Alan Wake II

[one-armed dwarf]

Paste mag's GOTY. Wake stocks on the rise

 

https://www.pastemagazine.com/games/best-games/the-best-games-of-2023

 

Quote

Sam Lake reaches the apotheosis of his postmodern kick with this sequel to one of 2010’s most interesting videogames. The Remedy Entertainment head has long tried to break down the barriers between games, film, and literature in a knottier, more avant-garde fashion than the many major studios making “cinematic” games, influenced as much by Pynchon and Twin Peaks as noir or horror movies, and with Alan Wake II he’s crafted another impressive combo of commercial blockbuster and trippy experimentalism.

 

A survival horror game that explores notions of free will, destiny, authorship, and ownership, Alan Wake II doesn’t come close to answering all of the questions it asks, but it raises them with such style, confidence, and confusion that you’ He’ll realize the answers don’t matter. It’s far from a perfect game —the investigation mechanics are inelegant, and Lake’s big narrative swings don’t always connect—but  Alan Wake II does more than any other game to undermine the bullshit dichotomy between “AAA” and “indie” games. Just because a game has a budget and a large team doesn’t mean it has to be a safe, hackneyed, overly familiar genre workout.— Garrett Martin 

 

👏

[DisturbedSwan]

Started this last night, only put about 90 minutes in so far but it has already impressed me, it's shaping up to be something special for sure if it continues on the way it is.

 

Just absolutely adore the whole investigative angle with Saga, looking at the body for clues, all the mind palace, profiling, all absolutely superbly done. How they make it so satisfying when the little pin goes across to the polaroid on the case wall I'll never know, definitely a little bit of the Sherlock Holmes games in here which is no bad thing at all, and something that has delighted me.

 

Still in the first chapter with Saga, just going around exploring, trying to get all the collectibles hidden about which is proving difficult. I love how tactile everything feels if that makes sense, everything is just so well thought out, there doesn't seem to be the deluge of readable collectibles in this like there was in Control yet either which is good. So good to see Sam Lake's likeness back in a game too especially married with James McCaffrey's voice (right in time for the MP remakes!), a delight to hear and see.

Playing this in the dark in bed last night with the PSP was bloody great as well.

 

Pics:

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Nag]

Just to let you know there's something you can get later on in the game which makes collectables a whole lot easier... and it's optional so if you prefer exploring that's fine too.

[one-armed dwarf]

The profiling stuff with Saga is maybe my least favorite thing still about this incredibly cool game.

 

There really is an attention to detail everywhere else tho, I agree that it feels like a very well realised place. Maybe not so much with the NPCs but it makes the maximum out of whatever budget Remedy have to work with these days. To a point I would prefer them to keep working within that budget rather than have a Sony/Rockstar/big franchise AAA style budget, cause I think the techniques they have to work within those limits are what make their games so cool and unique

[Nag]

12 minutes ago, one-armed dwarf said:

The profiling stuff with Saga is maybe my least favorite thing

 

This got old with me incredibly quickly, it's literally just trial and error busy work.

[one-armed dwarf]

Time for round 2, hopefully no Fortnite events are planned next week...

 

 

[AndyKurosaki]

For the most part, I enjoyed this. The first Alan Wake was pretty good, and you can tell Remedy put the effort in, as they usually do. 
 

That being said, it has its flaws:

 

-Saga’s profiling. Initially, it seems like an interesting concept. By the end of the game, I was absolutely sick of it. I’d just randomly press on files and hope for the best. It’s also annoying how there are certain sections where you can’t progress, without going through the board first. One section involved finding 4 items, and placing them to unlock something. I got all 4, but the game wouldn’t let me place them where they needed to go. I thought it was glitched or something. Nope. I had to go through the profile board, 4 times, so Saga could figure out they could be used. Only then, was I allowed to do so. 
 

-Alan’s levels. Man, I fucking hated these. All of them. Long, dark, convoluted sections, that just gave no guidance of where you were meant to go. I used a guide to get all the collectibles, and frequently had to use it just to figure out what the fuck I was meant to be doing. 

-Alan doesn’t have Saga’s profile board-Yay! Unfortunately, his mechanic is far worse. You have to find specific areas in the level, to unlock a keyword. Using that keyword completely changes an area. How people got through his levels without a guide, I’ve no idea. 

 

-Alan’s combat sucks, as it’s never clear which enemies you’re meant to shoot/flashlight, and which you can make disappear by simply walking into them. Resulting in a lot of ammo/battery wasting. 

-The story in general, is an absolute mess. Admittedly, I only finished the original game, I never played the DLC, or got through Control. So maybe that helps it make sense. But, it left me thinking that it’s not as clever as it apparently thinks it is. A lot of it, is shite. I won’t spoil the story here. Mainly because the vast majority went over my head. 
The ‘Guardian of Light’ musical section definitely outstayed its welcome. It was an interesting idea, at first. By the end, I was begging for it to stop. 
 

Overall, it was good. But ‘Game Of The Year’ material? To me, nah. 

[Nag]

Pretty much agree with that word for word.

[one-armed dwarf]

Control isn't really required reading here. Maybe AW1 unlocks some more understanding, I don't know. I didn't play it cause it seemed like a very ordinary 360 era TPS. I think enough ppl have played now I can put my story thoughts in spoilers

 

Spoiler

 

Alan Wake 2's story is a mess, I guess that's right. What I think though is it's actually a kind of purposeful mess which informs the design of the non-linear dual campaign structure, with how you can hop in and out of a puddle between both worlds and experience events in a sort of out of order fashion, encountering 'spoilers' in one sequence before seeing it in the other. People call AWII a very self-indulgent game, which it is but not on accident. Its messiness is about getting you to think about things that aren't just the plot, and its self indulgence is actually sort of the point. 

 

I think Alan Wake II is a game mostly about vibes, the vibes are much more important than what actually happens in the story. It's a very playful game, full of fairly obvious intertextual references to other types of art and the process of making that art, and how that art makes us feel (as well as how it makes the creator of it feel, or what they sacrifice in putting it out whether that's money or relationships or something else). The plot is purely a mechanical thing the game uses to make the action go forward and to push out a sequence of events. But the vibes are what makes the game really work, AWII is a game you can hang out in. There's always another zombie around the corner, but that's not as interesting as this 15 minute completely optional and missable Finnish indie horror film. Or the background audio of an imagined cult organising a sacrifice in a hotel. Or the credits sequences, which have lyrics which reflect some of the structural elements of the narrative. It's a sendup of all sorts of 'low' art like hardboiled fiction, surreal horror TV series and lots of other things thrown into a Nordic Noir blender. It's a game that's trying to dislocate you a bit from the norm and you should allow yourself get distracted by the weirdness rather than try to focus on pinning it down with some kind of concrete meaning, cause a lot of the time the weird stuff purely exists to just kinda be there. Or remind you of Max Payne, or Raymond Carver. It's kinda a game that you're supposed to drift along with as it makes these dreamlike associations between text, visuals and gameplay and think and recognise some of the poetry linking these disparate elements together, with each player coming to different kinds of realisiations cause of the nature in which you can progress the two campaigns

 

Kinda my point is that it doesn't matter how much sense the events of the story really make, so much as the feeling it's all trying to produce. The self-referential callbacks to Remedy's previous output, the stylings of American prestige TV and Scandinavian noir, it's a pastiche of high and low art, a game which embraces its own kitsch appeal with exuberance in the Herald of Darkness musical sequence (which integrates narrative in the form of an AW1 summary into an interactive music video with outbursts of action acting as its own kind of diegetic percussion). Terrible boilerplate fiction is a traversal mechanic to unlock doors and find hidden unlocks, scouring the map isn't purely about upgrading your gun but also just hanging out in a hall of mirrors reflecting back to you weird artistic influences. The game is largely an expression of egocentric despair in the shape of its author, who's Alan Wake who is played by an actor who plays two different characters, but also creates the actual creator of the game (Alex Casey/Sam Lake), who himself agonised in his own 'dark place' purgatory to get the financing in place for this game. The image of the author/auteur/painter looking directly into the camera out of the TV screen is an intrusive element, sometimes literally in the form of the very uncomfortable jump scare sequences or even the game over screen of Alan which looks like an image from a snuff film. It's not a subtle metaphor, it's a game about creatives torturing and isolating themselves

 

It all links together at some point, but you have to explore it in all its non-linear fragments and strangeness, and just kinda give it some benefit of the doubt. It is unwieldly at times I will admit, and very excessive. But even on that point I find the excessiveness sort of wonderful, it's the video game version of Twin Peaks third season

 

Sorry I wrote all that, maybe it's a bit cringe but that is the reason I think this game is so good (as well as the other stuff I talked about on page 1). But it can be summarised as saying that the nonsensical elements are the bits that actually work the best, and the concrete plot bits are only so important as they get you to the next level. It's super fucking cool that a game like that got made, and unfortunate maybe that the sales reality makes games like this very hard to get released. It's kinda the anathema to what Sony is doing with their titles right now, which is to make a lot of games with very similar gameplay hallmarks that reference cinema in a much more literal and limited kinda way, becoming more like a derivate copy (not trying to derail with a complaint about Sony as such, but making a point of the direction we are seeing with AAA and its budgets)

[Nag]

I just can't try to come up with all these clever reasons to justify a nonsense story for a couple of reasons... 1. I'm not clever enough and I'm not going to pretend I am and... 2. I can't spend the time trying to break down story elements in games like these, mainly because of reason number 1.

 

It very well maybe a very clever game on many points but when those points are missing by a mile for folks like me it doesn't matter one iota... then it has to fall back on gameplay and (in my opinion) that ain't all that either.

 

Sorry but Gears of War or Resident Evil is about as complex as story telling needs to get for me.😂

[one-armed dwarf]

That's totally fine, it's bound to be polarising and your reaction is a totally fair one to have. I also don't think the game plays that well to be honest, but at the same time it's not a big dealbreaker for me cause of what I said above. But, I think it's a good thing that a game can create such visceral reactions in opposing directions, rather than take a purely risk averse posture and make something with broad appeal all of the time. I mean, we have enough games at this point about superheroes and zombie apocalypses in my opinion, even though I really enjoy GOTG and RE

 

I'll only say though that I didn't sit here thinking hard to come up with clever reasons to justify the way the game is made, it is just similar to other types of stories in other mediums and if you've watched or read stories like that the kinda thing AWII is trying to invoke it isn't necessarily that mysterious or obtuse, it becomes more obvious/repetitive in its subtext and themes. In any event it's cool to see a AAA game take a swing like that, even if it might end up missing for half the potential audience

 

There's a good interview here with Sam Lake talking with a guy at Insomniac at their different approaches, and how Remedy maximises a more limited budget to kinda punch above their weight by doing things which a lot of other game makers aren't doing cause they are required to be more risk averse with how they spend their money and attention. I think it's really interesting

 

 

[AndyKurosaki]

You definitely make a fair point about the story. I’ve played games with an absolute shit story (Hello again, Saints Row). AW2’s story certainly isn’t shit. But I can’t say that I thought about it to the extent that you did. You’ve made some well argued points, about how the story made you feel. To me, I’m basically with Nag, it quite often left me thinking “What the fuck is going on?”. Some of it made sense and, I was able to follow it. Some parts genuinely didn’t, and to my dyspraxic mind, it went utterly over my head. 
 

As Nag, and myself mentioned, if story isn’t quite clicking, then gameplay has to step up. And while the gameplay isn’t broken, it’s far from ideal at the best of times. The dodge move may as well not exist, it’s so ineffective. I never understood why, in Alan’s levels, some enemies can be killed, while others you’re supposed to ignore. They all look the same, and react the same when you’re using the flashlight on them. 
 

It’s good that you can choose which character you want to play as, as because I hated Alan’s levels with a vengeance, I left them all to the end. Which was probably a mistake, as it meant the last few hours were pretty miserable.

 

Its undoubtedly hurt the game’s sales being digital only. When I get games, I’ll either trade older stuff in to get it much cheaper, or pay it off in instalments via Shopto. You can’t do that with a digital only game. Sure, you could get PSN credit to do that, but that’s not something a lot of people would bother with, I’d say. 
 

I definitely agree that it’s good it got made, as it’s certainly something different to the thousand cookie cutter open world games that are churned out on an exhausting basis. But if people ask me if they should buy it, if they haven’t at least played the first game, I can’t recommend that they do so. It’s a game for the fans, of which there are plenty of. But I imagine there’s still people waiting for it to get much cheaper before buying it.

[one-armed dwarf]

The non physical release was a disastrous decision. Especially a game as stylish as this which could have flogged a ton of copies of an overpriced special edition with a BTS book or dvd of interviews or some shit

[AndyKurosaki]

I notice they haven’t been shouting from the rooftops how many copies it’s sold. Which they can’t anyway, as it’s digital. Steam shows user numbers, but Sony and Xbox don’t. So there’s no way to know specifically how well it sold. 
 

I seem to remember them saying at the time they said it was digital only, that it would be cheaper than most Triple A digital games. And yeah, it was £50 instead of the usual £70+. But, £50 is still a lot of money. Especially for a game that was never going to appeal to everyone. I only got it because I was given a £50 gift card from work, and it was one of those were it was “Spend online! On stores that you’ve either never heard of, or wouldn’t go to in a million years”. 
 

They clearly put a lot of love into the game. And it definitely has some enjoyable moments. But I’d say that going digital only, has to have hurt its sales. 

[mmmark]

I read somewhere it was 850k

[one-armed dwarf]

This isn't very surprising as it's what people thought, but someone found a temp asset of Lance Reddick in the game's files as the original Mr. Door.

 

 

Spoiler

Which of course lends itself to some theorycrafting, he played 'Hatch' in Quantum Break and there's connections between these two universes hinted at by the game itself.

 

[Maf]

Can confirm Alan Wake 2 at max settings at 100fps is sick lol 

 

I started playing this on Xbox but like a few games this year really can't stand the look of FSR. So got it on PC as Epic had a coupon deal on top of the discount which made it like £28 or something. But even playing on a 3080 trying to find the right compromise in settings it just wasn't right. Some bits played at kinda 60fps but on medium settings, then the whole first boss battle couldn't handle that at all. 

 

Playing on PC made me realise how well they must have done to get the games running on console considering how the 3080 kept buckling, but also it's the first game this gen where the experience really felt lacking. Respect to the console port for running as good as it does, I still think the current consoles are kick ass, but it's the first game this gen that really felt beyond them (Outside of Cyberpunk I guess which I don't care about). 

 

Anyway, I'm just doing the subway tunnel stuff as Alan for the first bit of the game and can say this is so much better. I thought this game was good from the outset but this is extremely enjoyable now. However it's kicking my ass literally every fight. I lose every single encounter first time then make up for it on the second go. I want to blame KB&M but really I think the truth is...KB&M definitely not me being bad no way 

 

[Nag]

You lose because the combat is crap... and there's literally no other reason.

[one-armed dwarf]

You guys really just need to use your flares more often.

 

Don't hold onto flares at all, see a group of enemies in a tight corridor, flare them

[Nag]

Yeah... flare a group of enemies that you don't actually need to fight in the first place... fun for the entire family. 🙄🤣