2. Alan Wake 2, dev. Remedy Entertainment
The final choice, as always, was really tough. This year I flipped a coin to decide No. 1 and 2. I agreed with its decision.
Confession: I'm a little coward. Watching a horror movie and living out a horror movie is a huge difference. I know I'm over here in my room and the little guy in the horror movie is in my TV, we are separate entities. But that's the magic of video games, sometimes the distinction doesn't matter. I got so scared of Alien: Isolation that I chickened out and stopped playing before I saw even one xenomorph. I never finished SOMA or Resident Evil 7 or for that matter, Alan Wake 1.The problem is never the actual ghouls or ghosts, in the end, fighting a spooky in a horror game is not fundamentally different than fighting a monster in anything else. Live or die, whatever, a fail state is not scary in of itself. The problem is that I die a million times just walking up to the spooky. Not knowing what's around the corner is infinitely scarier than whatever is there. It takes a lot to actually play the game-part of the game.
Alan Wake 2 is not the scariest game I've ever played. It does have extremely effective jump scares and really freaky death scenes when you do die. But it was most scary not before the horror, rather after. It lingered with me. I could not go out at night, without thinking some wisps would wander by and say "...Alan Wake!". I would take my dog-niece Molly out for a walk and fear the spaces between street lights. She would sit around, oblivious, sniffing, and I would look into the park near my house, covered in darkness, and panic quietly, hoping nothing would grab me while I picked up her shit. In November I went to Niagara Falls and took a nice long hike around the Whirlpool Rapids. And even in the day, traveling the woods, I was terrified, because every trail blaze was marked with a spiral, a key symbol of Alan Wake 2's mysteries. I write horror stories as a hobby, who is to say that this strange, mostly unfinished existence of mine was not just the upper layer of the great metafictional infinity that was Remedy's horror masterpiece? I was writing myself into the story - you do not want to write yourself into the story of Bright Falls, Washington.
The first Alan Wake was an ambitious game, an interesting game, and unfortunately not a fun game to play. Remedy has improved considerably in the past thirteen years. In Alan Wake 2 there's a lot less combat, most encounters feel more meaningful, and even if you do not like the combat, you can often just run away. Also, best of all, for me, you can just set the difficulty down to trivial, which is good because I absolutely suck at this game. I could not beat the very first boss. The dodge move feels like you can never actually outpace enemies and instead get stuck in an infinite check, never able to fight back. I guess the real mark of a horror game is that the combat is "bad" (you could probably beat Super Mario Wonder in the time it takes Mr. Wake to reload). Yet, people celebrate the un-fun-ness with "look how scary it is". As an action game, Alan Wake 2 is barely acceptable - maybe. The best parts of it are when you're not fighting, just exploring its terrifying locations like the haunted theme park and nightmare subway station. There's just a lot more of experience and atmosphere in 2, which is good.
As an interactive experience, Alan Wake 2 is top of the line. Nobody is doing artful cinematic horror as well as Remedy. They've expanded their Northwest spooky towns into a whole universe of oddity. The whole region is Finland without actually being Finland, complete with Norse and Finnish gods hanging around. Remedy are the same guys who made Control, and they do not want you to forget that. Bureau of Control Easter Eggs are floating around in the very first section of the game, and the crossover soon becomes a major plot point. Also, a big point is the increasingly thin difference between our real world and the digital world. Remedy has been mixing live action and graphics for years - this game has a whole movie inside it that even spoils its ending.
In Alan Wake 2, they go much further. The game's director, Sam Lake, casts himself as a character created by the author Alan Wake, who is a character he created. In a horror story all about loops, it is a fittingly surreal choice, fiction and non-fiction blurring until there is no beginning or end. Nothing fully real or unreal.
Where Alan Wake 1 was Stephen King's novel Bag of Bones meets David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks, Alan Wake 2 is their Twin Peaks: The Return. (No good King analog this time that I can see.) Alan himself (Ilkka Villi & Matthew Porretta) is only the protagonist in half the story, with the other half going to FBI agent Saga Anderson (Melanie Liburd). Alan is trying to escape the Dark Place while Saga's investigation into Bright Falls finds herself written more and more into his narrative. Before long, she's a resident of this town, with unpleasant history and cooky relatives. With the series named after him, you'd think a Part 2 would be about the triumphant return of Alan Wake, Writer, where he can finally set everything right. Instead, what we see, is something much darker. Alan just wants to go home, get back to his wife. Instead, maybe that journey back is itself a destructive force. Maybe Alan's flailing desperately to hold onto any reality is not helping anything, just pulling more people down with him.
It is entirely possible we never get an Alan Wake 3. Which would be disappointing if you're looking for a clear conclusion, a clear ending, or even a simple happy one. Twin Peaks Season 3 left us with more questions than answers and you know what? They were right to do it. Alan Wake 2 really only exists as a quirk of bad economics. Epic Games funded this to make the Epic Games Store "a thing". Remedy was more too happy to use their money to make a game with rock opera interludes and metacommentaries on their entire studio history, without really answering anything. Nobody wants the Epic Games Store, exclusives will never solve that problem. I'm not sure the economics of the entire games industry are made on solid ground right now. But I can be glad somebody screwed up on the math enough to let Alan Wake 2 exist.
And if we never get an Alan Wake 3, I can be content remembering that closure and answers are overrated. The mystery is what is compelling, the pieces not fitting is what creates the horror. As long as need to be afraid, as long as we need the world to make a little less sense, Alan Wake will always be stuck in that lake that is an ocean, trapped for us.
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