds of people involved in game development to merely support for the big name. That being said, one must be impressed by Shinji Mikami. I can not comprehend practically inventing the survival horror genre with the original Resident Evil, help heighten action games to a new level with Devil May Cry, returning to a classic to iron out the few flaws and give it a good spit shine with REmake, and finally flip the gaming world on its head with Resident Evil 4. With that out of the way, there are some design choices from both REs 1 and 4 that I'd like to highlight: your inventory, and decision making.

When I think of RE1, I'm instantly reminded of the dread it induces with its strangling inventory and how key it is to trim all fat possible and keep only the bare necessities, lest you end up with an essential item left behind due to no free space. In every sense, RE4 manages to keep its iconic inventory management aspect, but only after completely overhauling it into something that has never, and probably will never be outdone. At an entry level, it's simple: rearrange items to fit the space; a Tetris-esque minigame in your downtime. But the more you play, the more your inventory feels like more than just a bag of options, it's a flash reminder of your entire arsenal. As much as I love the 2023 remake's decision to map certain weapons to the D-pad (a very comfortable feature), I find that it takes away from a certain improvisational aspect the game's combat has. You go into a room, you're surrounded by enemies, and after you shoot a few rounds to get the baddies swarming you off, you open your inventory; clarity. You think about how many enemies are in the room, how many shots you've put into them, when your last Merchant visit was, your ammo for all weapons, your grenade count, upcoming sections (if you're a returning player), and so much more, with one button press. And the only reason you have that moment of lucidity is because the game reminds you of your entire catalog, decorated in whatever order you prefer the most. Not only does it allow you to have satisfying click moments of everything fitting into place, but it lets you test your own speed, swapping between grenades, pistols, shotguns within seconds to sweep away enemies. Then, once that room is cleared, you collect all the ammo you've got and run another stocktake, mentally preparing yourself for the next encounter, just one small gear in what makes this game play like clockwork.

Adding onto that, I'd like to cross-reference this excellent review by SimonDedalus, wherein the game asks of you "how do you adapt to it putting you in a cage with Wolverine." It may sound silly on the surface, but the tensest encounters (a great example is the cabin in 2-2) in this game are, in my opinion, its shining moments. Sure, it's fun to pop the heads of enemies from a mile away with your rifle, but being trapped in a room not much bigger than you are and having enemies strapped with maces, cattle prods, crossbows, claw hands, or rocket launchers with nothing but the weapons you have and an ever-evolving game plan in your mind is what separates this game from the Resident Evil entries that would follow it. There's no expression of skill in mindlessly mowing down zombies, which is why this game never offers you that. The infected are tough, and you're doing yourself a disservice by just plugging away at them. Switching your styles and adapting to what the game throws at you will not only keep you well-stocked with ammo, as the "AI director" likes to throw a variety of ammo types at you to balance using guns you like while also keeping your gameplay fresh, but also reward you with a richer, deeper understanding of the game's combat and possibility for what could only be described as "combos" in the RE world.

There's more to talk about, of course, but I really think those two factors hone in what makes this game an immortal entrant into the pantheon of video games. Sure, I could talk about its effortless stylistic switch-ups, or its wonderfully cheesy B-movie charm, or its superbly satisfying and iconic sound design, but those are all just the church built on the proverbial "rock" of masterclass game design.

This is the best game ever made, in fact, I'd like to raise it up a peg: I consider RE4 to be an artistic achievement in humanity's name, and we are lucky to coexist alongside it in time. If you are a game designer, this game should light your head aflame with creativity, and if it doesn't, keep playing until it does. Even if you're not a game designer, the sheer strength and confidence in every aspect this game has should be enough to instill anyone with the faith in themselves they need to create something special of their own. If Shinji Mikami can do it, if Leon S. Kennedy can do it, if Capcom can do it, if Resident Evil can do it, so can you.

There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.

Manhunt is a game that's always really interested me. I've always had a grim, morbid fascination in the transgressive and controversial, the way the media can make people fear a film or game more than the actual work itself could. When I was younger, I probably had the entire Rockstar history memorized and would spring into a hearty speech about how "games aren't really the problem, it's the people", but you'd never really find me playing any of Rockstar's games; in an ironic reversal, I was just as fixated on the controversy of the material rather than the material itself. Of their entire catalog, Manhunt was the game that piqued my curiosity the most, since the very concept was so boiled down: you just kill people in gruesome ways, no morality tests, no philosophical questions. I played the first few levels when I was 13 or so, and thought I was a real scary edgelord for loving a game where brutality was so rewarded (guess what my favorite fighting games were), but I never really got far in it. I felt satisfied with the couple hours of exposure I got, and I think that feeling hasn't changed for me now, years later.

Manhunt lays its cards on the table early, and lets you know what you're getting into quite clearly: a dark, almost noiresque atmosphere, aided by the gritty PS2 visuals and clearly Carpenter-inspired soundtrack, and the sneering voice of Brian Cox cheering you on as you brutally murder the people in your way. For the first hour or so, it really is effective. The camera angles and quality of the Executions, along with the fluid mocap work, provides a grisly realism that works to unsettle even the most grizzled of horror vets. Combine that with some high-level sound design, and the end result is a spectacle of potently macabre entertainment, but it's not something that lasts.

As with most horror-adjacent media, exposure and desensitization are its Achille's heel. Not only is the arsenal of weapons surprisingly limited, a good third or more of that arsenal aren't available for Executions, and some of the weapons even reuse their Execution animations, which leads to even the most effective kills feeling dull after a couple levels of repeats. Unfortunately, rather than try to "up the ante" and make the game progressively more disturbing, it feels as though the developers completely throw in the towel somewhere around the third act, and turn the game into something more like Max Payne (sans bullet time) or even a "3D Hotline Miami"; the difficulty spikes, stealth is thrown to the wind, and guns become your primary tools against enemies, drying what remained of the atmosphere out completely, and turning it into a repetitive chore as the game gets closer to the finish line. And once you get to that finish line, is there a grand revelation waiting for you? Something that completely changes the context of the game, and perhaps even gives an "explanation" of the savage bloodthirst that you willingly took place in?

No. The antagonist dies, and the game ends with a brief news montage giving a slight bit of depth as to what happened, but never any concrete answers or commentary, which leads me to ask: what was the point? Was this a meta-commentary on how the elites are the real monsters, how police are just as cruel as the sadistic gangs you've been victim to, but society still finds a scapegoat to blame rather than looking at root causes? Is there perhaps an ironic connection between me, the player, never finding out any reasoning for why this all happened, leaving me in the same shoes as the protagonist? Could Rockstar be criticizing themselves, using the antagonist as an obvious stand-in for game developers who revel in the controversy garnered from subjecting the world to gruesome imagery?

Then I remember that this is a game that actively applauds you for performing more sadistic kills, with no cartoonish overexaggeration or a detached "silliness" to the bloodshed, just a jagged realism to everything you see. I believe there is no deeper meaning to be extracted from it. The game is sick, and I'm sick for playing it through to the end.

I'm a bit more jaded talking about this game than most others I've talked about and loved, because seeing some of the reaction towards it has really soured me. It took them a while, but Remedy has finally made a game that I enjoy from every angle. Max Payne I found too janky (mainly due to its age), and Alan Wake's gameplay really ground me down, but this just got everything right. Everything it takes influence from it does in wonderfully unsubtle ways, but in no way does that take away from the end result. I really can't stress just how fucking cool it is that we had a AAA company who saw a rinky dink little fan wiki and decided to make an entire game this openly inspired by it, AND to tie it into one of their preexisting IPs. The Oldest House is like a cross between The Overlook Hotel and the House (of Leaves), and is one of my favorite settings in any video game for that alone. To all the people knocking the combat... lmao, no. The abilities you get are delightfully open for comboing and pulling off stunts with, and it makes for some very fun, high-octane gameplay, even if I did admittedly find myself using one ability (you know which) way more than others. Still, at its worst, it was frustratingly difficult, and that was typically a fault of me rather than the game.

Yeah man I dunno, everything about this just kinda rocks. I really, really don't get people's beef with it, it soars over the other games in Remedy's catalog for me and is one of the coolest, most visually interesting, engaging, and inspired games I've ever had the joy to play.

I will grit my teeth and do everything I can to not draw comparisons to New Vegas, a game that is better than this on literally every front, and instead look at it as its own experience and as a sequel to Fallout 1 and 2.

Nothing you do in this game matters. Nothing. There's no choice that you make that ever has an impact on the story, you just walk a straight line to the end while the writers beat you over the head with their ideas and themes that they want to develop but never spend any time doing so. Bethesda is so terrified that you might not enjoy their story and world, so they trip over their own feet at every turn to make you connected, despite it being completely counterintuitive. A 20-minute long intro that takes you through the first 19 years of your life! Wow, don't you feel connected with your character and the places you see? Don't you love your good ol' dad? Oh no, the Vault is melting down (or something)! Aren't you sad about this? After all, this is where you grew up! I won't go into spoiler territory, even though the "twists" in the story really do not matter, but the examples I gave are just the tip of the iceberg of how much Bethesda grabs you by the back of the head and bashes your face into its story.

So, a lot of people who defend this game would respond to all of my complaints about the main story with a reasonable rebuttal: sure, it's not a good story, but the side quests and world design are pretty great. Alright, that's understandable, and I kept that in mind while I played, but I find that this isn't true at all. Side quests are more than the surface objectives, it's what they mean, to you and to the world around you. Fallout 2 had a quest that was nothing more than going across the street and buying a plow for a Vault City slave, and that had more impact on me than anything this game had to offer. Now, that isn't me being snarky and cynical for no reason, I'm offering it up to make a point; as much as FO3 tries, and it tries very hard, there is never a real connection with the player and the world around them because of how shoddily it's put together. Things exist and happen for no reason, characters are all completely flat, motives make no sense (when they're not blatantly aping the previous 2 entries), nothing in the game feels impactful to you at all. What's the point in me doing side quests if my reward is learning more about this poorly written world from poorly written characters with poorly directed voice actors? There's no sense of satisfaction, because my actions don't mean anything. My dialogue options are nothing more than "kind response", "neutral response", and "mean response". It's almost funny how the other games in the series have been critiqued for having Karma systems that mean practically nothing, when this game goes out of its way to flaunt its Karma system that has even less impact and feels even more phoned-in than the other games. I also want to mention, with regards to the side quests, that you have to find a great deal of them organically, via digging through the world for settlements. On the surface, this isn't a bad idea, but the problem is how segmented the world design is, on both micro and macro scales. Areas are unnecessarily broken up and labyrinthian just to make you have to find byzantine routes around, and said areas are thrown about randomly throughout the wasteland, with very rare instructions pointing you in any real direction. Not only that, but everything blends in visually to the point that you might glaze right over a possible area and side quests just because it didn't grab your eye. I never felt any drive to explore the wasteland because, outside of the quests having no meaning to me, it just never made me feel like the trek to find things would be worth it.

This shouldn't come as a shock, but all nuance and subtext in this is practically non-existent. Again, discounting New Vegas, compared solely to 1 and 2, it is genuinely impressive how much this game fumbles any and all meaning in its text. The Bible verse that is bludgeoned into your head relentlessly throughout the game is the perfect example of this; taking symbolism from the Bible, an incredibly symbolic and metaphor-ridden text, and playing it completely straight. The verse mentions water, and you're bringing water to the wastelands! Do you get it yet? Do you understand that whenever we bring up the water, we want you to think about how clever we are for choosing that Bible verse? Everything else in the game is the exact same way, absolutely zero subtlety and everything that could have even the slightest nuance being played completely straight and blunt. Wow, the guy who traps people in a simulation of the 50s is obsessed with the past and doesn't want things to change! It's so tiring. It is so, so tiring.

With as much as I rip this game to shreds, and believe me, it deserves every ounce, I have to reluctantly give it one compliment. Bethesda did a pretty good job at adapting the Fallout visual and gameplay style to a 3D world, with little details thrown in like Vault layouts, certain weapon and world models faithfully recreated, even the dialogue you tell your companions being similar to the games previous. But, I don't know how genuine of a compliment "you managed to follow the exact footsteps your predecessors laid out" is.

To wrap things up, I want to make my points as clear and concise as they can get, because I know I can get wordy. Bethesda is so terrified at the player not interacting with the story and world "correctly", that they strip away all impact that the player's choices have. This leads to interactions being flat, emotional moments feeling forced, and a general feeling of unimportance. To borrow a line from my friend who I played this game with, you are not the main character of the story; your dad and Doctor Li are, you are on the sidelines spectating the entire time. Your choices have already been made for you, you only get to decide what words will be used. This is the core issue with this game, and what leads to the world being inherently uninteresting and as a result, everything that happens to, and because of, the player feeling like they lack any influence.

"It's like... Bethesda is a bakery, and the visual designers do the frosting, while the writers make the cake. And the writers can't bake a cake to save their fucking lives, so the only thing the visual designers can do is make it look really nice on the outside and hope you don't notice how bad the inside is. It's not their fault that the end result is unenjoyable, they did the best they can." - aforementioned friend