Incredibly tight action gameplay here. Overall an astronomical improvement from Alan Wake. Tonally interesting but the way aspects of the world were chosen to be revealed or kept obscure felt a little haphazard. I feel like with something like this, you need to either go full abstraction and surreality--a la Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy or Twin Peaks: The Return (both obviously massive influences here)--or truly leave enough hints and easter egg hunting for internet sleuths to piece together a coherent timeline. I'm partial to the former method, and I think Remedy is leaning towards that direction as well. However, there wasn't enough pathos to get me to care to parse whatever allegorical elements were in fact present.