While Alan Wake II has sat lodged in my consciousness since its release over a month ago, I haven't gone back to replay the game. There are a few factors at play there - for one thing, WoW released its latest raid, and I've been spending a lot of my gaming hours getting my many alts (see the name of the blog) through the released LFR wings.
But also because while brilliant, Alan Wake II felt like an experience akin to watching a movie or a fantastic season of television - you want some time to digest it. That and, well, to be totally honest, the survival-horror action of the game wasn't quite as "fun" as, say, the telekinetic action of Control, a game that I'd have happily blasted through a New Game + mode and wanted to replay immediately, but have felt hesitant to do so because of its bizarre lack of multiple save files (you can replay chapters, but my understanding is that if you return to "endgame," meaning the parts of the game after having beaten the main story, you'll revert to the progress on side-missions and exploration that you were at when you started that chapter - meaning I'd have to beat the various bonus bosses and such all over again - some day when the urge to re-experience it is greater than the fear of losing progress, I'll start it over from the beginning).
However, in addition to later DLC that I don't think has an official release date, Alan Wake II is getting a New Game Plus mode called "The Final Draft," which purports to have significant alterations to the story.
Spoilers Ahead for both Alan Wake II and Stephen King's Dark Tower series:
Alan Wake II is, after all, in part a time loop - well, not a loop, but a spiral. Alan has been writing and rewriting Initiation, and even as the individual chapters bear similarities - always starting with his interview on In Between with Mr. Door and leading to his piecing together some sort of murder mystery while putting the keys Saga needs in place in the real world - it seems as if the entire experience is something of a loop.
But it's not a loop, it's a spiral.
I saw a review that noted the influence of Stephen King upon the game - King has been an explicitly cited reference in both Alan Wake and Control - specifically calling out King's exploration of metafiction in the 2000s (the reviewer pointed this out with some disdain, preferring King's earlier work).
As I've noted many times on this blog and elsewhere, King's Dark Tower series was a massive influence on me as a writer. I got into the Dark Tower series my senior year of high school, not long after King had his near-deadly encounter, hit by a truck while out walking. King hurried - some might say rushed - to finish his grand opus that he had begun as a teenager, culminating in the rapid release of The Dark Tower's final three books (of seven) in the space of a year or so. The last one came out when I was a freshman in college.
The ending of the final book was written as a special epilogue called The Coda - The Dark Tower tells the tale of Roland Deschain, a grizzled Gunslinger from a civilization that had risen out of the ruins of a world devastated by some apocalyptic catastrophe, only for his own civilization to fall to anarchy and chaos. He is on an Arthurian quest to seek the Dark Tower - the lynchpin that holds all of reality together, and while he seeks to save it from the mad monsters trying to destroy it, he also wants to be the one to enter the tower and climb it.
In theory, the book proper ends with him walking through the doors of the tower, leaving us outside. But the Coda, which is prefaced with a warning from King himself that we might not like the ending, eventually shows us what he finds inside: each floor has scenes from his life: regrets and traumas and sins. When he finally reaches the uppermost door, what he sees is actually the desert that the very first book started in. And for a brief moment, he understands that he's been through this journey many times before - countless times, always entering the tower, always dumped out into the desert.
We're given a glimpse, however, of something different - that when he arrives this time, he has the Horn of Eld, which in the iteration of this story we've seen he had lost at the bloodbath that was the Battle of Jericho Hill, from which (if memory serves) Roland was the only survivor. There's a possible implication that if Roland were to blow the horn at the Dark Tower, he might escape this doom, but what would happen is left to our imagination.
In Alan Wake II, Alan's various "deaths" in the Dark Place seem to just be part of a narrative - death does not seem permanent here, as we see Alex Casey (whether it's the fictional one from his stories or the real FBI Agent - and perhaps that's a meaningless distinction here) killed multiple times. Indeed, when we die in-game, we see Alan flash back to the Writer's Room, take a deep breath, and start writing again, as if our "death" in the game was just the Dark Presence exerting control and trying to change the arc of his narrative.
The final words of the game, as a mid-credits scene, following Alice's reveal that she did not commit suicide, but instead entered the Dark Place to try to help save Alan and defeat the Dark Presence (hooray for agency!) Alan jolts awake after having been shot in the head with the Bullet of Light and proclaims "It's not a loop, it's a spiral!"
Obviously, this mirrors the ending of the original game with its line "It's not a lake, it's an ocean."
But I think that the words that finish this game seem a little more straightforward - we've seen it in action. For instance, every time Saga goes after one of the "boss taken" - Nightingale, the Deputies, and Cynthia Weaver - she has to go through seemingly the same area multiple times, but after enough "loops," she reaches her target.
A spiral, of course, is a shape that seems to keep going back in on itself, but progress is made - either inward or outward.
Now, how do we think this story will end?
On one hand, I'd sort of expect Remedy would want to keep Alan Wake as an ongoing franchise. On the other hand, their establishment of the Remedy Connected Universe means that they can continue the stories of games and series that have concluded while still allowing them to reach their own ends.
The three books involved in Alan Wake's "trilogy" are Departure, Initiation, and Return, which are three broader acts of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. The first game is Departure, but the second game seems to have both Initiation (in Alan's chapters" and Return (in Saga's).
So, how "Final" will this Final Draft be?
I don't see a lot of discourse about this online, but I'm convinced that the "organization" that helped Alice understand the Dark Place and Cauldron Lake and restore her memories was not, in fact, the FBC, but was instead the paracriminal "Blessed" Organization that Barry Wheeler got involved with in Hollywood. "Blessed" could be a more central thing in Control II or perhaps as the focus (likely antagonists) of some other Remedy game yet to be announced, but I'll be curious to see if that plays a part here.
Obviously, while we can expect some new stuff in the game, it'll still ultimately be a New Game Plus, so I'm expecting the overall structure of it to look pretty familiar. For certain some things will stick out to me, knowing what I know now. I think I'll probably also play this as a bit more of a completionist (and maybe tick the difficulty back up to medium - I'm just going to try to stock up on ammo before Nightingale because that was very tough).
I did see, just now, on YouTube, some datamined footage of one plane-traveling scientist with a voice very much like Alan's that has apparently been in game since launch but could be involved in this new version. I think any time I see Ahti or Casper Darling is going to give me a big old grin, so I'm looking forward to it.
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