Alan Wake II came out in October of last year, so it's now been out a decent amount of time. As much as I've loved the game, I didn't spend a lot of time re-playing it, mainly just revisiting it when the Final Draft (New Game Plus) option came out, in order to see the changes and new ending (and to be more of a completionist when it came to collectables - something hampered by a couple bugs, like being unable to pick up one of Saga's inventory expansions and the fact that the Cult Stash with the Crossbow was already opened but didn't count toward getting all of them).
Like the original game and like Control, Alan Wake II is slated to get two different DLCs, being Night Springs and The Lake House. The former is said to consist of multiple "episodes" of the in-universe Twilight Zone (but from the 90s or early 00s) anthology show, with various Bright Falls characters taking the player character role (I'm given to understand it won't be Alan or Saga). The Lake House is built around the eponymous facility, which appears to be the lodge once used by Emile Hartman for his mental health center/unethical laboratory, but which has, in the last decade and change, been taken over by the FBC to be used as a facility to study the portal (Threshold) into the Dark Place in Cauldron Lake (and... honestly probably also conduct experiments of dubious ethical standards).
The timetable for these DLCs has been somewhat unclear, but it looks like Remedy is ramping up to at least give us a better look at Night Springs, which I believe will be the first of the two.
The first interesting note might not actually have anything to do with the DLC and could be a corporate branding thing but Remedy's YouTube presence has been renamed Poison Pill Entertainment. It's still "@RemedyGames" but there's a new logo and everything.
It does seem likely that this is part of the marketing for the DLC, and if so, I think in introduces a motif that we might want to keep an eye on, which is opposites. A Poison Pill, for example, is something you'd really want a Remedy to neutralize (though I suppose Antidote is the more obvious antonym for poison - but we're starting from the other side here). Beyond this, I don't know how much we should be reading in.
Next, something very odd: Ducks.
The Poison Pill/Remedy YouTube channel posted a short titled "Did you notice the rubber ducks in Alan Wake 2?" It shows several rubber ducks in various Alan Wake II environments, along with some suspenseful music and the creepy laughter recording you need for the ritual to open the Huotari Well.
Now, I don't actually remember seeing a lot of rubber ducks in AW2. To me, the thing that first came to mind was the rubber duck altered item from Control, which you need to chase down and return to Containment for one of the side quests. The duck, if memory serves, was seemingly created by an FBC agent accidentally, but I don't know if there's any real clear connection here to the goings-on in Bright Falls.
Finally, the most recent short at the time of this post is a shot of a coffee mug on what appears to be a diner table. Naturally, when it comes to diners in Alan Wake games, the Oh Deer Diner is the iconic one, and is a location we visit early on in both games. But here, the mug says "Nite's Diner" and "'The best' in... Night Springs."
Bright Falls and Night Springs have always had this kind of implied polar relationship - Bright vs. Night, or light and darkness, and Falls vs Springs - where water descends vs. where it ascends. The color palette here isn't strictly opposite, but my impression of the Oh Deer is kind of a classic 50s/60s/70s diner color palette of earthy browns and yellows, whereas Nite's Diner has pink and turquoise.
If I wanted to really put myself out there, the Oh Deer's "diner color palette" makes me think of diners from the northern part of the country, like New England, New York, or obviously the Pacific Northwest, whereas the pink and turquoise feels much more like an American Southwest or Southern California. Given that Night Springs was theoretically the setting for Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which was in a southwestern desert town, this might suggest that we're going to be in a significantly different environment in at least some of the DLC.
There is music that plays over this shot, which is from the Alan Wake II Chapter Songs album. The song is a bit of a throwback neo-disco pop song that feels like it shares some DNA with Michael Jackson's Thriller, with many references to horror movie scenarios. The lyrics of the chapter songs, of course, have tended to be very relevant to the events of the game, so if you'll permit a bit of an obsessive deep dive, let's look at those lyrics, verse-by-verse.
Secret agents with the down-down rays they shoot
Psychic powers, hypno eyes and magic fruit
Trees, machines, weird mysteries
We got freaky fantasies.
So, this all feels relatively broadly related to the kind of paranormal stories that you tend to find set in places like Roswell, New Mexico. The FBC, of course, functions as the Remedyverse's version of the "shady government agents," so I would not be shocked if this referred to them. The "space invader looking cute in a human suit" could easily be some brand new element, but you could also see this somewhat as a reference to the Dark Presence, and how it possessed people like Barbara Jagger, Alan Wake, and Alex Casey, wearing them like a suit. The reference to "Trees" is likely tied to the Cult of the Tree, but I'll confess that I don't really know where the hypno eyes or magic fruit are coming from, nor precisely what machines are being referred to. This could all be referring to elements not yet introduced, of course, or could simply be references to the genre in general (though I don't know if "magic fruit" is such a common trope).
In Night Springs, I don the black hole sun
'Cause in Night Springs we're just looking for the thrill
All your nightmares come true
Crashing through the warning signs, your car breaks down just outside
in Night Springs
In this first chorus, I don't know that we get a ton to work with, but we can consider a few references. First, "black hole sun" naturally makes me think of the Soundgarden song of the same name. Though, other than being a fan of 90s Alternative Rock and the sort of X-Files-style paranormal mystery genre, I'm not sure what to make of it. The Black Hole Sun, of course, does conjure up this paradoxical inversion: where stars like our sun are mainly known for outputting light, a black hole is an object so dense and massive that light itself cannot escape. The Dark Place, of course, feels a bit like this. The one thing I don't totally get is "donning" the black hole sun, though this might be the idea of "wearing" the Dark Presence in the way that the various Scratch incarnations (Jagger, Wake, and Casey) do. One final note on this is the car breaking down, which, notably, is the very first thing that happens in the first Alan Wake - a nightmare in which Alan's car breaks down and he's pursued by one of his own poorly-written (or at least minor and not fleshed-out) characters.
Live inside a sleepless dream, better let her sleep in Night Springs
If I died in your arms, I don't mind it
I'd hunt you when you like it
Phew, ok, this one's a little tougher. The first game did have the song "Children of the Elder God" playing at the Anderson ranch, so the "Elder God" has precedent as being a term for the Dark Presence (we think). Buck could refer to a deer, a symbol that is associated with Saga. Interestingly, "Buk" is used in Dark, Twisted, and Cruel in the opening line, referring to Charles Bukowski, an infamously bitter and pessimistic writer, but I don't know if we can draw a connection here, other than just possibly linking this to Nightingale's habit of referring to Alan by the names of different famous writers (suggesting that aside from being crazy, Nightingale was pretty well-read, or at least knowledgeable about literature). The "Endless versions of this town" line could simply refer to the way that Night Springs is an anthology show, so as a setting, it is constantly changing to fit the needs to the narrative. Not entirely unlike the Dark Place, which we know can take on many forms - Alan's dark New York is just one manifestation. Now, who is living in a sleepless dream? The simplest answer is probably Alice, who, by the end of Alan Wake II, seems to be in the Dark Place again (I'm still unsure of whether Alan is back there too or if the Writer's Room they go into is physically back in the real world, at the top of Valhalla Nursing Home). But "sleepless dream" sure sounds like how the Dark Place operates, and this makes me wonder if Night Springs is like, some part of the Dark Place (to borrow D&D terms, if the Dark Place is the Shadowfell, maybe Night Springs is a Domain of Dread like Barovia). And those last two lines... at the end of the Final Draft, Alan and Alice are still separated, but seem to also be connected in some way that is at least partially satisfying their desire to be reunited. That being said, I've got a pet theory that Alice's role moving forward will not necessarily be perfectly benign, as I'm convinced that it was the Blessed Organization, not the FBC, that helped her regain her blocked memories, and that whatever she is doing in the Dark Place is furthering their goals (whether she's a full convert to their cause or just a useful asset).
In Night Springs, a solar system in your soup
'Cause in Night Springs, we're just looking for the thrill
All your nightmares come true
Lost in mist for days and days, now you see the sunny seas
Night Springs
Ok, endless time loop feels sort of obvious - the Dark Place seems to operate in loops (or, actually, spirals). The "solar system in your soup" is either purely weird surreal imagery that fits the scansion of the song, or it's some huge, important detail that I just don't understand or don't have the context to fit in. What feels like the most important thing here is the "lost in mists" and "sunny seas" line. After all, the Dark Place is not a lake, but an ocean, and we got an as-yet-not-in-game Old Gods of Asgard song called The Sea of Night. Alan's experience in the Dark Place sees him lost in mists - sometimes literally (and once again reinforcing that Shadowfell/Ravenloft reference to D&D - a game that I know Sam Lake to be a fan of,) but the "sunny seas" might bear out the theory that the Dark Place is not an inherently malevolent thing - that perhaps the endgame for Alan is not to return to some semblance of normalcy with his wife, but that they might become navigators of this vast ocean of possibility, only now free from the terror that has defined their earlier experiences with it.
This final chorus repeats unchanged (fitting given its reference to time loops). Especially with the instrumental bridge, it's clear that the song is echoing some of the vibes of Thriller.
So, what does this all add up to?
What we've heard about the DLC is that it will essentially be several stand-alone chapters with other characters to play as. It seems likely this will all play out within the Dark Place, so it'll be interesting to see who gets swept in. I'd guess, though, that environmentally we'll be far from Alan's "Noir York City," and instead be in something resembling more of a Southwestern desert town - though I also think the town will look different in subtle and large ways with each story.
I'm also expecting Night Springs to feel like a kind of weird doppelganger of Bright Falls - perhaps there will be a downtown area similar to Bright Falls, with Nite's Diner serving the role of the Oh Deer. (I'm curious is Sam Lake or other Remedy folks are familiar with Welcome to Night Vale, which has its Moonlite All-Nite Diner).
I suspect we'll get a theme of opposite counterparts, and thus might even run into alternate versions of the characters we've met in Bright Falls. The Dark Place doesn't actually have much of a cast - for most of it, we basically only ever see Alan, Ahti, Mr. Door, the Old Gods (including Baldur,) Tim Breaker, and only much later Alice and Saga (all the "fade-out" enemies, it's been discovered, are actually Alan himself with blur and distortion effects hiding this from the player, either on a different loop or some self-destructive aspect of his personality).
Anyway, I've been eager to see what comes next in this story, so I hope we won't have much longer to wait for this DLC.
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