With my intention to be as much of a completionist as I can, with boltcutters in hand I am collecting all of the various odds and ends.
I just got the penultimate Nursery Rhyme and received a package from the FBC with a new doll - the Father doll (which... looks a little familiar) - and a suggestion that a new site has opened up at Cauldron Lake.
One of the issues I'm running into, though, is that I'm completely out of healing items, so I'm finding it generally wise to turn off my flashlight and give any Taken I come across a wide berth (it turns out there is a reason to turn off the flashlight - the Taken are less likely to see you if you do).
I realize I'm actually not right up to the point of no return, as I think the first confrontation with Mr. Scratch happens before that point, and of course with most of Alan's story left to play through I'll be swapping over to him for a good long while.
Alan, of course, has fewer obvious collectables - basically just his many Words of Power, and thankfully I think I've met Tim Breaker in each of the levels, so I believe I already have them all marked on the map.
One thing that has been helpful here is that if you find all of the Setter for Mayor posters, you'll get a sign announcing that he's meeting people at Suomi Hall in Watery, and if you meet the very good boy of a mayor, you'll get a charm that will show any collectables near you on the map.
I think I have only two lunchboxes left to find - somewhere in the Bunker Woods west of Bright Falls, I believe, and the only Cult Stash I have "yet to find" is the one that's automatically open on NG+ because it contains the crossbow - I think we'll need a patch or something to let it count for the case board.
I've been thinking about which half of the game I think is "better."
Naturally, Alan's "Noir York City" is the more mind-bending part of the game. It's interesting that Alan doesn't really have any boss fights in the same way that Saga does - with her three Overlap Guardians and her two fights with Mr. Scratch. Alan's Plot Board is simpler in some ways than Saga's Case Board, but it's also a little trickier.
The Restless Shadows as enemies are interesting - Alan is constantly surrounded by potential threats, but only one in ten winds up being an actual enemy. It definitely creates an uneasy sense, where you're either paranoid and potentially wasting batteries on harmless shadows, or you grow to underestimate something and wind up getting a big chunk of health knocked out when that shadow turns out to be a real foe.
I have noticed on this playthrough, though, that if a Shadow is holding a non-shadowy weapon, it's a sure sign it's the real deal.
Noir York City, as I'm calling it, doesn't have any of the fun cutesiness of Bright Falls - even if Bright Falls and Watery are under siege from a terrifying supernatural menace, a big part of the fun of the setting is all the idiosyncrasies of the small-town culture there. There's a real charm to these places even if it sometimes gets creepy. Alan's nightmare reality is basically free of anything remotely charming - it's the grittiest, grimiest version of New York you could imagine.
Also, one of the reasons a big city like New York tends not to feel so creepy is that there are, you know, people there. When I was in college in NYC, sure, there was a kind of anonymity to the city (also, given that I started college three years after 9/11, there was a dark shadow hanging over the whole place,) but it was rare I didn't feel safe there. Walking around at night, there were always tons of other people out on the streets and bright lights shining everywhere. Cities, after all, were built by humans to be a safe place compared to the wild woods filled with hungry wolves (holy crap are the wolves in this game scary).
So, Alan's nightmare NYC is all the fears and imagined terrors of the city with none of the counterbalancing reality.
I actually think it's kind of a brilliant juxtaposition. I remember a Cracked After Hours episode that was talking about how American horror stories almost all take place in rural areas, compared with British stories that take place in cities.
Now, the argument (which is made by a fictionalized version of the person in the episode) is a little more cut-and-dry than reality. Candyman, for example, is a definitely urban horror story that was very popular (though also written with a different perspective than the typical white suburban one that most horror stories of its era had).
But we kind of get both styles of alienation - for Saga, being from a more cosmopolitan home (I believe she's meant to be from D.C.) going into this remote, rural place (I suspect Sam Lake opted to avoid going too deep into the racial politics aspect of the urban/rural divide, given that he's not an American, but it's got to add a whole other layer of unease to be a woman of color out in a rural area - though there's some interesting questions of interpretation about the origins of Tor and Odin's conflict with Saga's father, and whether race played a role, much as I'd hope that the old rockers wouldn't care about that). Alan, on the other hand, is basically in the NYC from his Noir-inspired detective novels, and Noir is all about that isolating urban alienation. Particularly in the 70s and 80s, which is when Alan would have been growing up, there was a strong cultural association of cities with crime and danger - one point of inspiration for The Dark Place's NYC is the movie Taxi Driver, which has a protagonist who cannot see anything in the city but the sleaze and corruption.
If the rural horror is being too far away from anyone else to get any help, urban horror is the idea that your problems are minor and personal enough that the vast majority of the city's populace doesn't care to help you solve them. In that sense, the fact that the Dark Place is, in fact, densely populated, just with shadows that are indifferent to you, kind of nails that feeling.
Anyway, with only one full day before I fly off for the holidays, I'm skeptical I'll be able to make much progress - I might be able to clean up Saga's side of things, but then I think I'll maybe be able to scratch the surface of Alan's next chapters (if memory serves as well, The Oceanview Hotel was the longest "level" of his side of the game.)
So, in that case, it's unlikely I'll be finding out how the Final Draft ends (though I'm stumbled across some spoilers).
I don't know if we have a timetable for the Night Springs and Lake House DLCs, but I'm not holding my breath. I am, of course, looking forward to other DLCs from other games, like Shadow of the Erdtree (I believe the recently-released Valhalla expansion for God of War Ragnarok is free, but while that game was pretty good, it's not as high on my priority list of exciting stuff.)
I'm sure it won't be for a few years, but damn am I excited for Control 2. I'm hoping we don't need to wait thirteen years for it - I'd like to play it before I'm 50! Alan Wake II has so much polish on it compared to the first game, and even if I'm freaking out a little about healing items, I think I'm getting the hang of the combat (getting those lunchboxes has helped). But with Control, I came back to the game after beating basically everything just to run around and fight random Hiss spawns for fun - the combat is that satisfying.
If we could have a Control 2 with the production value of Alan Wake II (not to say the original was lacking) I'd be freaking overjoyed.
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