Alan Wake: The Signal and the Writer

 Alan Wake is a fairly quick game, and the DLCs that are packaged as part of the Remaster from a couple years ago (and the version of the game I've played) are similarly short. Each can be done in an hour or two, I think - I definitely did The Writer in a single sitting.

Somewhat similarly to Control, the enemies in Alan Wake aren't terribly distinct from one another (I'd say Control has a much clearer variance in things to fight, though the vast majority remain Hiss-corrupted FBC employees) but I think Alan Wake isn't really interested in providing a menagerie of strange beings to fight.

The ending of Alan Wake's main game places some limitations on the nature of its DLCs, so I'm going to put a spoiler cut here for a 13-year-old game.

The main game of Alan Wake ends with the eponymous writer diving into Cauldron Lake, taking his wife's place within the Dark Place and forcing himself to contend with the Dark Presence's intention to use him as a means to write itself into reality. We learn that the events of the game were basically set up by him during his week of lost time - he wrote "Departure" as a means to help Alice escape, and then forgot the text, only living through that which he had already written.

The DLCs, then, are odd in that it seems that they are not only taking place within the Dark Place, but actually taking place inside Alan's mind - the second DLC makes it clear that we're not even really playing the entirety of Alan, but his rational, cool-headedness, and the mad, ranting voice we see in the television screens is not some other person, but instead just his voice of self-doubt and fear.

The line between fiction and reality is, of course, blurred by the fact that the events of Alan Wake take place exactly as he wrote them to the previous week, but here it's explicit that there is no physicality to the world in which you play through the DLCs. It's a nightmare version of Bright Falls.

Perhaps to mess with us even more, "Mr. Scratch" is not, as it turns out, the bad guy behind these chapters, though you could be forgiven for assuming that to be the case. This figure, introduced in the closing cutscene of the main game, remains a mystery. I'm given to understand he's the main antagonist of Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which I don't think is available on Playstation platforms, but I also wonder if he'll be part of Alan Wake 2.

I was brought to this game by my enjoyment of Control, whose second DLC tied the game directly to Alan Wake, even suggesting that the story of Control was written into existence by Wake within the Dark Place, though other than the defeat of The Thing That Had Been Hartman, it seems that any future effect Jesse Faden will have on Alan Wake's situation is yet to be determined.