When I was in high school, two movies really introduced me to an aspect of fiction that continues to be something I hold very dear: the Mindfuck (pardon the curse word).
The two movies were David Fincher's Fight Club and Christopher Nolan's Memento. Not to get too into the spoilers for these movies, but both involve major twists that reframe the entire story once they are revealed. Pointedly, both movies are also written, shot, and edited in a way to disorient you. Both involve main characters whose sense of reality is unreliable.
Being unable to trust your own perceptions is one of the major sources of horror in Alan Wake II - beyond the undead Taken and the sinister Dark Presence trying to conquer our reality.
I'm several hours into the game, in the middle of the "Local Girl" chapter, which is one of the first you can play after getting the ability to choose between progressing Saga's story or Alan's. My plan is to alternate between them.
Spoilers ahead:
The Cult of the Tree is the sinister force that drew FBI agents Saga Anderson and Alex Casey to Bright Falls and its environs, but evidence continues to mount that the "Cult" might not be as sinister as it first appears: When the naked, bloated corpse of Robert Nightingale emerges from Cauldron Lake in the game's cold-open, we're naturally inclined to believe that the group of deer-masked strangers who hunt him down and strap him to a picnic table before carving his heart out are doing something evil.
But instead, it actually looks like they're just trying to reenact the way that Alan Wake destroyed the corrupted Barbara Jagger at the end of the original game. See, they've got their hands on an Object of Power, the Clicker.
OOPs, as we learn in Control, are particularly powerful "paranatural" items that draw power from the Collective Unconscious to do amazing things, such as a Floppy Disk that contained nuclear launch codes for the Soviet Union granting people the ability to telekinetically launch things. (There's a whole Control-related rabbit hole we could dive into headfirst, but I'll save that for later).
Nevertheless, it seems that these guys are also not immune to becoming Taken themselves - there's an arrogance that at least some of them have derived from their position as secret guardians, and we encounter two deputies we met earlier transformed into Taken as we follow them to the Cult's headquarters.
Alan's story, so far, is actually told as a flashback - Saga and Alex find him on the shores of Cauldron Lake, but he's convinced something went wrong - he did escape, yes, but he thinks that Mr. Scratch got out with him (maybe it was Scratch's escape that let him out).
The environment and tone of the stories is very different. Saga is working cases - you basically piece together your own "quest log" by collecting evidence that you attach in a big flow-chart of posted photos and index cards on the wall of her "Mind Place." Saga's story takes her through the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest - around the town of Bright Falls and neighboring Watery, as well as the woods around Cauldron Lake. Alan's story, on the other hand, takes him through a bizarre, perpetually Noir-ishly nighttime New York City - a version of it that is like New York as seen by Travis Bickle, and one in which the only other people (outside of the people he sometimes encounters on a bizarre talk show) are horrifying "restless shadows" that sometimes (a minority of the time) are actually Taken who must be fought - even while most will slowly fade away if you shine (without focusing) your flashlight at them.
While Alan is in these terrifying stories, projecting into them to try to delve deeper into the Dark Place while he's still technically in the Writer's Room (familiar as the room at the top of Bird Leg Cabin from the first game) if that even means anything, Saga's not left out of the mind fuckery.
Gradually, people begin to recognize her as if she's a local. The first is Rose, the poor waitress who still works at the Oh Deer Diner (and is not constantly holding a lantern, as we might have expected from the finale of the first game) and then things get far more intense in Watery. The Koskela brothers, who seem to own every business in town (and are also evidently in a leadership position within the Cult of the Tree, which, again, might actually be far less sinister than they first appear) claim that she has a trailer in the trailer park they own, and comment on her daughter.
Now, going in, we've heard Saga talking with her daughter on the phone, but as the reality of the story shifts, we find that the new memories the people of Watery have not only places her as a resident of the town, but also has it so that her daughter, Logan, drowned at some point.
This is the really cruel knife-twist - even if Saga knows that the original reality was one in which she remained happily married and her daughter lived, there's no guarantee at this stage that that reality can be reestablished.
So, then, we have to ask a hard question: is Logan's "death" Alan's doing? Not as a direct murderer, but as an author of the story that made it happen?
The game is all about dualities - the first image we get in the game is Alan's face fading into Mirror Peak, reflected in Cauldron Lake. Mirrors and reflections abound. And while the Cult of the Tree exists in the real world (perhaps it's narrow-minded to consider our reality the "real" one) Alan finds references to a "Cult of the Word" in the Dark Place. Both use double-triangle symbols (which, I'll note, also remind me of the images foreshadowing Dylan Faden's Hiss-infected pyramid rising to meet the inverted black pyramid of the Board in Control) and seem to enact ritualized murders (even if it looks like the Tree is technically more accurately performing... exorcisms?)
The game's plot has you tumbling between narratives and questioning causalities - just why does Saga's partner look precisely like his "fictional" namesake? At one point Sam Lake (the game's head writer and creative lead and physical mocap actor for both Alex Caseys, who is clearly just a copyright-safe version of Max Payne, at least in Wake's fiction) appears as himself (though in a bizarre supernatural talkshow).
Sheriff Breaker (played by Quantum Break's Shawn Ashmore) is blinked out of our reality when the dead Agent Nightingale wakes up, very similarly to how David Bowie's Phillip Jeffries vanishes in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but Alan meets him in the Dark Place as an apparent longtime ally. (Though I think is distinct from the friend (?) he gets calls from on the pay phone in the Dark Place version of New York.) Has he gone back in time? Or is his blinking away from the Bright Falls morgue a return to the Dark Place?
Those of us who played Control obviously know about the FBC and its terminologies. We've got a big-time AWE on our hands, and the Clicker is identified as an Object of Power by the Koskela brothers, suggesting they know a little about the paranatural matters that the FBC focuses on.
Of course, we also have appearances from Ahti, who shows up to help Alan in the Dark Place by giving him the Angel Lamp - the lamp that the disconnected lightswitch that is the Clicker supposedly originally connected to - but also shows up in Watery to sing some karaoke (unless he's been on a very, very long vacation, he must just come back here periodically to hang out with some Finnish-Americans who get his vibe).
I am, of course, more convinced than ever that Ahti is some kind of deity (or the closest equivalent if we're not using the "g" word).
I've seen a single reference to "the red-headed woman," which I think could mean Jesse Faden. Near Cauldron Lake, we find an FBC monitoring station that is likely where the signal at the end of Control's AWE DLC originated from.
The game is definitely scarier than the first one - I think that could in part just be a result of the advances in technology. Lighting and atmosphere have come a long way since 2010. But the game also works hard to build up suspense before throwing you into combat.
The first (and so far only) "boss" fight I've had was Saga's final (?) confrontation with Nightingale, and I'll confess that while I didn't lower the difficulty for that fight, I found myself deciding to go with the easiest difficulty afterward - the tension of the fight became more of a frustration when I kept dying over and over because I'd exhaust all of my ammo to get through a single stage of the fight and then spend most of my energy hunting around the area for more ammo. While ammo conservation and battery conservation was certainly a thing in the first game, there were a lot of ways that the game would be somewhat more forgiving - like how your battery slowly recharged, meaning you only had to consume batteries if you were running out in the middle of a fight.
In this game, you need to watch your resources a lot. Bringing the game down to "story" mode puts the Taken a little closer to their difficulty from the first game, where two headshots could usually take one out after you burned away their shadow shield. On Normal mode, these guys will take an entire clip into the dome (or so it seemed to me).
While I certainly appreciate a good challenge (consider that I willingly play FromSoft games) for this game it felt like the actual scariness was paradoxically being undercut by the fact that I had to keep reloading and starting certain segments over (the two big ones were the Nightingale fight and a moment in the subways on Alan's side of things after placing the cult meeting scene in the end-of-the-line hall).
The Case Board reminds me a little of the leads in Deathloop - a kind of big logical way of laying out all the clues and objectives. Unfortunately, this is also used to track secondary collectables, like when you find a Cultist's cache, manuscript pages in Alex Casey lunchboxes, and various doll-and-nursery-rhyme puzzles set up as an experiment by the FBC, which so far look like more of just a way to track these discoveries than something that is going to reveal actual plot.
The plot here is engrossing and feels truly like you're playing through some prestige drama (with a heavy dose of horror). I'll confess that I think the high-powered action of Control is a little more my speed and style, but with the difficulty turned down, I feel confident I'm going to have a rollicking time chewing my way through this densely twisted plot.
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