Echoes of the Past and Alan Wake

 I followed through on my threat to do both Local Girl and Old Gods one after the other, meaning I've left a lot of Alan's half of the story to go after I've finished up Saga's.

One thing that I had forgotten is that you don't actually get the Bolt Cutters until you're fully in the Overlap after going to the Valhalla Nursing Home, so you really can't access all of the game's areas until you're really near Saga's endgame.

I don't know how many of the manuscript pages I've found are truly new or just that I missed them the first time - or even that I just forgot them.

But we do see a little more about the sequence of events:

Rose Marigold is a well-intentioned menace.

Alan's superfan, we discover, is the reason why he was able to get the Angel Lamp, which is crucial to his traversal of The Dark Place. But the source of it is that she stole it from Cynthia Weaver before putting it in a shoebox and sending it down into the Dark Place via the pond outside the nursing home. One is left to wonder if Cynthia would have been safe from the Dark Presence had it not been for this act.

Rose and Cynthia have parallel stories, of course - both are obsessed with a character portrayed by Ilkka Villi, with some mix of romantic infatuation and worship. The bitterness that Cynthia harbors toward Barbara Jagger - not as the Dark-Presence-infested monster but simply as the woman Tom actually loves - feels like the seed of her downfall. Rose has been touched and controlled by the Dark Presence before, but has never truly become Taken. Is it her unrealistic fantasy about Alan that keeps this from happening? Would breaking her from her parasocial obsession doom her?

Rose is... not very likable in this game. She seems to have no remote sense of tact when it comes to bringing up the notion that Logan drowned as a child.

I am fully convinced at this point that Mr. Door is Saga's father. We get a little more background through manuscripts, including a story of what is almost certainly Door plucking out Odin's eye the moment they banish him to the Dark Place (though it seems less of a banishment and more part of a deal - Mr. Door wants to stand between every reality, so he wants to occupy the Dark Place as well).

This confrontation happens in 1988, and we see a photo of a baby Saga in her mother's arms from 1989, meaning that this likely happened before Saga was born (meaning Saga is two or three years younger than I am! I feel so old!)

One of the constant moral questions here is to what extent Alan is culpable for all the violence going down in Bright Falls (and environs.) Mulligan and Thornton are dipshits, and I guess over the past decade or so I've become much more skeptical of the idea that cops are good guys by default (arguably the opposite). But their great sin - the killing of one of the Coffee World employees after mistaking her for a Taken - was that bound to happen because they were a pair of trigger-happy idiots, or was it because Alan pushed the pieces into place?

Saving the world is obviously the most important thing, but there's also a possibility that, no matter how hellish, Alan might be more morally correct to simply consign himself to the Dark Place and not allow the Dark Presence a chance to escape.

That being said: It's not like Alan hasn't tried that. But with his memory being messed with by the nightmare dimension, perhaps it's inevitable that something will happen with him. Maybe the best he can hope for is to try his best to cause as little harm in his attempts to escape - which I think is basically what we see of him.

I haven't finished the Final Draft - in fact, with only three full days before I fly home for the holidays, I might not do so until January (I still have Room 665 and Zane's Film, along with the endgame chapters). I'll be very curious to see how things ultimately wind up.

So far, Saga's end of the story feels nearly identical to the original version. I think there have been subtle changes - apparently some of the jump scares have been timed differently - but I'm starting to suspect that what's more different is the Dark Place content.