Ok, now this feels like the main event.
In Time Breaker, we play as... Shawn Ashmore, presumably. Like, it's not precisely the real-world version of him, as he's doing FMV and mocap for a game by "Poison Pill Entertainment" rather than Remedy, but at the start, we're being directed by Sam Lake - like, the actual Remedy creative director - in a game that mirrors in some ways the game Quantum Break.
Shawn goes to look over the screenplay for the next scene they're going to shoot only to witness some crazy thing in which an alternate version of him is killed, and a woman who looks a lot like Jesse Faden (and a lot like Beth Wilder, for that matter) shows up, only for Mr. Door to teleport him away to some other reality.
Essentially, many versions of Shawn Ashmore are being hunted down by Mr. Door. Some versions of Shawn are working for some kind of multiverse-straddling reality-maintaining organization, and Mr. Door has determined that Shawn (and his variants) are a threat to him.
Notably, Door is referred to as the Master of Many Worlds, and we're given a theoretical backstory, explained by one of the... let's say Courtney Hope variants explains that some time long, long ago, Door touched some profound power that allowed him to become the single version of himself, existing in all realities, and eradicating his alternate selves.
Structurally, the episode takes us to various levels in which we seek out these floating polyhedrons and draw power from them to use various Lumivista TVs to warp to the next area. We go from the studio to a trailer in the woods (that might re-use Cauldron Lake assets, though this episode looks like it might have some more unique environments) and then to a black-and-white version of the Oceanview Hotel (with some weird spatial warping,) and then going off the rails into a comic-book cutscene, followed by a maybe SNES-era video game, then a strange void-space (that looked like it was under a lake, notably) and then into an old-school text adventure that ends with ASCII art.
Shawn is chasing down the Master of Many Worlds, but also trying to reconnect with The Red-Headed Woman. But when he seemingly finds the Master of Many Worlds, it's not Mr. Door he finds, but instead, evidently, Alan Wake.
There is a lot to unpack here.
How much of this is revealing the actual backstory of Mr. Door? Are we to understand that the multiversal variants and how they work in this are actually how the Remedyverse works as well? To what extent is this a non-canonical side-story?
I think I'm going to let myself digest this episode before going in deep on any serious analysis. There is sort of an ongoing question with these Night Springs episodes: Alan Wake II's main game felt like it was built with real intentionality behind just about every detail (and I'll concede that I'm a sucker for Mystery Box narratives, even though I should probably know better by now,) while the first two episodes of Night Springs did feel a bit inconsequential in the long run.
And maybe I'm reading too much into this one. But it does feel like there's some important stuff to glean from all of this - the DLC is mentioned by name by Mr. Door in his final confrontation with Alan, even if he treats it like a cancelled project. Dr. Darling is also mentioned on a conspiracy whiteboard here.
I don't know that this episode was much longer than the first two, but it definitely felt like we got more, thanks in large part to the formal experimentation and the stronger implication that this really will matter in the overall narrative.
But, we'll have to wait for the Lakehouse DLC. While I don't know that I can predict that to be much more substantial in terms of content and hours, I do believe it's a single narrative, and will probably be more clearly and directly tied into the plot (with a lot of speculation that it will tease Control 2 in the same way that Control's AWE expansion teased Alan Wake II.)
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