One of the things that's interesting about playing Alan Wake (Remastered) is that it's a glimpse into an era of gaming that, while I was certainly around for it, came over a decade ago and thus feels something like a time capsule.
There are some aspects that I find actually quite refreshing. There's zero sense of "progression" in terms of Alan's power as you play through the game. Most segments see you lose all the equipment you've amassed over the course of the previous one, and there's no resources that have you making a "build" where you choose, say, to increase your health or the power of certain attacks.
Now, I realize that this might sound like a veiled critique of Control, Remedy's more recent game. I don't mean it to be, but I just think that it's interesting and kind of fun to have a game where you're there to play through the story and the levels without thinking about "stats."
Another thing that is unconventional, though perhaps only today, is Alan Wake's division into "Episodes." Despite the fact that the story is about a novelist who seems to have somehow written a manuscript of the Stephen King-style horror story he's now living through, the game is broken up in a manner similar to a television show. (Evidently Remedy Studio has actually sold the rights to make a TV show based on the game, which I actually think could work pretty well). The game originally came out in 2010, during the era of "Peak TV" or the "Golden Age of Television," which... it's possible we're no longer in. Serialized dramas on TV were the center of the pop culture and, frankly, "screen art" conversation.
This was also an era in which some game studios envisioned a new structure for delivering game content - with "episodic" releases as a possibility. Half Life 2 (which had come out several years earlier, to be fair) had two DLC chapters that were referred to as "Episodes," and if memory serves, this was also embraced by TellTale's various story-centered games.
Now, you could argue that really what the episodes in Alan Wake are are simply a different name for "level," a gaming structure that dates back to Super Mario Bros. in 1985.
But Alan Wake leans heavily into the idea of approaching the story as if it's some serialized TV drama. Episodes begin with a "previously on" recap, just as you'd get with any serialized TV show (which can feel very silly when you've just finished the level they're recapping, but is great at helping you catch up if you take a break).
While Stephen King is an undeniable influence on the game (the shadowy "Taken" are perhaps more broadly from any kind of horror story, but the weird idea of selfish people trying to gain power by manipulating artists and a protagonist who has some other version of himself on another plane of existence "writing" this reality into being feels very Stephen King) another strong influence is David Lynch and his show (with Mark Frost) Twin Peaks.
King and Lynch are not usually included in the same conversations - King is generally seen as a popular but not really critically "important" writer (though I think as generations raised on King's books begin to have a say in the critical, literary "canon" that's changing) while David Lynch is an arthouse movie director that exists about as far as you can imagine from "popular entertainment" (though again, Twin Peaks in its original run was actually a hugely popular water cooler-conversation-starter,) there's actually a lot of shared DNA there. Both like to examine the darkness lurking underneath America's idyllic, small-town seeming utopias and often approach that with an eye toward the strange and the dreamlike (or nightmare-like).
Indeed, I sometimes think that David Lynch might actually play in the genre of cosmic horror, but his narrative style is so unconventional that critics place his works outside of the "genre" and into the "literary" or "arthouse" space.
Expressed as a video game, I think Alan Wake is fun, though I do sometimes feel like the actual "game" parts can feel like a sort of interlude within the meat of the game's entertaining value. Luckily, at least so far, none of the "trudging though the woods" segments of the game has felt so long as to wear out its welcome, but I think you could rightly criticize it for getting a little samey - ultimately, most of these segments have you just follow a relatively simple path and then do the same "shine your light as much as you can until you can pump some rounds into the Taken you're being attacked by" or, if you get overwhelmed, you usually get flares or flashbangs to take out a large number of them at once.
One thing I find interesting is that one of the "patients" at Doctor Emil Hartman's lodge on Cauldron Lake, where Alan spends a brief time being told that he's actually a schizophrenic who has had a psychotic break after his wife drowned and died (something he and we never believe for a second,) is a video game designer. At one point, we hear him ranting about how producers come in and force him to make changes to a game so that they can feel like they've got a fingerprint on it, and there's a joke about adding a Mullet to a game character, and how now the game has something called "Mullet Time," which I have to imagine is a reference to the heavy use of bullet time in Max Payne (Remedy's original claim to fame.) It even makes me wonder whether this is a critique of Alan Wake's own slow-motion camera effects when you dodge one of the Taken's attacks.
This slow-motion kind of speed-ramp is the most visually dated element in the game - something that feels like it was probably mind-blowing and cool in 2010, but now calls way too much attention to itself and kind of slows down the action.
There are also segments in the game where you can get in a car and drive around - sometimes using the headlights and the weight of the car to easily take out Taken who would otherwise be a bigger challenge. Now, don't get me wrong - I really like when an on-foot game can also see you getting into a vehicle, but it's also something that feels very much like a trend that was big in 2010 and maybe not as much of a deal nowadays (thinking back, I remember how the original Mass Effect had planets you could go to and drive around in the Mako, but those worlds were often pretty empty aside from one or two buildings you could explore. Half Life 2 also had extensive sections with a... hovercraft, I think? And later a little dune buggy).
Something I actually really love that feels dated is that the game makes use of filmed actors at times - specifically, when you find televisions that have another version of Alan speaking through them, we see the actor for Alan's appearance, Ilkka Villi, rather than the CGI facsimile that serves as the character model. This was something I loved about Control, which was peppered through with live action video of Matthew Poretta as Doctor Casper Darling (who is also the voice actor for Alan Wake).
Back in the 1990s, in the early days of video and computer games, this was more common - CGI was so rudimentary at the time that a lot of game studios simply chose to dress actors in costume and film them, and then insert the videos as cutscenes (for me, the most memorable performances were Rand and Robyn Miller as Achenar and Sirrus - and then the former also as their father Atrus - in Myst). This fell out of fashion by the 2000s, but I like that Remedy has chosen to keep this method in their toolbox - something that might have felt dated in 2010 but now feels novel once again.
What I'm finding exciting about the story of Alan Wake is that the "scary shadow people" as the main monsters you face are just the jumping off point. There's weirdness afoot, and these guys with axes and chainsaws who can only be killed after you've exposed them to enough light are just the obstacle to uncovering that.
No comments:
Post a Comment