Having consumed Control and its two DLC expansions, I found myself eager to explore the connected game (made abundantly clear in Control's second DLC, AWE) Alan Wake. This was a game I remember being intrigued by when it first came out in 2010, but never got around to playing. A few years ago a remaster came out, and given a relative cheap cost on the Playstation store, I got the game for my PS5.
The very first words of narration in this heavily narrated game are "Stephen King," and so it should be no surprise that the story of Alan Wake is meant to feel like it could be a King story. Taking place in the town of Bright Falls, it trades King's typical northern New England for the Pacific Northwest (a choice that might reflect the other influence of David Lynch and particularly his TV show Twin Peaks) but Bright Falls could easily exist in Maine as well.
In my delve into the idea of the New Weird, I keep finding myself thinking about the way that, despite his being the most popular living Horror writer, I've always felt that Stephen King doesn't quite fit into that genre neatly. That might be in part because my first King novels were the first few of the Dark Tower series, which set out to be an emphatically American epic fantasy. But the thing is, King's stories tend to get a little weird one way or another. Usually, whatever paranormal or otherworldly monster or threat is only one element.
Take The Shining, for example. The Overlook Hotel has some kind of evil presence (more complicated and alien than just ghosts, though it would be easy to mistake it for that) that drives Jack Torrance to homicidal rage, but at the same time, Danny Torrance has his eponymous Shine, which is some kind of enigmatic psychic power that isn't connected in any direct way with the presence at the hotel, other than that it helps him and his mom escape.
Alan Wake could be a King protagonist, not least because he's a writer (though he seems to be a kind of neo-pulp crime novelist rather than a horror writer).
Things get weird quick for Alan Wake. In fact, things start weird because the playable tutorial is set within a nightmare that just so happens to mirror future events, where a character he's written to have some nasty fate in one of his books comes after him for revenge - to the character, Wake is basically God, assigning a cruel fate solely for the purpose of drama.
We find that the nightmare occurs as he's sitting in his car on a ferry to Bright Falls (telling us this is an isolated little town if you can't just drive there) with his wife, Alice. While things are more or less normal in those first moments - just a local with a late night radio show asking for an interview with the famous author - things get, in this case, decidedly Lynchian as he enters a diner that must have been designed to look like the RR from Twin Peaks, and when he goes to pick up the key for the house he and his wife are renting, he has a bizarre interaction with a spooky woman with a black mourning veil, who gives him the key. Naturally, as he and Alice pull away, the man they were renting from runs out, yelling that they forgot their key.
To sum up: they get to the house, and we learn that Alice has a severe case of Nyctophobia - fear of the dark. Alan has to reassure her and get a generator running before she'll enter the dark house. Once she's settled in there, she reveals that she actually rented the place as an opportunity for him to try writing again - he's been suffering from three years of writer's block. They argue, he goes out to take a walk and cool off, but then something... strange happens. The lights shut off, and Alice screams, and he sees her sinking into the lake, and then...
He's in his wrecked car, teetering on the edge of a cliff. Trudging through the woods to get to a gas station where he hopes to call for help, he's assaulted by people from the town who are covered in some kind of veil of shadow.
This is where the game's combat loop takes form - Alan finds a flashlight and a gun, and you learn that you need to shine light on enemies to dispel the darkness that makes them invulnerable before you can shoot them.
And the nature of this corruption feels very Kingian - the named enemies (kind of bosses, but often also characters we've encountered previously) rant and rave with words they would normally use. The first "boss," a guy named Stucky, who was supposed to give you the key to the house on the lake, rants about renting cabins in a voice that gets distended and distorted.
But the truly Kingian elements that start popping up are when things get less straightforwardly scary and more weird and unexplained. Alan begins to find pages of a manuscript to the book he's been struggling to write, and the story he's evidently written describes almost prophetically what is happening or about to happen in the next moments. One of these pages describes being blinded by a television that spontaneously turns on when he gets to the gas station, and sure enough, that TV turns on, showing him in the cabin his wife had rented, ranting about his need to keep writing reality so that the world wouldn't end.
It's possible I just haven't yet gotten the rhythm of the game down yet, or it's possible that thirteen years is long enough for a PS3/Xbox 360 era game to feel kind of dated, but at least so far there are elements that feel a tad out of line with what I've come to expect from other games - particularly after playing through Remedy's Control. To be fair, the latter game's protagonist is, for lack of a better word, pretty much a magically-enhanced superhero shortly into the game's runtime, while Alan is just a guy trying to survive a nightmarish scenario.
One of the elements of the gameplay is that the sprint/dodge button causes near misses to slow down the action momentarily so you get a kind of speed-ramp shot of Alan dodging out of the way of a deadly swung wrench or bat. I can't decide if this is something that might have felt really cool thirteen years ago but now looks a little cheesy.
Light is your weapon and shield in the game - you need to shine your flashlight at foes for a certain amount of time before you can take them down, and you can expend the battery of your light to do so with greater speed, making batteries as valuable as bullets.
I'm not super far into the game, but one thing that's very unusual is that the story is broken up like episodes of a TV show. When you reach the gas station and are brought back to town by the sheriff, there's even music that plays that you could imagine playing over the ending credits of an episode. Next thing, you get a literal "previously on" recap and a flashback cold-open to Alan and Alice's life back in New York, reinforcing the idea of Alice's fear of the dark when they suffer a blackout due to a blizzard. The action then returns to the present, where we find that Alan has a missing week between his wife's disappearance and waking up after the car accident. Furthermore, he's told that the cabin on the island on Cauldron Lake hasn't existed for decades, raising the question of where the hell Alice could even be.
I'll leave the recap off here, but there's a general sense of mystery that goes beyond "why are these people getting turned into shadow-people who want to kill me?" And given the influences, there' no way it's going to be simple or expected.
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