I can see the faint traces of the magic that people see in this game. I can hear bits of the echoes of the things that touch them or that they find charming. But for me, it came up very, very short.

I got all the way to the sand monster boss, where my game would not stop crashing, which I took as a sign for me to stop trying to force myself to have a good time.

I think I could go on at length if I could talk out loud, but having to formulate my thoughts right now in this little word box, I don't know if I can articulate why it doesn't click with me very well, but lemme give it a shot.

I've heard people compare this game to like watching episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon. People have said it's a hangout game, or a vibes game. I think that's true for those people, but the missing context there is that it's a certain type of Saturday morning cartoon; it's a certain type of hangout. It's a boy's club hangout.

DQ11 feels like the perfect, most magical game dreamed up by three 10 year old boys in 2002 from within a treehouse with a 'NO GIRLS ALLOWED' sign on it.

Just not my thing.

Once the bugs get ironed out, this will be the video game equivalent of House of Leaves: visually inventive, its unique presentation within its medium an artform unto itself, but I don't know if the stuff beyond that will stick in my craw quite like what it draws comparison to.

The lack of both enemy variety AND interesting things to do with the enemies (lack of consistent stuns and/or limb-based damage or hit reactions in general) gets really tedious, and the walk speed is pretty slow relative to the amount of ground these maps want you to cover. They have a "shoot the randomly-determined glowing weak point" mechanic and then make it almost impossible to hit enemies from behind because of their tracking, aggression, and your lack of counterplay.

There's a lot of "but why?"s like it in these mechanics. I really think the pistol upgrade Saga gets that lets you stun enemies with successive headshots should've been a core part of your kit for both, and I STRONGLY question the inclusion of a powerful dodge mechanic that includes an even-stronger perfect dodge. It feels like it's supposed to be your universal stun option, but it's inherently reactive instead of proactive (which, given the lack of other options mid-fight, means everything you're doing past just waiting for them to attack is boring and feels bad) and it also means that ranged enemy types, all one-and-a-half of them, have zero interesting counterplay options.

I'm not sure why they got rid of the "flashlight-is-your-crosshair" conceit they had in Alan 1 when it was distinctive, satisfying, and cool. Inventory management, at least on PC, feels like every interaction has one button press too many, and it's just not very interestingly handled in the first place - it's not as complex as RE4's tetris and it doesn't have the addictive optimization-induced high that successive RE:2 replays tap into. It all being real-time would be cool if you ever had to interact with it in combat, but the hotkeys are generous and the UI is kludgy enough that anything not on them is just not worth equipping mid-fight. Saga's key items list is just flat-out bugged and doesn't remove most of them like it's supposed to, which makes finding the few reusable keys incredibly annoying.

It feels like punching down to write this much about the mechanics when Silent Hill's gameplay is also pretty bad and it's my favorite survival horror series, but Silent Hill is a lot more cohesive with how puzzles, enemy placements, and dungeon designs loop you around encounters (even if they're too damn easy). Alan Wake 2 feels like it wants a lot of Things To Do for the sake of it, and this confounds pacing and requires interactions with the mechanics far more than it or I actually want.

At its (frequent) best, it's instead a set piece-driven linear thrill-ride. Character writing in general touches on cool or relatable conceits and doesn't really know what to do with those ideas outside of these set pieces, even if there are a lot and they're actually sick when they do happen. Alan's plot board allows for a lot of visual inventiveness but runs dry pretty quickly, and it's genuinely astonishing how underused the lamp is after its cool-ass introduction. It entirely ceases to be a resource immediately, and I feel insane thinking about that for too long. His dungeons get progressively shorter as time goes on, or maybe just repetitious enough that I started editing out the downtime in my brain.

Saga's side hews more traditional in structure, aesthetics, and Silent Hill-ass dungeon crawling, and it's generally better for it. Her mind palace mechanic is addictive and rewards engagement with the environment while training the player to be genuinely thoughtful. The route split is strange and outright expects you to finish one side first despite not signposting that, which makes the escalating action that leads into its climax scream to a juddering halt.

I don't want to go into detail with said climax, but I left feeling like it has two amazing ideas with only one getting the execution it deserves. They cooked incredibly hard with tying mechanics, presentation, and narrative to a singular moment of catharsis and then killed whatever momentum built up before or after that before running face-first into an ending that felt like it needed far more deliberation.

My issues with the ending and its narrative momentum were heightened by having a staircase bug out and make me fall through the map every time I sprinted on it, forcing me to lose 2-5 minutes of progress. Remember what I said about walk speed? Still a pretty easy recommend to anybody interested though, and hopefully my issues with the climax get ironed out with NG+ and the DLC. Initiation 4 is worth the price tag on its own. Do wait for bugfixes though, it's really dire.

I have a very cynical viewpoint on AAA storytelling, often seeing it as faux-meaningful and vaguely cinematic. Alan Wake II, by contrast, is neither merely appropriating cinematic technique or falling back on rote nonsense. It's certainly nonsense, but it embraces that - it's an intentional mindfuck that truly pushes the AAA game narrative not necessarily in its contents but in its mode. There are countless points throughout Alan Wake II where Remedy's approach to storytelling actually feels sophisticated and provocative. And sure that's a low bar (when you discount your TLOUs, your Red Deads, your God Of Wars - the really marquee stuff) but Remedy leaps so god damn far over it.

By fusing live action and traditional game cutscenes here, Remedy has created a new way to convey information that is both surprisingly harmonious and purposefully discordant. Alan Wake II is clearly aware of the "rules" that curtail AAA storytelling and break them, breaking its own narrative framework in the process, breaking the fourth wall implicitly. Remedy knows that we're playing, and Remedy leverages that fact - even if Saga Anderson never turned to me, winked, and said "isn't this nuts!" We get as close to that line without passing it as feels appropriate, for a game concerned with asserting that games are a vehicle for storytelling that can and should do a lot more to remix the medium's affordances than it does now.

This is also just a really damn good survival horror game. It's genuinely scary and violent in a way that few games, I find, are able to be - reaching a sort of arthouse horror tenor that recognizes tropes, either leaning all the way in, or working to effectively subvert what's been wrung dry. Sound design, art direction, novel worldbuilding choices - they converge in such effectively unsettling ways.

Alan Wake II, when you become enmeshed in its illogical yet oddly contiguous world of postulations and terrors, is a new high-water mark for what AAA games can be. The ambition on display here is so well and truly beyond the overwhelming majority of its peers.

But this is also an extremely flawed game at its core, on a gameplay level. The combat is a major sore spot, significantly lacking enemy variety to the point of any sense of threat dissipating - the extremely limited foes all require the same rinse & repeat strategies. But these monster closets can become unnecessarily punishing when the checkpointing feels all sorts of wrong, forcing you to retread unskippable dialogues before retrying an encounter after those exchanges, in the worst moments.

Navigating the world can be a chore as well, constantly brushing against an unhelpful map and a world that - both intentionally and unintentionally - gets you turned around even when you backtrack through the same environments end for end, time and time again.

These issues wouldn't be so apparent if the game was 10ish hours long instead of 15 about, a pace that's further hampered by a narrative-switching structure that gives you all to much freedom at points. It often left me feeling more confused than empowered.

So there are doubtlessly a lot of issues with Alan Wake II, many of which aren't in the game's contemporaries. But those titles aren't attempting to be anywhere as boundary-pushing or inventive as this. Alan Wake II falls short because it tries VERY HARD to be more than you'd expect from a modern survival horror title, a modern AAA title overall. And in this case, I value that creative intent far more than I magnify its mechanical issues.

This is a flawed masterwork, but perhaps the most important and necessary game of 2023.

I love Alan Wake. I love Remedy. I should be sucking this game off like everybody else is, but I just can't. The story's great, if even more indulgent than standard Remedy fare. The art design is outstanding. There are some fun setpieces. Those are about the only exceptional things. The gameplay is generally fine with a number of interesting ideas, but a few odd design choices and basic missteps make it feel even clunkier than the original at times. Worst of all, it's absolutely steeped in technical issues and bugs that have an inherent impact on the experience, from missing audio and visual queues to clipping out of bounds and softlocks. Did I play a different game than everyone else? Unless I'm in the Dark Place too, this game was not ready for launch. I'm sure it'll end up like Control, where in a few months all of the kinks will be worked out and it'll be more polished, but as of now, I feel pretty underwhelmed by one of the few games my jaded ass was genuinely excited for in years. I fucking hate video games.