When I first heard about Alan Wake, I was intrigued - a rather modest name for a video game, but one that centered on a writer caught in a nightmare of shadow-people. Still, I didn't get around to actually playing it until recently, after having gotten through Control, which is one of my favorite games of all time (though for the love of Ahti, why can't we get a New Game + or at least a second save file?)
Alan Wake draws clear inspiration from Stephen King, but not just in the sense that it's, well, modern American horror, but also in King's ideas about the strange way that perception and storytelling can shape reality. For a recap of the original: Alan Wake is a novelist (who writes hardboiled crime novels, his most popular character being Alex Casey, who is basically Max Payne but with Remedy Studios retaining the rights to the character) who is suffering from writer's block, and his wife takes him on a vacation to a place called Bright Falls, where they rent a cabin for him to get away from all the distractions so he can start writing again.
But things get weird: his wife falls into Cauldron Lake, and when he dives in to rescue her, he wakes up a week later in a wrecked car. As he makes his way through Bright Falls, he's assailed by "Taken," who are people that have been infected by a strange shadow that warps them in violent menaces. Weirder still is that he starts finding pages of a manuscript he's written: a story called "Departure," which describes exactly what he is going through - though not always in order. Indeed, sometimes the pages describe things that are about to happen.
As a spoiler for the end of the game - you manage to get Alice, Alan's wife, out of the lake, but to do so Alan becomes trapped in the Dark Place, the strange other plane of existence to which the lake serves as a portal.
Nine years later, Remedy's Control has a totally different story, but the AWE expansion for that game confirmed explicitly that Jesse Faden's story takes place in the same world as Alan Wake, and that he may have even had a hand in the creation of her story and thus her reality.
Now, four years after Control, Alan Wake II is finally coming. The gameplay looks different - dialing back the action aspect of the original game in favor of more slow-paced survival horror (the original always had elements of this, with dwindling ammo supplies and flashlight batteries). The game jumps between two player characters - Alan is still stuck in the Dark Place, but rather than a nightmarish Bright Falls like in the DLCs for the first game, here it's a rain-slicked city out of a noir story... and one in which it seems Alex Casey will appear as a character (after all, Alan's writing does create new realities). The other player character is a new one, Saga Andersen, an FBI agent investigating cult murders in Watery, a town near Bright Falls (that was also mentioned as the place Ahti went on vacation halfway through Control).
Now, Control's AWE expansion implies that Alan may have written the Hiss, Jesse Faden, and possibly the entire FBC into existence in the hopes that a hero like Jesse could help save him, so I have a strong feeling that the Cult of the Tree in Alan Wake II might be part of his narrative plan.
In Alan Wake, we learn artists of any sort who are near Cauldron Lake develop this reality-shaping power. An earlier artist, the poet Thomas Zane, had a similar experience to him in the 1960s, and similarly lost his girlfriend to the lake. But Zane just quickly wrote that his girlfriend, Barbara Jagger, came back, and the Dark Place filled in the details - that she came not as herself, but as an avatar of the Dark Place (also, the name Barbara Jagger is clearly a reference to Baba Yaga, especially given that the cabin the Wakes rent, which conveniently doesn't actually exist, is called "Bird Leg Cabin.") Alan realizes that using this power requires exquisite care and caution, as the power of the Dark Place will use any opportunity to twist the intent of it. Thus, he has to write the harrowing journey of "Departure" to get Alice out, and has been working on "Return" for over a decade.
So, I think that the cult murders are part of "Return," and have to be there to place Saga near the lake, and also possibly to get the FBC and Jesse Faden involved (though the degree to which the FBC plays a role in Alan Wake II hasn't been revealed in previews - while I love the easter egg, I think this is going to be Stephen King-style connections rather than a full-on Avengers-style crossover).
Just a few observations and questions:
The Cult of the Tree might have something to do with the FBC. The FBC headquarters, The Oldest House, which is where the entirety of Control takes place, is implied to have possibly been a tree before there was a modern city surrounding it, and the tree was likely Yggdrasil of Norse Myth, or the inspiration for it, especially when you consider the "Thresholds" to other realities in the Oldest House, which could be akin to the way that one can travel the nine realms along the branches and roots of Yggdrasil. (There's even some speculation that The Service Weapon was, in a previous age, Thor's hammer Mjolnir.)
Both the fictional Alex Casey and the in-world real FBI agent who is Saga's partner (whose name I can't recall) use Remedy Studios' creative director Sam Lake as their model. Lake was the model for Max Payne back in the day (in the 90s when video game studios just used the programmers and other staff when they needed models for their games). Is it possible that this agent was written into existence - maybe as a more realistic version of Alex Casey?
There's a cheapo amusement park in Watery called Coffee World. This has to have been written into existence by Alan, whose coffee thermoses are a very 2010-video-game collectable item that does nothing except possibly get you an achievement.
Saga Andersen is an FBI agent - when she arrives in Watery, despite never having been there before, people treat her as if she has lived there for years, and that they all know her. Clearly Alan is rewriting reality, but is the original reality that she lived there or that she's an FBI agent from elsewhere?
This year has been crazy for video games - an embarrassment of riches. But I'm confident that when AWII comes out, I'll be quick to get it and play it, because I think Remedy's general aesthetic is really, really consistent with my own.
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