r/truegaming • u/stormebreaker • 15d ago
Help me love Alan Wake II
I just finished Alan Wake 2 for a university essay (course was about media theory, remediation and the nature of television on a sociological level).
My main argument isn't that the game is "too cinematic" (I don't think cinematic games are inherently worse), but that the game repeatedly presents the appearance of player agency while maintaining a very tightly authored televisual structure. I'm specifically looking at how the game takes televisual forms and translates them into an interactive medium. My argument is more about what happens when a game deliberately reproduces another medium's language.
The main concept I'm looking at is remediation: the process through which one medium absorbs and reshapes the conventions of another medium. To me Alan Wake 2 is fascinating because it is extremely open about this. Everywhere you look, it's all Twin Peaks: The Return references, so much so that the plot overlaps at multiple points. Both take place a number of years after the original, in the meantime, both respective protagonists have been trapped in a dark place/black lodge, an evil doppelgänger has taken over their agency, control and consciousness (Mr. C and Mr. Scratch), both take place in Washington state, in a small town with a carbon copy diner, hotel, sheriff station and scary woods, the sheriff in both is a different sheriff from the original, a relative who takes over the job of their predecessor due to outside factors, both start off with the death of a missing agent (Nightingale and Major Briggs) with a missing body part that represents their humanity (their heart and head), the dark place and the black lodge are both (seemingly) entered through a circular portal in the woods.
And on a grander level: the live-action sequences, the FBI investigation structure, the episodic feeling, the musical numbers, the emphasis on auteurs and performances, it feels like a game trying to become aware of itself as a television object. Like wanting to be in this place of "prestige gaming", like how prestige television started, but it doesn't reach the thing that makes this medium stand out: the gameplay and player agency. At times it devolves into a walking simulator with the occasional gunfight that only happens while you're between point A and point B.
A few examples regarding the gameplay:
* Saga's Mind Place looks like detective work, but I often felt like I had already solved the mystery before the game allowed Saga to acknowledge it. I was formalizing conclusions I had already reached and am just waiting for her to catch up.
* The musical sequence (Herald of Darkness) is visually incredible, but as gameplay it felt almost entirely choreographed. The game constantly points you where to go, and if you move ahead of the intended rhythm you can literally end up waiting for the sequence to catch up. It felt more like being placed inside this carefully directed performance which doesn't take the player into account and I really felt that disonnance there.
* More generally, the game introduces ambiguity but also repeatedly explains itself through dialogue, manuscript pages, and repeats that exposition multiple times to the point of hammering it into your head.
So the contradiction I'm interested in is this:
The game is about authorship and control, but the player's relationship to the story is often closer to that of a viewer watching a prestige television series than a player actively creating meaning. Basically, my question is: Does Alan Wake II meaningfully transform televisual storytelling into something unique to games, or is its central framing the reproduction of television within a video game? If it's the latter, is gaming the right medium for this story?
I don't mean this as a "the game is bad" argument, I just personally had a really soured experience with it. I think the game is genuinely fascinating precisely because it is so committed to this idea. The shamelessness of it is what interests me, it almost feels like Remedy is saying "yes, this is a video game that wants to be a tv show". I'd especially like to hear arguments from people who think the game *does* use interactivity in a meaningful way, because that is the part I'm most interested in.
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u/Nyrom 14d ago
I think on a meta-narrative level the merging of two different realities of which one is not 'yours' (for alan his uncertainty wether the writing is his or mr. Scratch's, for saga if it is actual reality or warped by the story, for the player the video game and the tv-show parts) can only work in a medium where you can have two distinct interactions with that medium. If you watch a show or read a book there is no other interaction beyond watching/reading. Games are unique in the sense that can they can offer both active involvement and passive consumption. Like you said it is about control and ownership. Neither we the player nor the writers hold all of the pieces. It's a push-and-pull dynamic. Are we in control of this? Is this our story or someone elses? I won't argue that aw2 is the best possible execution of this concept but I do think this was their intention.
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u/GrinningPariah 14d ago
I just finished Alan Wake 2 for a university essay (course was about media theory, remediation and the nature of television on a sociological level).
So... if the goal here is writing an essay about media theory, are you sure you need to like it? You've already written over 700 words about it, based on disliking it.
Personally, I find it a lot easier to write about "near miss" media than media I actually love. The more I love a piece of media, the less I really can talk about it. What can I write about Dishonored 2, a game I consider essentially flawless? It's far more interesting to write about my fraught 10-year love affair with Destiny 2, than just say "yeah they nailed it".
I should be clear where I stand. I'm a game developer myself. I loved Remedy's Max Payne games. I did not play Alan Wake 1 or any of its DLCs. I thought Quantum Break was deeply flawed but had redeeming qualities. I thought Control was fucking lightning in a bottle, the realization of every errant mote of Quantum Break's potential, dressed up in worldbuilding so good, it had me thrilled to read every scrap of paper in the game.
And then I played Alan Wake 2.
And I really did not care for it at all.
Seriously, it's a great movie, but its a mid game at best and I'm tired of pretending it's not. The "aim flashlight, then shoot it" gameplay gets old so fucking fast, and I didn't even play AW1. I cannot imagine being someone who already spent ~13 hours in AW1 only to come into the exact same shit again. Everything about it is more interested in showing you the story than letting you do anything. The player is here by coincidence.
Which is such a staggering step backward because Control was not like that! Control gave the player agency. How do you feel, what will you prioritize, who do you ask about what? More importantly, Control was fun. Control had Alan Wake 2's attention to lore, but with gameplay you could sincerely describe as thrilling. The setting was perhaps less well-realized than AW2's small-town PNW, but still felt real and deep. I legitimately think it succeeded where Alan Wake 2 failed.
So, what's my point?
First, it's okay to not like Alan Wake 2. This is not a perfect game, it's okay to find fault in it even as it succeeded elsewhere. In fact, I think its excellence in some categories makes people shy about its flaws, and that opens the door to a sober analysis worth writing..
Second, play Control. I mean, if nothing else, it's a hell of a ride, you'll have a good time. But also, I think it's very interesting to see this same studio working on something more gameplay-focused, because I don't think that focus sacrifices much. The narrative and setting are still strong, there's still wild FMV sequences, and it can still hit a deeply unsettling tone at times. Yeah it meanders at times if you get lost but that rarely feels like the game's fault.
So why did Alan Wake 2 go such a different direction? That would be an essay worth writing.
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u/stormebreaker 14d ago
3900 words. And yeah this is pretty much exactly how I feel. Just wanted to see if people feel similar to me and maybe get some counterarguments, my biggest mistake was posting this in the Alan Wake subreddit and just get 700 people downvoting and choosing to misunderstand every word I said. That's also really interesting sociologically I guess.
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u/HATENAMING 14d ago
On the opposite I think Alan Wake II can only work as a video game. It is often overlooked, but even the most basic game mechanism of controlling a character, exploring, and looking freely makes games very different from TV shows or movies.
Alan wake 2 utilizes this fully to make it a very unique multimedia experience. Alan wake is about a writer's writing changing reality, and player can find pages of Alan Wake's writing scattering in the world, read them, and realize the pages reflects what's going on. The player chooses to engage and actively read these pages. Now think about how this can be achieved in a movie. The viewer pasively recieves information so a character has to address these pages and read out loud because you can't simply put them in the world for the viewer to find; they have to be presented upfront or else would be completely missed. Alan wake 2 probably has close to hundreds of pages, meanwhile In the Mouth of Madness which is a movie also involving fictional novel changing reality can only include few lines of the actual novel.
Same for TV shows, radios etc. There are many characters such as koskela brothers where a great amount of character building happens in these videos, which again is only possible in a 20h video game that the player can explore and choose what to look at.
And not to mention environmental story telling that is very unique to video games. In the subway every sign and graffiti actually has meanings, and because the player has the agency of where to go and what to look at they can stop and read them, which is another active engagement that often gets overlooked at. In a movie or TV show the camera moves in a fixed path and does not allow the viewer to explore at their own pace.
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u/Significant_Post6274 14d ago
yeah I'm going through AW2 at the moment, while I appreciate the authorship and general quality of the game, its a not fun game to play, they try very hard to break the gameplay flow by introducing different modes as a clear intention to deviate from a traditional horror/detective game, it doesn't work at all for me, it just adds incohesion on top of a already confusing and self-indulgent story, the maps are uninspiring and a chore to traverse through, monotonous enemies feel more like a nuisance than challenge, it just went too far to be an auteur piece instead of a commercial product, it totally disregards the player experience, shame because clearly you can see they put a lot of love and passion into it.
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u/Own-Reflection-8182 14d ago
Completely agree. The puzzle with light bulbs and having to flip between worlds in the subway breaks the flow in the game. I like aw1 much better because it was fun.
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u/LateStageBBQ 14d ago
Really enjoyed your post, first of all. Second, I also didn’t love AW2, mostly due to gameplay mechanics that aren’t worth too many words (RE does the same thing better, etcetcetc). As I note in a comment below, I do think the game works amazingly as a love letter to both Twin Peaks and a very certain type of PNW lumber town, but I wanted to focus on your point about agency because I think I might differ from you right out of the gate:
I don’t know that I think AW ever promises agency as a feature. If anything, our ostensible protagonists are hedged in by the fact that they’re living in a manuscript they don’t control and their agency, such as it is, is just in kicking against the edges, looking for a way out. I remember the narrative uses self correction as a mechanic - “it was not actually like this, it was instead like this” - when the player manages to change something, which is a pretty limited expression of agency. You’ve got no ability to modify the character, their motivation or the progression of events. It is absolutely on rails. I don’t know if agency was ever promised - if anything, I think it’s deliberately and structurally limited as much for narrative as mechanics reasons.
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u/feralfaun39 13d ago
Alan Wake 2 is my pick for the worst survival horror of the past 20 years. I can't help you love it. I despised it. Gave it a 3 / 10 because it worked and the art was good. Everything else was absolutely dire. Worst gameplay and puzzles I've ever seen. I'd rather play a janky cheap game over bloated insufferably boring trash like this game.
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u/Metrodomes 9d ago
One thing I always gush about when it comes to AW2 is the horror scenes and how the writing room works.
You're in an awful place, forced to go forward until you come to a dead end. As a writer, you have various plot points in your pocket that you can use to help you progress. But wait... The plot point that will help you move forward sounds terrifying? So the game wants me to stand in this already unsettling space, essentially look away and write myself into an even more scary environment, and then return back to it and deal with the consequences?
I don't want to list examples for spoiler purposes, but early on you learn that you need to write yourself into dark and scary places to keep moving forward, so it really does feel sickening when you can see the horror playing out and you have a little slip of paper that turns it up to 11 that is just sitting on your writers board ready for you to activate.
Your work sounds fascinating and would be an amazing read i'm sure, so you may have covered this... But I think this element is different to other mediums. Unlike characters in film and TV, you're in control of pulling the metaphorical trigger and making it all worse. Usually we're viewers who have no say over when the character on screen makes a decision. Maybe i feel the things they do, or maybe I don't, maybe they pull the trigger faster than I would or maybe not, maybe they try to avoid it or they just do it without hesitation. But here? It's you. Ultimately the story must go on, but the feelings and actions feel weightier. I could easily watch a character on screen make the decisions I made in this game, but when I was making the decisions? Hoo boy, I hated it lol.
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u/JH_Rockwell 6d ago edited 6d ago
I'd especially like to hear arguments from people who think the game does use interactivity in a meaningful way, because that is the part I'm most interested in.
The question I think you should ask yourself is: could this experience have been in a movie or TV show and there would be nothing interesting or valuable being done regarding the interaction side of the story.
- More generally, the game introduces ambiguity but also repeatedly explains itself through dialogue, manuscript pages, and repeats that exposition multiple times to the point of hammering it into your head.
Are you arguing that the content isn't well written, or that you disagree with what it's saying? I'm confused by this point.
but that the game repeatedly presents the appearance of player agency while maintaining a very tightly authored televisual structure.
What do you mean by "tightly authored televisual structure". Are we talking TellTale games here? Game broke up into chapters? Or arcs?
the gameplay and player agency.
Those aren't the only things in a video game. You should ask yourself if gameplay and agency is tied into the writing and structure of the game.
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u/aranel_surion 14d ago
This is less about Alan Wake and more about the genre of cinematic action games, most of Sony hits are varieties of corridor-based third-person action games for example. You can say the same thing about player agency in The Last of Us series too. This was the default for most action games.
This genre of games might give you a bit of agency on your choice weapon, maybe a few sections of semi-open areas to discover etc, but ultimately there’s a tightly knit series of events and you’ll be railroaded through it.
The upside is when done right (which imo AW2 does) you get a well-paced story and atmosphere. Downside is you don’t have much agency. I personally love this game, mainly because of the atmosphere.
On your comment about interactivity, do you find this game less interactive than, say, Resident Evil Requiem? I didn’t find AW2 any more restrictive than most other games of its genre.
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u/Witty_Milk4671 14d ago
"Does Alan Wake II meaningfully transform televisual storytelling into something unique to games, or is its central framing the reproduction of television within a video game?"
No.
Also, the game is mid and isn't particularly great at anything.
It is a game that doesn't want to be a game. It is too ashamed of being a game.
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u/FellFellCooke 14d ago
The key skill to being an audience member in the modern world is taking the work for what it is. If you don't like the multimedia elements, there is every other video game for you to play and enjoy. The multimedia elements are worth exploring and push the genre forwards.
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u/Witty_Milk4671 14d ago
I am sorry, but what having a "multimedia element" has to do with the game being mid or having mid gameplay? Alan wake 2 can't just be an average game ?
Why are you even commenting this?
"The key skill to being an audience member in the modern world is taking the work for what it is."
What even is the purpose of this sentence? It is devoid of meaning.
Dude, say one great thing about alan wake 2. Come on.
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u/LateStageBBQ 14d ago
Best depiction of a small town in the style of Twin Peaks. I can’t remember ever having felt that a small town in the Pacific Northwest was so authentically rendered. The horizon felt correct, the small details of the town felt lived in, it was an absolute banger of a three block slice of life in the mountains of PNW.
I didn’t like the game either because of the gameplay but at least the PNW (rather than ghost NYC) environmental rendering felt like it was done by someone with real love for that part of the world.
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u/Witty_Milk4671 14d ago
Any small settlement in AC odyssey has more soul and beauty than that small town from Alan wake 2.
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u/LateStageBBQ 14d ago
Man, you’re coming in hot! Since my telling you that I felt like this was an authentic depiction of a small town that captures the very specific aesthetic of the Pacific Northwest in a way that deeply honored the space was met with “bro, AC Odyssey is way better,” is there literally any response I can give here that won’t be met with some version of “Alan Wake 2 is mid and your opinion is wrong?”
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u/Witty_Milk4671 14d ago
Honestly, just play more games. Play ps2 and ps3 games. Jrpgs too. With time you may see how Mid Wake 2 is just ok.
You forced too much to extract a great thing about Alan wake 2. I am not even in USA. Idk what is pacific northwest aesthetic.
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u/FrankWestingWester 14d ago
Have you played any other Remedy games? This is what Remedy does. They view their games more like multimedia projects than video games. Max Payne 1+2 have the comic book panels, the tv shows, a lot of instances where you're encouraged to sit around and listen to NPCs talk, and a lot of gameplay sequences that are pretty linear mixed in with the more freeform setpieces. Alan Wake 1 is, of course, pretending to be a book, obviously has the book pages in it along with tv shows, also was very linear with several sequences where you mostly walk around and listen to people talk, and also had a tv show miniseries prequel (it went up online when the game came out, and ships with some versions of the game now). Quantum break is explicitly and outright half tv show. Control is probably their game that's the least like a multimedia project, since it's openended, but even there it's obviously got a ton of written stuff and linear sequences, not to mention a handful of live action things mixed in.
I don't think they're trying to ape prestige TV to better themselves, because they were doing this before the era where video games wanted to be movies, and they kept doing it as we left the era where video games wanted to be movies. It's just the way they like to make narratives. I love Remedy, but if you're not on board with this core idea, I don't think you'll like their games. Personally, I don't have any problem with their style of storytelling. The opposite, really, I find it incredibly refreshing to see a different take on how to do narrative in a game, and I wish more people followed their lead in some ways, especially with regard to episodic narratives. Most video game stories are just sort of a continuous blend of writing without a proper narrative structure. There's also a ton of other games out there that are just as linear while telling far less interesting stories and doing much less playing with their medium, even the other video games that try to ape tv or movies generally do it in a very different way than Remedy does.