I've downloaded Alan Wake II to my PS5, so it's just a matter of waiting for Friday for the game to unlock so I can play it.
I'll be curious how I feel about the game. The original Alan Wake was inspired by the works of Stephen King and David Lynch (most obviously Twin Peaks for the latter) but in terms of gameplay, it was more of an action game, even if it had a weird horror aesthetic. The new game looks like it will be leaning more emphatically into horror.
My tastes, as I've come to discover in recent years, seems to align largely with the New Weird - an artistic/literary movement that incorporates elements of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy to present things that are strange more than they are necessarily terrifying (though these stories can get pretty scary).
The conceit of Alan Wake - a man waking up a week after he dove into a lake to rescue his drowning wife and then finds pages to a manuscript of a horror novel describing the exact events he's going through, apparently written by him - I'd say leans more into that "Weird" side of things.
Control, the Remedy Studio's 2019 game that first really established the idea of a "Remedy Connected Universe," explicitly drew its inspiration from the New Weird, and again, while the story has some disturbing and terrifying things in it, it really leans more into the idea that these things are strange and unusual more than there to elicit terror.
Of course, one of my biggest literary influences was Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which retroactively fits into that New Weird mold (or, it might be more accurate to say that some of the folks in the New Weird movement, like the creators of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, were heavily influenced by King's work, and particularly the Dark Tower). King is, of course, known as a horror writer, but the Dark Tower incorporates elements of fantasy fiction, science fiction, and of course terrifying moments of horror (cosmic horror being an element that often fits into the other two genres fairly easily).
Given the Dark Tower's prominence in my personal library, I sometimes have to remind myself that King is known more for straight horror - though even his horror stories often incorporate strange elements. The Shining, for example, involves the evil presence in the Overlook hotel infecting Jack Torrance's mind, but unrelatedly (yet serendipitously) Danny's "Shining" ability - some kind of psionic ability - is what allows him to survive the story.
Alan Wake of course has scary shadow-monsters, but the way in which it really feels "Weird" is its strange conceit that this is all happening the way that Alan wrote it - whether he did so as some kind of prophetic prediction or if his writing it made it happen that way (and inviting us to ask whether there's any difference between the two).
What I've seen of the sequel in previews suggests that the rhythms of the game are going to be different - each foe you face is going to be a significant drain on resources, but there will (in theory) be fewer of them. Visually, the game looks more gruesome - wounds inflicted with your various weapons upon the Taken and other monsters are gory and gross.
That, I'll admit, is a little less my style - I think it's fine to make a point about the reality of violence, but I'm perfectly ok with video game enemies showing no real "combat damage."
Interestingly, they've cited a number of survival horror games as inspiration for the gameplay here, such as Resident Evil IV. This is a genre I've never really played, so I have only a vague, secondhand sense of what to expect.
I've been playing a ton of Elden Ring lately, so while my reflexes are well-practiced thanks to that, we'll see how I adapt to this one.
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