This year marks the 20th anniversary of the final book (well, the ending - there was an "interquel" written later) of Stephen King's epic Dark Tower series, which he began writing as a teenager, and which serves as something of a nexus for all the dark fantasy worldbuilding that he does in his horror ouvre.
The Dark Tower was a massive influence on me - I hadn't read any Stephen King before, after a haircut at my barber's the next town over, my mom took me into a bookstore around the corner (my mom was a bibilophile and more or less always offered to buy me any book that seemed interesting that I came across in a store - the house I grew up in has an absurd library collection, which I dread dealing with when my dad gets old enough that he needs to move out). I saw these surreal covers (the paperback Plume editions - this was likely early 2004 or late 2003 - Wolves of the Calla had come out, I think, but was not published in the same run).
Anyway, if you haven't read it, the story is an epic journey following Roland Deschain, the last surviving "Gunslinger," who was raised in a now-fallen society called Gilead (not to be confused with the one from Handmaid's Tale - this one predated that, but I think it's a Biblical name) that was essentially like King Arthur's Britain mixed with westerns of the 1960s. Gunslingers are the elite, chivalric order that defend the kingdom, and in order to become one, you need to basically be a stone-cold badass. While they look like they come out of a Leone film, they have creeds and oaths that are sworn like an idealized medieval knight or samurai. Roland is on a quest - he's chasing someone called simply the Man in Black, a practitioner of dark magic, who he believes holds the key to reaching The Dark Tower - a metaphysical but also literal tower in the center of all universes, upon which the whole of reality rests, and whose downfall would mean utter chaos and madness.
Other than the western setting, this is pretty classic fantasy stuff. But things get a little weirder:
First off, Roland meets an 11-year-old boy named Jake Chambers who is from 1970s New York City, and remembers getting murdered by a serial killer before finding himself out in the deserts of Roland's strange world. There are mutants, and advanced technology left behind by the Old Ones - a term used to describe a technologically advanced civilization that fell long before Roland's time.
Second, there are echoes of our world in Roland's, like someone playing Hey, Jude on a piano in the saloon of the town that Roland eradicates early on in the story (he literally does this in self-defense - every single person in town is coming to kill him).
The story grows stranger over time - in the second book, Roland encounters two other New Yorkers, but from different decades - one a woman from the 1960s who is both a double amputee and has dissociative identity disorder, and the other being a man from the 1980s who is a deeply troubled heroin addict who is indebted to the mob.
But this strange, time-shifted found family winds up training under Roland to become Gunslingers themselves, and join Roland on his epic quest.
Across King's works, there are references to Roland's home world or universe called "All-World" (most of what we see is the part called Mid-World) and characters from across King's stories show up in the series - most notably Father Callahan from Salem's Lot, who has a bigger role than most.
Oh, is this an Alan Wake post? Let's get to the meat of it.
First off, less the main subject of this post, I think it would be easy to imagine that Remedy's ambition to create their "Remedy Connected Universe" is playing on Marvel's MCU. I think it would be silly to imagine that it's purely a coincidence that they're getting into this at the time that so many people are trying to replicate Marvel's success (and it might be a little worrying as Marvel's nearly the only company to ever do it successfully and even they seem to be struggling now).
However, we can't ignore that Stephen King's clearly a big influence on Remedy's works - Alan Wake and Control both begin with quotes or references to the writer, and King's decidedly modern take on the supernatural (even if "modern" for some of his stuff is like 50 years ago now) informs much of the tone and aesthetic of Remedy's games.
And King was all about writing in a big shared universe. If you read 11/22/63, for example, the main character briefly stops in Derry, Maine in the 1950s and meets some of the kids from IT (and, King showing his evolution with a changing culture, has his protagonist uncomfortably aware at how it's probably not great that one of those kids likes to talk in a weird minstrel voice).
With a few exceptions, you really don't need to read everything else to understand his latest novel - they mostly stand on their own (even Insomnia, one of the more Dark Tower-adjacent ones, only mentions the story in passing). I imagine this would be a wise model for Remedy to imitate, maintaining the connections but letting you just say "what's this? Oh, a reference to Control? Cool. Guess I should play that at some point. Moving on."
But, with a lot of text buttressing this, we need to talk about the endings of both Alan Wake II and The Dark Tower (specifically The Dark Tower volume VII, The Dark Tower).
And that's going to be a spoiler cut.
In Alan Wake II, specifically the first playthrough, the ending is ambiguous. Saga shoots Alan in the head with the bullet of light, and we get a mad last burst of fear and paranoia over whether he's actually succeeded, praying that if he is to die, it will just be death and not some eternal torment in the Dark Place. With Alan dead at his desk, Saga called Logan, but the phone continues to ring, unanswered, when the credits begin to roll.
And... perhaps borrowing from the MCU, there's a mid-credits scene. Just a brief burst: Alan sits up, alive, eyes wide, the bullet hole still glowing, and says "It's not a loop, it's a spiral."
The game has been one of seemingly endless loops, requiring repetition to advance. We see this in many places - including the various Overlaps on Saga's side (and also at the cinema on Alan's side,) but also in the overall structure in which Alan's three major "levels" are all structured the same way, forcing him to go through another cycle for each draft of Initiation. (Note here that I heard an interpretation on MinnMax that the "Return" Saga plays through in this game could be argued as just a book-within-a-book in Initiation, which could leave the door open for an Alan Wake III if they want it).
But this moment tells us that yes, Alan's been through all of this before, in that weird way that the Dark Place warps time, but, optimistically, that while each iteration might seem like the same thing, there are enough changes that progress is made. You might see the same landscape features each time you loop around, but you're getting closer to the center, or maybe closer to the exit. You need to trust the process, essentially.
In The Dark Tower, Roland has been following his quest to find the Dark Tower for a long time. The world he is in already has a strange relationship with time - it's said "The World has Moved On," and the people he meets speak of Gilead as if it fell long ago in ages past. Roland's age is never made clear - he could be 40, or he could be 40,000.
After Jake, Eddie, and even their little semi-verbal (like, parrot-level) billy-bumbler, Oy, (imagine a kind of lithe raccoon) have died, and Susannah has left Roland to find peace in another version of New York (where she seems to be reunited with alternate-universe incarnations of the others) Roland travels with a psychic named Patrick Danville (introduced in Insomnia as a kid, though now an adult) to the Dark Tower and faces down the Crimson King, a monstrous demonic figure who turns out to be a pathetic shadow of what he once was, little more than a demented old man now, who is physically erased via Danville's power.
Roland walks up to the tower, climbs the stairs to its doorway, and enters it.
And here, King does something strange: he warns the reader against reading on. He breaks the fourth wall, tells the reader that they might be deeply disappointed with what he finds in the Dark Tower, and leaves the whole conclusion to the saga that took him like 30 years to write in a "Coda."
Indeed, as an 18-year-old reader, I had sort of always assumed the story would end with him entering the tower and then closing on that moment. It seemed like the most satisfying way to do it - the Tower was this incomprehensible, vast, god-like entity, and so it seemed right to leave it to our imaginations.
But I read on, because of course I did.
Roland sees, climbing the tower, that the rooms each have scenes from his own past - pivotal moments that marked him, most of which were deeply painful, either from the pain inflicted upon him or the pain he inflicted upon others. And finally, at the highest chamber, he finds the Unfound Door. Opening it, he sees the very desert in which the Gunslinger begins. He realizes, briefly, in that moment, that he's done this before - he's done it countless times, forgetting each time, and that this moment resets him to continue his endless quest.
He is deposited in the desert, and the last words of the book are the same as the first of the series: The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.
And boy was I pissed off. What kind of resolution was that? I had liked the ambiguity of the "first" ending, but this was such a strange idea.
I... I still don't know if it's a good ending. I haven't done a full re-read of the series ever (though I did re-read the first few books at some point).
But there is one point, before Roland forgets and begins his cycle anew: He is now carrying the Horn of Gilead.
Over the course of the series, Roland's greatest trauma (though not without competition - perhaps the fact that we spend a good 500 pages of the middle book exploring another trauma means it's at a higher place of prominence) is the Battle of Jericho Hill, at which his last and oldest friend, Cuthbert, dies. In fact, everyone but Roland dies - it's the bloodiest battle of the war that ends the Kingdom of Gilead, and Roland is the only person who walks away from it. Cuthbert had been entrusted with carrying the Horn of Gilead, and his death also coincided with the horn's destruction (surely a reference to Boromir's death at the fight at the Anduin river at the end of Fellowship of the Ring).
The crux of his quest was to come to the Dark Tower and blow the horn, but he was never able to do so - his quest was left incomplete, and perhaps this is why he has been trapped in the loop.
The battle of Jericho Hill happens long before the events of the first Dark Tower book, so it's not like he's got a chance to change things - it's simply that this new cycle has changed.
Now, I'll take a moment aside here to mention that the Idris Elba-starring Dark Tower movie from 2017 did seem to show Roland with the horn, and part of the marketing for the movie was that this depicted that final cycle. I never saw the movie because it looked like it was slapped together in some executive board room - a 90 minute movie adapting a seven-book series? I can only hope it was one of those "we need to make this movie to retain the rights so we can actually do it for real in the future" things.
The point is, King's final book in the series (not the last he wrote, but the final one in the main series) hints at another cycle in which things might end differently, but we don't get to see it.
Alan Wake, though, does show us this.
New Game Plus doesn't totally have an equivalent in other media forms. I suppose you could argue that a remake or remaster of a movie, perhaps a director's cut, is vaguely similar? But really, the purpose of such a mode is typically to let you experience the game again. Sometimes they make it harder, in part to balance your being able to carry over player power, but it's also just a way to see the game again with the level of mastery you've developed after beating it once.
However, this idea of playing through the same story - the same experience - many times and having a different experience each time because of the way you've changed as a player exists in any kind of video game (I'll point out that Control's frustrating "one save file only" approach has seen me never replaying what is honestly one of my favorite games of all time. I guess that's what Let's Play videos are for). I can play through Super Mario World now and it'll feel totally different from all the other times I've played through it.
Alan Wake II's Final Draft free DLC is a New Game Plus mode, and released only about a month and a half after the game first came out. Unlike its main story DLCs (one of which, I believe Night Springs, comes out in a couple months maybe?) this one was free and likely only delayed to deal with launch bugs and to avoid rushing people in their first playthrough.
To be honest, the changes are not huge - there are new manuscript pages to get and a few new videos. But I think, substantially, there are just a couple things of particular note:
The first is the awareness of the loop, with the first one we find calling out Saga's feeling of deja vu. She's "immune to the story" but not, it would seem, the manipulations of time in the many drafts of said story.
The second is the series of Dark Poems, which seem likely to tie into Tom Zane. I don't really have an interpretation to share here, but I do think it's notable that, despite Zane claiming that his "Tom the Poet" character was just a role he played, the guys really freaking likes to talk in poems.
However, the real change is the ending - the original FMC cinematic plays, cutting to black with the phone still ringing, but then the scene cuts back in and Logan responds - she's ok, though she's had a hell of a bad nightmare.
Furthermore, Alan, despite being dead at the end of the story, is no longer bound by it (my interpretation) and thus awakens alive, the bullet of light now a beacon out of his third eye. He has finished his hero's trilogy and emerged as the Master of Two Worlds - or even a Master of all.
Now, there's a big question to be asked about Alan Wake - is the series over?
I don't think that would be the end of the world. Consider, for example, that if you take the Iron Man Trilogy, that series ended with Iron Man 3 in 2013. The story of Tony Stark (the MCU version of him, at least) continued until the end of Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
I could easily see Alan Wake continuing to be a presence (a Light Presence?) in the RCU moving forward, but this game potentially closes off the Alan Wake series, as it were. Effectively, Alan's part of this game is the second of the trilogy, and Saga's is the final part. (I've begun to interpret Alan's experiences in the game as a flashback, even though time wonkery means there are overlaps that span stretches of time - like, there might be simultaneity, but causality seems to be flowing more from Alan to Saga than vice versa.)
I think the reason I want this to be the last game in the Alan Wake series is that this kind of looping narrative wants to reach its conclusion - it wants to reach that last iteration.
Back when I read the Dark Tower's conclusion, there was this question that I think I hadn't really known to ask: Why are we seeing this version of the loop?
If the loop were truly unending and unchanging, then sure - you couldn't even tell one instance from another, so it doesn't matter "which one" we see. But if we're given the promise that one of these loops will end and fulfill the cycle's purpose, I found myself wondering why we weren't seeing that journey of Roland Deschain - the only value seeming to be the gut-punch. (A much darker interpretation that I came up with was that his blowing the horn would ultimately lead to the Tower's fall - and so we had to hope that Roland would always be on his journey, never completing it. Is a story's end the end of its universe?)
If this is truly Alan's ascension - his completion of the spiral and emergence - then it gives the game's ending a greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. Indeed, I don't even think this requires him to leave the Dark Place (it's unclear whether he can or can't at the end, though I would hope Saga and Casey get to) but if he's attained mastery, he might actually now be safe there. He might be able to live outside of the terror and confusion that trapped him and explore this ocean of possibility.
And in this sense, I think Alan Wake II had an advantage over Stephen King. There's no NG+ for the Dark Tower series. We're left to wonder what Roland's final journey to the Tower would be - or even if the next one were really it. With Alan, though, we can experience the reveal that it's all a big loop (well, it's all a big spiral) and then see the culmination of that spiral with its conclusion.
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