Alan Wake II's Conclusion

 It's not a loop. It's a spiral.

The absolute head-trip that is Alan Wake II goes far beyond the insanity of the first game or Control, all the while delivering the most devastating emotional gut punches and leaving you wondering what is coming next for the emerging Remedy Connected Universe.

Let's get into specifics, which means:

SPOILERS AHEAD:

While Saga Anderson investigates the Cult of the Tree and the goings-on involving Cauldron Lake, the Dark Presence, and what all of this has to do with the disappeared writer Alan Wake, we catch up with Wake trapped in a seemingly endless series of loops trying to write the perfect story that will allow him to escape but which will not unleash horrifying darkness upon the world.

Alan's motivation in the first place to go to the Dark Place was, of course, to rescue Alice. Alice emerges from the lake at the end of the first game, but we don't get a ton about what, precisely, she has been through during her time there.

We know that she visited the FBC (which really riled up The Thing That Had Been Hartman) and that she had been tormented by repeated visitations by Mr. Scratch.

Periodically, in the course of the various loops Alan goes through in the game, he returns to their apartment and witnesses the devastation of his disappearance and how it weighed on his wife, and also how his nightmarish doppelganger drove her to despair and detachment.

After the final location-loop, where Alan once again puts together a horrific crime scene, we get the darkest gut punch: following her "Dark Place" exhibit, of photos she has taken of Mr. Scratch invading her home, the video clearly meant to play in the exhibit states that she killed herself by jumping into the lake.

And so, it would seem, Alan's entire reason for subjecting himself to all this horror is for naught: he has lost the person he most wished to save.

It's a wrenching moment, made all the more wrenching as the video shows the last photos she took - evidently on a timer, which show her going over the edge.

Alan finds photos of the Clicker and a Bullet of Light taken by Alice, and has to put them in a shoebox for Saga to find.

Put a pin in that, though.

When Alan shows up in the middle of the game, strange things happen, and the FBC takes him into custody while Alex Casey (FBI agent, rather than Noirish detective) is injured. Saga has acquired the Clicker, intent on bringing it to Alan, but then we discover that the person Saga and Alex found on the shores of Cauldron Lake is actually Mr. Scratch.

While the FBC has the equipment that in theory should be able to contain him, he breaks free. The only way to fix everything is to get Wake out of the Dark Place, and Saga enlists the Old Gods of Asgard (oh, and in the midst of this she discovered Tor was her grandfather) to summon him with a hard-rock show at the lakeside. This... well it works, but it works by bringing Alan there earlier, when they first saw him.

And, as we discover: Mr. Scratch is just Alan with the Dark Presence inside of him. They are... sort of, the same being. A second fight with Scratch/Alan ends with him the Dark Presence pulled out of Alan, but it takes Casey and in the meantime, Saga is hurled into the Dark Place.

We get a bit of a reversal: Alan has to make his way out of the lake area and to Bright Falls, but finds that Casey/Scratch has opened a portal there back to the Dark Place, and Alan decides he's got to follow him inside.

Scratch's dark plan is very odd - an endless Deerfest in, interestingly enough, bright sunlight, but which sees everyone more or less worshipping the author of Return - basically a dark manifestation of Alan's desire for fame and approval.

It's telling that the FBC's term for the Dark Presence is The Shadow. This is a term in Jungian psychology that refers to basically the dark side of things - the way that even positive qualities might manifest in malign ways. People taken by the Shadow/Dark Presence sort of manifest the worst version of themselves.

Anyway, Alan needs to get to the Writer's Room, which in this version of the Dark Place is at the top floor of the Valhalla Retirement Home (as usual, Ahti has the keys for us).

Arriving there, Alan needs to make contact with Saga, who is also now in the Dark Place. Together they determine that the story has to have a dark ending - a sacrifice of a hero to have a chance to save everyone, due to the horror genre.

We meet up with Saga, who is trapped in her own Mind Place, the Dark Place magnifying all of her doubts and fears - we have to put together a case board that demonstrates all the ways that we (as Saga) suck, but eventually, as the case comes together, it would seem that Saga doesn't, in fact, suck, and that this is just the Dark Place/Presence trying to lead her to despair.

Saga emerges from the Mind Place, back in control, and arrives at a daytime (but very overcast and rainy) version of Alan's New York Dark Place. She even meets up with Tim Breaker there, who has his own challenges on finding Mr. Door, but she is able to retrieve the Clicker and Bullet of Light from the shoebox.

Ultimately, after communing with Alan via her profiling (which is clearly a paranatural ability) the two figure out how to put the ending together and she enters a portal down into his writer's room.

The trap is set. Alan is the bait.

Scratch, in Casey's body, emerges as the true Dark Presence form and takes possession of Alan once more, ready to complete Return the way he wants it.

And then Saga shoots him in the head with the Bullet of Light.

In his final moments, we hear all of Alan's doubts and fears: that this is just another loop, that this isn't going to work, that he's going to have to keep living this nightmare over and over forever-

And then it all stops. The glowing light in the bullet hole silences him. Peace? Perhaps. Scratch, it would seem, dies with him.

Casey, now returned to his own agency, asks Saga if they fixed it. Saga pulls out her phone to call Logan, but we get no direct answer there: the phone is ringing, but things cut to credits before anyone picks up.

So, we're left with what feels like a definitive ending at least for Alan - he's lost so much, but at least the nightmare is over. He's sacrificed himself to end the story and save the world.

Then we get the big post-credits twist:

Alice spent a long time in the Dark Place herself. And she's an artist, too. All the time that she was there during the events of the first game, she was trapped in her own endless loops and struggles to find a way out.

Mr. Scratch's nightly assaults on her home were not driving her to nightmares - they were a constant reminder that her husband was alive, and that he was trapped. When she visited "an organization" (I'm assuming the FBC, but it could be the Blessed Organization, given Barry's connection to it) she regained all of her memories of her time in the Dark Place.

Her "decision that people would not understand" was not suicide. She's not dead. She jumped into Cauldron Lake because she wants to rescue Alan. And as that revelation hits us, we see Alan, seemingly dead in his writer's room, wake up with the new revelation: It's not a loop, it's a spiral. The endless repetition seems like it's getting us nowhere, but we are plumping the depths, digging deeper and deeper to find the truth of the Dark Place.

It's a hopeful note for Alan, and it's a hopeful note for fans of the series who will want to see a third game. But it's also a promise of deeper nightmares and terrors.

The thirteen years it took for them to make a sequel to Alan Wake feels well-spent. The ambitions of the first game feel like they're fulfilled in this one. I'll confess that there are elements of the gameplay I could have tweaked a little - perhaps I just find Survival Horror frustrating, but I found myself turning the difficulty down to the lowest level during the Caldera Street Station mission, Casey, and still came across some frustrating fights (the Cynthia Weaver fight - and how sad is it that she became a Taken? After all the effort she put into the Well-Lit Room and everything! - being the most frustrating) where I felt like I didn't really get what I was doing wrong until one time, I just happened to win.

The game also has a lot of rewards for obsessive exploration, but the story feels like it's driving you to get through it - one of the refreshing things about going back to the original game after playing Control was how it was totally lacking any bogging-down of progression systems - you could get more ammo and batteries if you explored, and you could find manuscript pages, but the game was always pushing you forward through the story. Here the lightly-open-world aspect of it felt a bit more like a snag.

Similarly, there was a weird thing where if you missed finding a map for an area, sometimes the "blacked out" version of it would overlap on other maps and make it harder to navigate (for example, I didn't get the main Dark Place map until pretty far into the game, which gave the Oceanview Hotel map a big black chunk over it.)

Still, there's fantastic environmental storytelling there, good humor, and some of the craziest mindfucks in gaming (if you weren't sure about who, precisely, Thomas Zane was after the first game, get ready to be even more confused - though it was cool to see Ilkka Villi get to play a character as both model and voice). There's also some just insanely audacious things: one of Alan's earlier levels has you go through a third interview on "In Between with Mr. Door" that takes the form of a giant rock-and-roll musical number (complete with lots of live-action footage of the performance) and later, after completing the "Zane's Film" chapter, you get to see a ten-ish minute piece of 1960s arthouse avant-garde film, Zane's "Nightless Night," which has its own weird recursive elements like "Alexi Kase" played by Sam Lake encountering a cult in his hometown that looks a whole lot like the Cult of the Tree, and is also the inspiration for the Cult of the Word in the Dark Place or Alan's stories or... Look, Ahti is in the movie and plays a janitor who asks Alexi to put in a good word for him at the FBC, forgetting that Alexi Kase or Alex Casey is an FBI agent.

Now that I've gotten through the game, I'm going to delve deep into all the interpretations online. There's a boatload of stuff to unpack here, and while I'm super-excited for Control 2, I hope they take their time to bring this level of artistic inventiveness to the game (though hopefully not a full thirteen years).