So, as it turns out, you have to do Alan's first (full) chapter, "Casey," before you can switch between characters at will in Alan Wake II.
I think I'm going to try to do all of Saga's stuff before going into the rest of Alan's stuff this playthrough, if only to mix things up compared to my first playthrough - and I'll be honest, part of this is delayed gratification to save "We Sing" for as late as possible. (I think my first go around I did We Sing before Local Girl, but then did Local Girl before Room 665.)
I don't think I had realized you can find a map of all the Cult of the Tree stashes in the hideout toward the end of Local Girl, but it marks all of them on your map, making the collection a bit easier. There are lists of where the Nursery Rhymes are, but it's less explicit, and the lunchboxes are... I don't know if there's any clue to them other than "keep an eye out for colorful yarn thingies."
Another thing that I think has really helped me is that I actually got the Dark Place map as soon as I got out of the studio - which in the first playthrough I didn't until pretty late in the game. I don't think I ever got the map for the health center at Valhalla Nursing Home, so I'll try to get that too.
Anyway, I think I have everything out of Watery I can get so far - I don't have the Bolt Cutters yet, so there are a couple things beyond my reach. More frustratingly, the stash near the little hut across the river from Coffee World was already open, despite being marked on my map. I don't know if this is a very weird Final Draft thing or if it's just bugged - I've been opening other stashes I had previously found in the original playthrough, so there's nothing about this one that suggests it should be different.
With the Screwdriver, I can open a few of those park service supply boxes at Cauldron Lake, but I don't know if there are any other "major collectables" that I can come across there.
On Alan, I think I got absolutely everything out of Caldera Street Station, including all the Words of Power.
As it turns out, I suspect that these upgrades might be making the game more manageably easy, which is nice. I took a few shots form Thornton and Mulligan, but knowing how to beat them of course makes the fight relatively simple.
Once again, though, I have a couple clues in "The Story" that say "for later," which in my first playthrough I never wound up being able to put on the case board. I'm hoping that by being really insanely thorough I'll get every case buttoned up.
I'll be curious to see how Night Springs and The Lake House fit into the game - if they'll be standalone chapters like the ones from the first Alan Wake, or if you'll access them in-game. I honestly think the former might be better, given that I think the last "autosave" spot you get is well past a point of no return.
This game is, of course, more of an open world like they conceived for the original Alan Wake, but it's really primarily a narrative-focused game, and so the openness is really more to reward backtracking.
I'm going to be looking up lists of all the manuscript pages and other collectables to make sure I don't miss anything.
So far, the Final Draft has not seemed all too terribly different. I imagine the "real world" stuff would go roughly the same, though. We're not looking at a whole other game here, after all. I'll be keeping an eye out for a different ending, of course.
That being said: Alan Wake II is already a complete game, and much as I'd love to have more, more, and more of it, I'm going to get ready for the DLCs and the other Remedy projects in the works - even if they're going to be probably years off (will I play Control 2 while I'm still in my 30s? We've got about two and a half years!)
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