Alan Wake II's first DLC released a couple days ago. The entire thing is pretty quick - easily completed in a couple of hours. I'll confess that I was a little sad to find I'd consumed the entire thing after months of anticipation in such a short amount of time (I paced myself, taking a break between each episode and even waiting until the next day to do the third).
I think there's a broader question, as well, when analyzing any form of art, but particularly such a labor-intensive medium as video games, about intentionality.
Having finished the DLC, I went back to a new character I had made in Elden Ring, going through the game's first major dungeon, Stormveil Castle, and found myself wondering about the placement of two specific items related to one of the many factions of that game found in a particular room (specifically the Godskin's prayer book and sacred seal).
These games, and Remedy's, suggest to the player that every detail could be relevant. While Remedy's games have a more explicit story (again, my best friend and I had a discussion about how you could argue FromSoft's games are more about "lore" than "story") they share a taste for hiding details in the environment and level design to flesh out the world and reward the player for their inquisitiveness. Both studios inspire numerous "lore analysis" YouTube channels to comb through the details of their games.
However, we also have to acknowledge that sometimes, the reason for a particular item's placement or the presence of a particular enemy in a particular area is less about subtle lore implications, and instead because they need to put it somewhere, or they need some challenge or reward, and they use the assets they've developed.
Night Springs re-uses a lot of assets. Number One Fan uses the Bright Falls map, aesthetically changing a few things but keeping the overall environment and pathways unchanged, except where new barriers appear to block off some of the extraneous places. Likewise, North Star re-uses the Watery map, and specifically pushes you to only explore Coffee World. In both cases, the "set dressing" is altered to make it look and feel different, but it's still the same place overall. Time Breaker does seem to have some original environments - the strange "under the lake" place with all the discarded polyhedrons, for example, but most are at the very least re-using the "tile-sets" of existing places.
Still, all of these reasonable time-saving techniques aside, I think the next big question is whether these vignettes are weighted with the gravity of important lore, or if they're just a fun little side thing.
Notably, none of them are really survival horror. In all three episodes of Night Springs, ammo, batteries, and healing items are plentiful. I think I was walking around with like 400 shotgun shells on the first one. The gameplay balance is different - rather than trying to be very precise with my limited shots, I found myself unloading as fast as I could. I wonder if the enemies were even balanced differently than those in the main game, because it seemed they were going down faster to my liberal, rapid fire.
But let's talk story and lore.
The first thing to discuss is how these episodes end: all three have you ultimately find Alan, even when, in the first two, you're not looking for him.
Rose is, of course, looking for him, but Jesse is looking for her brother Dylan, and Shawn is looking for Mr. Door. Each of these paths lead back to Alan, who is credited as the writer of each of these episodes. If we're to assume that these are "canonical" in the sense that each was a story written by Alan in his attempts to escape the Dark Place, it seems to me that they might have served somewhat as "auditions" for heroes.
Alan has been trying, after all, to find someone who can be his savior - a role that Saga winds up playing in the main game. Now, the fact that Shawn finds him when looking for the Master of Many Worlds then seems to place his story after the events of the main game (and the Final Draft New Game Plus) but temporal causality is totally nonlinear in this game anyway, so it probably works out ok anyway.
On a meta level, two of the three protagonists are kinda-sorta the player characters/heroes of other Remedy games. Jesse's episode, of course, parallels the story of Control (she goes into an unfamiliar place looking for her brother only to find that a weird alien presence has taken over most of the people there - and hey, there are big inverted black triangles too!) while Shawn's parallels (I assume) elements of Quantum Break, where Shawn Ashmore played protagonist Jack Joyce.
This makes Rose the odd woman out, as her only prior appearance was in the first Alan Wake, where she was more of a victim/tool of the Dark Presence than anything. Interesting that she's the only one actually looking for Alan.
(As a note, using the leather-jacketed Mr. Scratch as "hot bad boy biker who's really just misunderstood and also a werewolf" is a very, very funny choice. I know that the werewolf part was probably to let them just re-use the wolf assets, but it ties in perfectly to the Twilight-fan-fiction vibes of Rose's writing.)
Rose is, of course, a character who doesn't come off super-well in these games. In the first, she's largely an innocent victim of the Dark Presence, her enthusiastic fandom for Alan is a little over-the-top but it seems more the result of Alan being a super-star author (not a profession that often elicits such a response). But Rose's kind of manic characterization in the second game starts to step over the line in some ways. I guess a fantasy is just a fantasy, but there's a strong parasocial thing going on with her. And ultimately, Cynthia Weaver pays the price for this, as it's Rose who steals the Angel Lamp from her, dooming Cynthia to becoming one of the "super-taken."
Number One Fan then gives us a glimpse of the way that Rose imagines her relationship with Alan - one in which her obsession and infatuation is vindicated, where he truly needs her just as she thinks she needs him. And the almost story-book nature of her adventure then suggests that Rose is suffering from some kind of arrested development. After all, Rose is almost certainly in her 30s by now, a fully-grown woman. But she has clung to this infatuation, and while it's not that she hasn't done anything else with her life (she is working at the nursing home in addition to the diner) but it all feels a little sad, if not enough to make us kind of dislike her.
The thing is:
This is all how Alan has written things.
In fairness, the first time we glimpse Rose in the first game does seem to be outside the bounds of the stories Alan has written. I wonder if we could interpret this as Alan seeing a perhaps overenthusiastic fan when he first enters the Oh Deer Diner and then using her, making her more of a stock character as he builds out the plot of Departure, and later Return.
The ethical reality of what Alan does in these games is truly vexing - it doesn't feel fair or right that he should play god in this way (and Rose gets off relatively easy - much better than Cynthia) but it also doesn't seem like Alan has a choice in the matter.
I do think it's kind of interesting that Mr. Scratch in this episode, while antagonistic and ultimately a boss for us to fight, is someone that Rose ultimately forgives and accepts, sparing him rather than killing him. If Scratch is the Jungian Shadow of Alan Wake, then it might be that Rose actually has a much healthier attitude - the Shadow can't be destroyed, only repressed or accepted, and while Alan has been fighting for thirteen years to rid himself of Mr. Scratch, Rose's solution leaves him intact and potentially changes the relationship Alan might have with his shadow.
Ok, let's talk North Star and Coffee World.
As stated before, there are parallels here between this and the plot of Control, which both see Jesse Faden entering a mysterious location to find her brother and then finding some alien influence transforming people into monsters.
However, I think the other notable element here is that the one friendly NPC in this episode is essentially Tim Breaker. Tim, notably, seems to think about the paranormal/supernatural in a more "aliens and UFOs" subgenre context. And it just so happens that the evil coffee taking people over in this chapter is seemingly from outer space.
The coffee function very similarly to the Hiss in Control - and in both cases, Jesse is exposed to the alien power, only protected from being converted herself by Polaris. (Is it intentional that both Polaris and Hedron are pronounced strangely? I've always pronounced those as "pol-AIR-us" and "HEE-dron," but in Control they're "pol-AHR-us" and "HEAD-ron.")
However, the symbolism isn't quite the same - across Coffee World in this episode, there are posters depicting a coffee machine and a coffee pot that look very much like the inverted pyramid of the Board and possibly the upright pyramid underneath (which is a symbol that does seem to represent the Hiss' attempt to infect the Board, which happens at the end of Control). Still, the evil coffee is Black Triangle Coffee, which would seem to imply that if there really is a parallel, the infectious alien presence is actually related to the Board instead.
(As a side-note, in my own fiction, there are monsters that mortals cannot see with their physical eyes, and they need to drink a strange liquid euphemistically called "coffee" to train their brains to actually register when they are looking at these things, so I appreciate the use of alien coffee.)
Tim (or pseudo-Tim) in this episode is a friendly face, but does also seem to kind of preach inaction. Ultimately, when we finally get into the warehouse, we find that he's been converted, and the room where we find him almost feels a little reminiscent of Trench's (or, I should say, Jesse's) office. Tim, as a police officer, is kind of a representative of authority, and Trench of course (spoilers for Control) turns out to have been patient zero for the Hiss invasion.
But it's also kind of interesting that both Jesse and Tim show up (or at least their doppelgangers do) in one another's episodes.
Furthermore, establishing the pattern, when Jesse finally does get down into the depths of the warehouse, she finds not her brother, but Alan, floating in the same big containment chamber that she encounters Dylan within in Control. While Rose was looking for Alan, Jesse wasn't, but the path she took led her to him.
Naturally, North Star doesn't fit within the canon of Jesse's story, and technically we're never told that she's truly Jesse - instead she could be any variant of the Remedy characters played by Courtney Hope. Still, the story so closely parallels that of Jesse entering the Oldest House that it's hard not to think of her this way.
Time Breaker, once again, feels like the densest of the three episodes. I'll probably be revisiting it in a later post, but I wanted to start with a few quick observations.
I never played Quantum Break, so there are likely a lot of references to that game that will sail over my head (I assume that REC is the equivalent of Monarch or whatever the big organization in that game is). I am aware that Quantum Break does end or at least hit a dramatic moment in which Jack (Shawn Ashmore's character, and also the main player character) promises to come back and save Beth Wilder (Courtney Hope's character) after she's frozen in time (and killed in another timeline).
Not knowing that much more about Quantum Break, though, I don't know if Time Breaker's premise - that Mr. Door is hunting down the variant Shawn Ashmore characters across multiple parallel universes - actually ties in anyway to that game (I know there are "Shifters," but what they are exactly I'm not totally clear on - are they just that game's equivalent of the Taken or the Hiss?)
But I think the real question is whether the proposal of Mr. Door's origin is actually real: Variant Jesse describes him as someone who encountered some crazy alien power that destroyed all other universes' versions of him and allowed him to... take their places? Weirdly, this reminds me of a Jet Li movie from 2001 called The One, in which Jet Li is being hunted by his own alternate universe self, the latter of whom intends to become some kind of godlike entity by wiping out his variants.
As a side note, I'll just mention that I'm not super crazy about the push for this style of multiverse narrative - the "road not taken" version. Admittedly, Remedy is going farther afield, where the lives of these different variants is far more different than what we're seeing in, say, the MCU. (While I only know the comics version from wikis like TVTropes, the comic version of Kang the Conqueror seems way more interesting to me than all the parallel variants version. As I understand it, the different versions of Kang in the comics aren't from alternate universes, but instead different periods in the life of the same individual who happens to be both a time traveler and extremely long-lived, so that we're actually just seeing different periods of a single lived life that can cross over with one another thanks to time travel.) I don't know that I necessarily want it to be Remedy canon that Jesse Faden and Beth Wilder are truly the same person from different universes. On the other hand, Remedy is clearly now happy smashing the fourth wall into microscopic shards, so perhaps this was inevitable.
Ironically, if Quantum Break were to be allowed into the Remedy canon (through some negotiation to get the rights back from Microsoft) it would actually raise an interesting contradiction, as Mr. Hatch and Mr. Door are almost certainly variants of one another - Mr. Hatch explicitly said he wouldn't take on a name as grandiose as Door (obviously they're also played by different actors, but the real-life loss of Lance Reddick necessitated that change. And hey, David Harewood and Melanie Liburd are both Brits doing American accents, both of which slip occasionally. Like father like daughter!)
One thing to note here is that in the first two episodes, neither Rose nor Jesse are explicitly named. While the player characters in both episodes is very clearly modeled on these known characters, the way their stories go down are obviously outside of the "canon" story of Alan Wake II (and Control). And likewise, it's explicitly not Tim Breaker that we play as in Time Breaker.
Mr. Door is obviously playing an antagonistic role toward Shawn in the third episode, but there are two wrinkles to that:
The first is that Mr. Door is the host of this version of Night Springs, and thus has a certain omniscience and perhaps omnipotence within it that suggests that he can't truly wish to kill the player character in this episode. Indeed, I got the impression in the base game that Mr. Door's abduction of Tim in the morgue and Tim's stranding in the Dark Place might not be out of malice. I almost got the sense that Mr. Door intends to take Tim on as a protege (something I believe is parallel to Mr. Hatch's intentions toward Jack Joyce in Quantum Break).
The other wrinkle is, of course, that the Master of Many Worlds that Shawn finally finds isn't Mr. Door, but is Alan Wake instead. Naturally, when we hear the term used earlier in the episode, and given how episodes 1 and 2 ended, we know to expect Alan there.
And isn't it curious, then, that when Alan and Door have their final confrontation in "Masks" in the main game, Door angrily demands that Alan play his "part," while mentioned off-hand "our Night Springs" - a reference that feels unexplained in the main game (and honestly still a little unclear now - hence this paragraph of speculation)? How much of everything we see in these games is "real" and how much of it is the story-writing-to-fix-reality. Is Alan truly the Master of Many Worlds by the end of the Final Draft? Or is he just playing a part?
There's some speculation, for example, that the origin story proposed at the end of the game for the Dark Presence - that it erupts out of Alan's head, born in the moment of his self destruction and thus beginning the loop cycle once again - is a new story imposed on an existing thing. After all, this is nothing like what the Dark Presence is in the first game. But if we think of the Dark Presence playing a part, forced to do so by the story, then that could also imply that Alan's assumption of the role of Master of Many Worlds may or may not be the truth of his situation, but it is the truth of the story into which he has written himself. (The idea of playing roles is introduced early, with Alan "taking on the role of the detective" when Alex Casey gets killed inside the Dark Place the first time - that we witness at least.)
Indeed, this idea of roles make the presence of literal actor Shawn Ashmore, but also character-who-is-an-actor Shawn Ashmore kind of a clever archetype to add into the story.
Is this all just some fun that re-uses a bunch of assets from the main game? Maybe. Or it could be a big key to understanding the plot of the game and the larger Remedy universe.
We'll have several months at least before The Lake House comes out. I expect to have a lot more mysteries to explore when we get that.
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