Last year's Alan Wake II came out in a year that was huge for video games, but I think it's the one that made the strongest impact on me, personally.
I think this is one of those games we're going to be talking about for a long time, and so if you're sick of my posts about it... uh, sorry?
I'm a recent inductee to the Cult of Remedy (thankfully I was not required to dump any bodies in a well/air shaft next to a movie theater - all that was required was playing a few video games) and so there are elements of their oeuvre that I have yet to experience (I'm given to understand there are remakes of the Max Payne games in the works, so I might hold off to experience these in a more updated incarnation).
I've spilled a lot of digital ink over Alan Wake II, but I think it's all justified because it's a game that really swings for the bleachers and knocks it out of the park.
But, if there's one confession that I have to make here, it's that in terms of genre, I kind of like Control better.
I think in the grand scheme of things, Alan Wake II is the greater achievement. In this day and age, I think that the argument that video games cannot be art has more or less died out - there might be some filmmakers who got established in the 1970s (and please don't take this as a dismissal - in a lot of cases these are still brilliant, talented artists) who will never be convinced, but I think as generations of people who grew up playing video games and seeing them not as some novelty to entertain children but a genuine medium in which to experiment and invent have become the creators and the voices in this world, we're seeing that potential unlock.
I mean, let's be clear: Super Mario Bros. is still a work of art. But just as the discipline of painting had to gradually invent vanishing points and shading techniques to bring about the stunning works of, say, Caravaggio, the medium of games has needed those in-retrospect-obvious innovations to progress (I could be wrong, but I think before Super Mario Bros., the idea of a game even being "beatable" was unheard of, with most video games based instead on the ever-ascending, looping difficulty of the arcade to try to squeeze quarters out of those playing them).
Games have matured, I'd argue, very quickly as a medium, in part getting a boost from other media. And Alan Wake II is something of a mixed-media experience. Games have, for a long time, had cutscenes, but AWII makes use of many forms of them - from fully animated to fully live action, to in-game-superimposed-live-action (pioneered in Control).
I also think that we can't ignore the fact that Alan Wake II took a very long time to come out. The first game released in 2010, and for thirteen years the makers of the game struggled and often had to start over with earlier drafts of the project.
In a brilliantly meta way, this is reflected in the story of the game, where protagonist Alan Wake has spent those same thirteen years trying to actually get the right draft of his story finished to allow him an escape from the horrors of the Dark Place.
Control came out in 2019, nine years after Alan Wake, and with the benefit of other medium experimentation that Remedy had done with 2016's Quantum Break. (I'd be interested to play said game, but I think it's a Microsoft exclusive and we've been a Playstation house the past two console generations).
Control was the first game to make a "Remedy Connected Universe" explicit - an endeavor that could be seen as dangerous given that 2019 was the year of Avengers: Endgame, and what seemed like the last hurrah of the massive success of Marvel's experimentation in connected properties.
Still, I'm more optimistic here, because I think that Remedy's embrace of this intertextual connection has not diminished their narrative and thematic ambitions.
Alan Wake II is a mature story, genuinely interested in exploring the human psyche and eschewing easy answers.
So, what about Control?
I think Control has always been a somewhat more straightforwardly heroic narrative - Jesse Faden, unlike Alan Wake, has a more sympathetic inner conflict. We witness her entrance into a world beyond the veil - beyond the "poster on the wall" hiding a tunnel - and her emergence into mastery of that world, with the status of guardian and hero.
Jesse is a younger protagonist than Alan (even if only by a couple years if we consider Alan's age in the first game) but more than that her conflict and journey is, I think, more that of a younger protagonist. Alan is forced to confront the darkness within him and atone for the way he has been, while Jesse must find a way to emerge from the shell of her childlike innocence.
In terms of gameplay, Alan Wake is one of desperate survival. Control is not trivially easy, but the rhythm of it encourages risk-taking - you expect to come out of a fight at full strength, thanks to how the system has no ammunition to track and how defeating the enemy directly allows you to heal.
Comparing the game to Alan Wake 1, Control looks immensely polished. But it's also an evolutionary step toward the kind of masterpiece that Alan Wake II is.
What, then, would it take for Control 2 to get to that point?
Alan Wake II made some significant changes to the game mechanics. The first game is horror-themed, but plays a little more like an action game - your flashlight battery recharges, and it's rare that you fully run out of ammo. The second game leans fully into survival horror - every excursion into dangerous regions (which is most of the game's world) is a calculated risk - can you make it to safety with more than you left?
In terms of gameplay, I think Control's combat already feels incredible, if perhaps in need of some tweaking (the Launch ability you get early on is wonderful but perhaps too powerful in comparison with everything else you have). There is also, I think, a bit of bloat when it comes to "loot," where the game creates all of these materials and mods that are a bit of a solution in search of a problem.
I think the rhythm of combat and traversal needs very little changing - playing as Jesse feels great. Even when I finished the game and both DLCs, I found myself sometimes just wandering around the Oldest House hoping to bump into Hiss so that I could just have some more exciting fights.
But I could imagine streamlining or just replacing the mod system. It's fun to progress in power, but I don't know that this is the genre for comparing 12% versus 13% boosts in damage to head shots when you're floating in the air.
One of the things that was teased in the original game but never really accomplished was Building Shifts. I don't know that I want to spend Control 2 still locked in the Oldest House, but given the amazing effects of both the Angel Lamp and the Writer's Room in Alan Wake II, I suspect the technology to create these jarring environmental shifts happen in the Oldest House exists now.
Narratively, I think we've got a lot of threads to pull on:
The first is that the FBC is in this strange state - given the nature of the "paranatural," something like the FBC does need to exist. But it's clear that under the leadership of Trench and Northmoor before him, the FBC did not have a great deal of concern over matters of ethics when containing its threats. We get a sense that under Jesse's leadership the FBC is going to begin acting a bit more humanely, but we haven't really seen A: that in action and B: what repercussions that will have.
Jesse is made Director much like Arthur is made King (indeed, it's possible that the Service Weapons he picks up is literally just Exaclibur in another form). Might we then see what it is like to wear that heavy crown?
Naturally, the Blessed Organization seems like a possible antagonist down the road - there seems to be evidence that they might actually be backed by the Board, and as the Foundation DLC showed us, the Board is a pretty petulant, untrustworthy entity/group of entities. But would it be too much for us to oppose them directly?
Then, of course, there's the question of Dylan. Dylan Faden is the only person to be "cleansed" of the Hiss resonance and not die, but we don't know the degree to which that cleansing actually worked. He's comatose.
The Ordinary AWE might simply serve as backstory for Jesse and Dylan - it might, in fact, be best to simply leave it as that to establish that yes, these things happen all the time, and these two kids just happened to be the only survivors of that particular one in 2002.
I guess it's a question of how much here will be deeply significant versus merely background.
I think the danger of going to broad and general, perhaps in the interest of setting up other Remedy stuff, is the trap that the MCU fell into in the post-Endgame world (and every other would-be connected universe fell into almost immediately). Control 2 has to feel significant and real on its own terms.
Thankfully, Alan Wake II accomplished that even while drawing big bold lines of connection to Control and likely setting stuff up further down the pipeline. I have confidence in Sam Lake and the folks at Remedy to tell a story that works on its own even with these connections.
I hope we'll see further experimentation with live-action, but with an in-universe justification. We presumably won't have Dr. Darling presentations to watch anymore (or if they do, they'll be way weirder) but I think the use of live action does lend events a kind of special significance if used well.
They key here, I think, is ambition with restraint. Ambition to try for the big, bold, bright idea but restraint to ensure you're not doing it just to be cool and weird. I'll concede that another player might have argued that ambition outweighed restraint in some elements of Alan Wake II, like making an entire short film in live action, all in Finnish, that players might accidentally walk away from without viewing. But personally, I think the impact of Yöton Yö is huge, and even if I can't tell you exactly what it means, it felt vital to the game.
Is it asking too much that Remedy blows me away again with Control 2? Maybe. But I guess high expectations are the price you pay when you make such a staggering work of art as Alan Wake II.
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