It's probably not really fair to jump immediately in attention to an independent studio's next game (I think next?) little more than a week after its most recent release. Alan Wake II took 13 years to come out, and Remedy's previous title, Control, came out four years ago.
But if you'll forgive me, while I adore Alan Wake, and loved the sequel for its story and world and audacity (I'll confess that I'm not sure survival horror is my favorite style of gameplay,) Control seemed to hit me almost dead-center in my tastes for the New Weird, its fun action and exploration, and just its overall... thing.
(Just give us some kind of New Game Plus or multiple save files, for the love of Ahti.)
Control and Alan Wake are, of course, the cornerstones of the new Remedy Connected Universe, linking the games of Remedy Entertainment in terms of its universe and lore, with crossovers and enigmatic connections (and less enigmatic ones as well - I mean, the FBC plays a pretty unambiguous role in Alan Wake II).
But I think another connection between them is one of how the original game had to compromise on some of its conceptual ideas.
While in development, Alan Wake was conceived to be relatively open-world in structure. The idea was that the player would be able to seek out places in and around Bright Falls as they uncovered the game's mysteries. But they were unable to accomplish this, instead structuring the game as a series of fairly linear levels through which one navigated.
But with Alan Wake II, this structure was restored. Yes, each chapter of the game tends to have you stick to one of a number of areas - Saga starts with the Cauldron Lake shoreside, then has her second big chapter in Watery, and her last before the finale in the Valhalla Nursing Home just outside of Bright Falls, but in all of these, you can explore elsewhere, and return to old locations to find new clues and puzzles and stashes. Similarly, Alan's Dark New York functions as a hub, and his chapters take you to the subway, the hotel, and then the movie theater, but it's all ultimately available for you to explore.
In other words, the original open-world ambitions of Alan Wake are realized in the sequel.
Control, as much as I love it, presents us with a fascinating concept: that the Oldest House in which it takes place undergoes shifts, changing its room's layouts. We see the aftermath of some of these shifts, with halls and rooms arranged in nonsensical manners, clearly the result of some shift that turned a former office basically uninhabitable. But the only time we really experience one of these shifts is at the very beginning of the game, when an elevator appears that wasn't there previously. We get something kind of like this when we secure certain Control Points, but this is usually just a bunch of weird concrete blocks receding into the wall and restoring the area to its brutalist grandeur.
What seems implied instead by the concept is something more uncanny - that you might find yourself coming back into a room you had previously visited and finding either a totally different room or one that is eerily similar, but maybe the doors or stairs have changed.
Now, I'm a little conflicted in what I want here:
The Oldest House was a cool setting for a game. But the FBC feels like it's too big to simply be stuck in lockdown with the Hiss for a whole other game. I'm hoping that whatever we deal with in Control 2 has nothing to do with the Hiss (other than maybe having to deal with Dylan's recovery or perhaps even refusal to recover from the Hiss). And, frankly, I'd like to see Jesse get to leave that building.
Make no mistake, the Oldest House is designed to be as big as the authors of the game want it to be, and they could forever iterate on its various departments and laboratories.
But I wouldn't want Control as a franchise to never leave the one building. For one thing, Alan Wake II makes it ambiguous if the Oldest House is still, four years later, under lockdown. Do people outside even realize Jesse's the new director? (Given how quickly everyone recognizes her as such in the first game, perhaps they do.)
I'd suspect that instead we might have the game take place at the site of some AWE - maybe even showing us what is left of Ordinary, Maine.
But does that mean that we have to give up on the shifting space concept?
In a way, we know that Remedy is capable of something like that already now. Alan's seamless transitions with the Angel Lamp, as well as his re-writes, shows how they're capable of having an environment utterly transform instantaneously (less flashy, but just as impressive, is how instantaneous the transition into his Writer's Room or Saga's Mind Place is, which is just as responsive as hitting a pause button).
There's no reason to say that we couldn't see weird environmental warping in Control 2. Indeed, I wouldn't be opposed to having a part of the game take place in the Oldest House, as long as we get a chance to see what it's like when Jesse gets to leave the place.
I'm sure we've got another several years to wait before we even get a teaser trailer for Control 2, but it's encouraging to know that they're already working on it.
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