Where does Alan Wake II wind up? Well, that's spoiler territory, which we'll cover in a moment. Stories, including those told in video games (and particularly in narrative-focused games like this one) have a number of important components, but I think that the two biggest are plot and themes. The plot, which can also be a representative of all the up-front elements like framing, visual design, sound design, and in games, the gameplay, is the easiest thing to get at.
Theme, typically, at its best, is conveyed subtly through those forward-facing elements. If your themes are too obvious, the work starts to feel preachy - more of an essay than a work of art. We feel more engaged with a story's themes when we are able to discover themselves. The "art" of art, in this sense, is in letting the audience discover it on their own, to arrive at their own interpretation and, perhaps, find a synchronicity on those themes between author and audience - to convey those feelings that cannot be so easily expressed in simple words.
Plot-wise, Alan Wake and its long-awaited sequel are about a supernatural force of darkness pushing its way into the world, trying to re-shape reality to make it dark and twisted and horrific. But this darkness requires creative minds to manifest itself because, on a fundamental level, the darkness is not creative in and of itself.
While these games use "The Dark Presence" to describe the evil force, the in-world Federal Bureau of Control uses the term "The Shadow," which is taken from Jungian psychology. The Shadow is the dark reflection of the world and all its elements. The cruel witch is the Shadow of old women. The werewolf is the Shadow of civilized, peaceful people.
On a deep, instinctual level we have ancient ancestors who feared predation by monsters that were nothing supernatural - just big animals that wanted to eat us. But as humans have become the dominant species on our planet, we're far more likely to see violence coming from others of our species. And we must grapple with that darkness, that Shadow that exists inside of ourselves as well.
Spoilers Ahead:
It's no accident that the embodiment of the Shadow in Alan Wake II is Alan's "doppelganger" Mr. Scratch. Mr. Scratch is, as we later discover, only ever physically real when Alan himself is possessed by the Dark Presence. Everything Mr. Scratch is already exists within Alan. And while, yes, the story does literalize the idea of the Dark Presence or the Shadow taking people over, there is no escape from the fact that the seeds of darkness were always in there to begin with.
In the original game's DLC chapters, The Signal and The Writer, our antagonist turns out not to be Mr. Scratch, but instead a half of Alan's personality that is willing to give in and let the Dark Presence take him. Here's the thing, though: I don't think that's actually any different from Mr. Scratch. Perhaps it's more a question of emphasis. The "crazed Alan" in those DLCs is more depressive and fearful than hateful and violent. But both reflect a darkness inside of him that he wishes to overcome.
As is made clear in Alan Wake II, the people who become Taken all harbor some darkness within them. In the case of the two deputies, they are both burdened by the guilt of having accidentally killed an innocent woman and then hidden the body. Cynthia Weaver (whose turn to darkness feels particularly rough given her role in the first game) was unable to get over her obsession with Tom Zane.
But that's ultimately pretty terrifying, because who amongst us is free of darkness? Who amongst us is actually immune to the corrupting power of the Dark Presence? For the purposes of the plot, some are Taken and some are not. The potential for corruption is there in just about everyone.
Darkness doesn't just take the form of rage and violence. Alan is suffering from writer's block. And the very gameplay of his chapters - in which he visits and re-visits sites of terrible horror, trying to piece together a narrative that will work - feels futile and even repetitive (of course, video games typically have a "gameplay loop," but here that loop is arguably made part of the plot). The repeated failures, as he scraps old drafts and begins new ones, really mirrors the way that a writer who hits these blocks feels (hello!)
As a writer myself, and one who is in the middle of a bit of a block as well, having earlier this year had a period in which I was writing like fifteen pages a day, only for that thundering river to dry up, I can relate a lot to this feeling. Writer's block is a lot like depression. It tries to rationalize itself. As Alan sees in posters in his false New York, "your books weren't ever that good" or something to that effect. That's a quote from a dream at the intro of the first game, but it's also clearly something that he tells himself. Every artist doubts the profundity of their work, in part because they know all of the duct tape and paperclips holding the edifice of it together. But this doubt can be utterly crippling.
It's notable that Alan feels his ending has to be perfect or it won't get the job done. He's convinced he's got to write a totally flawless story to defeat Mr. Scratch and escape from the Dark Place without bringing the Dark Presence with him. But perfection doesn't exist. In the end, he and Saga come up with an ending for the story that is not perfect, not clean - but it does end the story and the game.
See, one of the paradoxes about the Shadow, or the Dark Presence, is that if you only fight it, only push it away, you let it grow within you.
I am not sure whether I agree with the decision to put this in a post-credits scene. You could easily beat the game and think that Alan Wake, the character, is over - released by death, gone, but also free of the nightmare his life has become. But that's not actually the case.
Alice Wake has been on her own journey. We get glimpses of it, and what we initially can read it as is that she has fallen into a deep depression, pushed to suicide by the constant terror inflicted upon her by Mr. Scratch.
But perhaps we should have known better: she jumped into Cauldron Lake. She understood what it meant to do that. She had spent her own nightmare in the Lake during the events of the first game. And she's also an artist.
And it is her "Bullet of Light" that Saga shoots into Alan's head while he's possessed as Mr. Scratch. Alan wakes up, presumably after Saga and Casey have somehow emerged from the Dark Place, no longer part of the story, and he is given the following revelation: It's not a Loop, it's a Spiral.
A spiral is a loop that actually gets somewhere. You keep passing the same scenery, you keep going through the same motions. It feels like you're making no progress whatsoever. But you are. Your depression will tell you that nothing is getting accomplished, that you're just stuck and unable to escape.
Over the course of the game, important moments are often signified by loops: the bosses Saga fights, Nightingale, the Deputies, and Cynthia Weaver, can only be reached after going through seeming environmental loops. Alan can only find the projectionist booth at Poet's Theater after going through a similar loop. Even jumping to Remedy's previous, connected game Control, Jesse only escapes her Hiss nightmare by going through three iterations of her "office hell" loop.
The Dark Presence, the Shadow, is telling you to give up - that you're just going to be stuck there forever, doing the same thing over and over without anything changing.
But it's not a loop. It's a spiral. Progress is made, even when it feels as if you're doing the same thing over and over. That's how you beat the Darkness. You work through it.
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