The Oceanview

 In Control, I believe our first encounter with the Oceanview Motel and Casino is when we need to cross the gap in the Executive Sector to reach The Hotline. The Oceanview is one of the FBC's most consistent known Places of Power, and has been used by agents even just to rest for a while in a comfortable bed.

Practically speaking, the Motel is a transitory place - which makes sense, as it takes the form of a classic American roadside motel.

When I was a kid, we did a number of cross-country road trips from Massachusetts to California, and we stayed in many of these generic motels en route. These are places you visit and stay for the night but forget about shortly after you leave them. The Oceanview seems to be a kind of archetype of those sorts of motels.

The Motel is reached by pulling three times on a light switch cord, found initially while the FBC was investigating an AWE in Butte, Montana in 1992. But the cord started appearing in the Oldest House. Pulling the cord three times causes you to appear at one end of the motel, where a bunch of doors that have strange symbols on them flank you. There's a small lobby, and then another hall with conventionally numbered doors.

In the game, the numbered doors are typically part of a puzzle - you ding the bell at the counter and one of those doors will open - each door opening and closing in sequence. Solving the puzzle grants you the key that opens the door with the inverted black pyramid on it, and another cord will take you back to the Oldest House - either to the same spot but with a change (such as a bridge appearing) or to the place you were trying to go.

This is a strange and eldritch place. The FBC doesn't know where the Oceanview Motel is located, if it even has a location, though one time we visit it, we can hear voices from outside knocking at the door and deciding it must be closed (we cannot see the people out the windows). Another time, blood seeps from under one of the doors on the numbered side. When Jesse is nearly taken over by the Hiss following the destruction of Hedron, it is into the Oceanview Motel that she escapes the Hiss-induced nightmare and where she is able to find/reignite Polaris within her. And finally, we visit it one time during the AWE expansion, and find a darkened Oceanview, seemingly affected by the Dark Presence.

Now, flash forward four years to Alan Wake II.

Alan is trapped in a nightmarish, grimey version of New York City. But in his second main chapter, Room 665, he is directed to explore the Oceanview Hotel.

Superficially, this Oceanview is utterly different. Where the Motel and Casino was the kind of place you'd find out on a remote highway in the Western United States, the Oceanview Hotel is a water-damaged ruin of a fancy old New York hotel. The place holds a kind of faded glory - once a luxury hotel, the wallpaper is now peeling off the walls, and the signs of a terrible murder mark the place.

But there are ample hints that these two places are connected, and indeed might actually be the same place in a metaphysical sense.

The first is that the address to the hotel is 3 Cord St. The second, and perhaps more compelling hint is that the very same symbols appear on the doors of the hotel - including the inverted Black Pyramid and the Spiral (which we do actually see elsewhere in Alan Wake II). And, of course, there's the name.

I think another element of note is the presence of Tom Zane - as we talked about in a recent post, Tom Zane should perhaps be thought of as separate from Thomas Zane, the poet and "Light Presence" from the first game. Tom Zane's nature is a huge enigma, but in Alan Wake II, he sort of inhabits the Oceanview Hotel.

Or does he?

Alan gets phone calls from Tom Zane, but never do we see Tom in the world of the game - instead, he appears in live-action filmed segments (performed by Ilkka Villi, who also provides the motion capture and live-action visual performance for Alan, though Tom is Villi in both appearance and voice). He "inhabits" Room 665 (the neighbor of the beast, and running gag throughout Remedy games - honestly, it shows up like 19 does in Stephen King's Dark Tower series) but it's a little weird: When Alan makes it into the Oceanview and goes to meet with Tom, Room 665 is only an empty square room, but within that room is a film projector. Turning it on starts a scene that we can enter similarly to how we enter the televisions at Mr. Door's talk show. But in that film, Alan goes into a different Room 665 and meets his Finnish doppelganger, who welcomes him to "The House of Zane."

And that Room 665 is more of a luxury hotel suite, with a little couch area with a TV and a big bed.

One of the key features of The House of Zane is that there's a big painting of a black-and-white spiral above the TV.

Back in Control's AWE expansion, when Jesse gets a glimpse through the spiral door at the Oceanview Motel and Casino, she spies on Alan speaking with Tom (though in this case both are rendered in video game graphics, and look identical to one another, including facial hair and clothing) in a lodge room with that same painting.

The fact that Jesse is peeking in while Alan and Tom speak does allow an interpretation that Alan's first encounter with Tom in Room 665 is, in fact, another "draft" of the conversation from AWE - with Jesse's face appearing on the television as an interpretation of her peeking in through the door.

But we don't know.

Still, it does lend some credibility to the notion that the Oceanview Motel and Casino and the Oceanview Hotel are just two forms of the same thing - that perhaps it looks different depending on who is looking at it and in what context.

Now, let's consider the symbols.

The Spiral certainly seems associated with the Dark Place, and specifically with Alan's Writer's Room there. The inverted pyramid seems very likely to refer to the pyramid from which the Board contacts the Director of the FBC. Supposedly, the other symbols are affiliated with other Remedy projects, like Vanguard.

It would stand to reason, then, that the Oceanview connects with all of these different planes of reality, and might be a transitory space that one passes through to get from one to another.

But that leaves some questions:

First, the Oceanview is one of the three major locations for Alan's part of the game. It's a murder site, where the catastrophic performance of The Cult takes place. Now, already, the reality of these murders is a big question: Did the real Alex Casey investigate real Cult of the Word cases in New York, or are these just symbolic versions of the cases surrounding the "Elite Taken" in the Bright Falls area?

In other words, on a certain level, the Oceanview Hotel is just another "level" like Caldera Street Station and the Poet's Theatre.

The other oddity is that there's a third Oceanview.

Near Bright Falls, during World War II, a bunker was built to defend against a potential attack on the west coast by the Japanese. This, of course, never got used, and was abandoned after the war. Later, Thomas Zane (not Tom? I think?) had a house built over it, and after his disappearance, the house eventually was purchased to become the Valhalla Nursing Home. But teenagers would sneak down into the bunker to drink and get high and have sex. And the teens called it, as an inside joke, the Oceanview Hotel.

Now, our in-game experience of this bunker is weird.

We're told the bunker is beneath Valhalla, but we only descend into it via an Overlap, going down into the little pond between the main house and the medical center - so we never actually find a hatch or door or stairway into it. Instead, we only see it as a looping Overlap through which Saga is chasing the now-Taken Cynthia Weaver and trying to rescue her grandfather.

The connection with the Oceanview Hotel in the Dark Place is mostly apparent - we find Cynthia's body in room 108 of the hotel, evidently as the target of "The Devil" in the performance of The Cult, and we are able to send the record of "Anger's Remorse" to the real world for Saga to use and open the Overlap.

But this Oceanview, even if it's a surreal, looping Overlap, doesn't share the distinguishing features of the Control version or the Dark Place version. To my knowledge, the symbol doors are not there and there's no front desk.

The one possible exception is if we include the upper floor of the house, where there is a single door with the Spiral shape - which is key to the very end of the game (and seemingly guarded by Ahti, whose room at the home is next to this door).

Ultimately, I suspect that the true nature of the Oceanview is going to remain a mystery. I'm inclined to think that the "real world" version - the Bunker - is, while not quite "coincidental" in its naming, likely not possessed of the true "Place of Power" nature as the versions found via the Light Cord and within the Dark Place.