Alan Wake II has more live-action footage than the first Alan Wake or Control. I'd say it has the most of any Remedy game, but Quantum Break was sort of sold as half a video game and half a TV show, so I don't want to get into those numbers.
Live action went out of fashion in video games around the time that high-definition CGI became available - when you can render really gorgeous computer-generated footage (with far higher resolution than what the game can actually render in real-time) the live-action stuff you saw in the 1990s looked dated and archaic.
And so Remedy's choice to lean into live-action is a very deliberate choice. The first Alan Wake game used it very sparingly - only showing the occasional footage of Alan in the Writer's Room and some of the Night Springs episodes (which, while conceptually cool, generally look like they were probably shot on a camcorder in the Remedy studio with nonprofessional actors - apologies if that last part was wrong). Control, coming nine years later and after the experience with Quantum Break, incorporated lots of live-action - we got some live-action Jesse in a few moments (generally when the otherworldly horror of the Hiss is trying to invade her mind) but mainly in the "Hotline Calls" and Caspar Darling's various presentations (always intriguing how Darling is such a huge presence in that game and never appears with as a 3D model).
Alan Wake II is a whole other level. Spoilers ahead, I guess,
In the real world (setting aside the notion that maybe the Dark Place is actually the real real world - but what is reality, anyway?) there's not a ton of live-action. Mainly I think we see it with the Koskela Brothers commercials. On Saga's end of things, it's typically used either with those or with her Profiling ability in the Mind Place.
But Alan's story is chock full of live-action segments. We see the Writer's Room in live-action, even ending the game there in that way. But weirdly, there's also a lot of parts to the game where the transition from game to live-action is marked with a particular threshold. Alan enters the talk show, In Between with Mr. Door, by staring at a television until his consciousness seems to enter the live-action world depicted on that television.
And, I think very importantly, when we meet Tom Zane, we do so only by interacting with a film projected on a blank wall in Room 665.
That can be easy to forget: the actual Room 665 in the Oceanview Hotel is empty and unoccupied and even, I think, has a different layout than what we see in Alan's interactions with Tom Zane. When Alan confronts Tom and discovers that the latter was working with Mr. Scratch, and then shoots him (sort of accidentally, or impulsively during a very disorienting moment,) upon Alan's return to the "game reality" the footage keeps playing and shows that Tom is actually totally fine, calling "Cut" and wiping the bullet-wound off his forehead, revealing it only to be a make-up effect.
And that got me thinking:
Is it just a stylistic choice to include this live action footage? Or is the game telling us something?
The Dark Place doesn't work with the same rules of reality. Alan is, yes, traversing this dark version of New York City, but in another way that is just as true, he's sitting at his desk typing out the story of how he's traversing the city. The fact that we can seamlessly pause and enter the Writer's Room represents, to me, that layered reality. It's not clear that Alan ever leaves the Writer's Room during the entire game, other than when he (possessed as Scratch) returns to our world - and notably, when Scratch leaves him and enters Alex Casey, when we are able to briefly fight our way back to Bright Falls, you can't access the Writer's Room - because Alan's not in there at that point.
The act of writing his story is what allows him to traverse that world - the Alan writing the story and the Alan living the story are one and the same.
And there just so happens to be a lot of film showing up in this video game.
Ok: so what would we think if this were the case: Suppose that every time there is live-action footage in Alan Wake II, it is because Tom Zane has made that footage. He is its author.
This is obviously explicit in Yoton Yo, the film that plays at the end of the Zane's Film chapter if you stick around in the cinema. But it could have wild implications if it's true for the entire game. It would also imply that In Between with Mr. Door is also Zane's work.
(Though I think it bears pointing out that this show is the one place I can think of in the game where the transition from live-action back to game has no threshold - when the show ends, the lights flicker and we regain control of Alan seated on the set in a suddenly-abandoned studio. Does this imply a different authorship of these moments? Certainly Mr. Door could be involved, though I don't know if we have evidence that he counts as an "artist" to the extent that the game's narrative requires.)
I'm eager to replay the game when the "Final Draft" DLC comes out, and will probably try to be more thorough in scouring the place for all the lore bits and such (I didn't find all the caches or manuscript pages or finish all the doll puzzles - were they all supposed to give items? Because I think I only got one off of one or two of them). But I think I'm also going to pay very close attention to the live-action bits. Tom Zane has, if anything, become a far greater enigma than he was even in the first game, and I wonder if this is a key to learning more about who and what he really is and what he wants.
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