Stepping into the Lake House

 I'm deliberately pacing myself because I don't know when I'll next be able to experience a new bit of Remedy atmosphere. 

Spoilers for The Lake House, and I guess Alan Wake 1, II, and Control while we're at it.

So, I'm only really two big monster encounters into Alan Wake II's second DLC, but I decided to take a breath, let Estevez chill in a safe room, and step away from the game for a moment.

Yes, you play as Kiran Estevez, the FBC agent who enters the picture around two thirds of the way into Saga's half of the main game. Apparently you can access this DLC within the main game by speaking to her in the Bright Falls police headquarters near the end of the game, but you can also just call it up from the title screen, which is what I did.

Using her keycard to gain access, you go through the gate that was closed to Saga in the Cauldron Lake area and make your way to the FBC facility known as The Lake House. Here, married and apparently resentful researchers, the Marmonts, were essentially continuing the work of Emile Hartman, trying to explore the use of art to shift reality with the power of the Cauldron Lake Threshold.

It's interesting - before even entering the seemingly abandoned facility, Estevez in her retrospective voiceover (presumably telling the story to Saga) notes that the Investigations department and the Research department never got along very well - makes sense, I suppose, as one department is basically trying to light fires the other is there to put out.

Our way is barred through much of the facility by - you guessed it - numbered keycards. Estevez, being a Bureau agent but not affiliated with the facility, only has basic access, allowing her in the front door and that's about it.

While the map I've gotten of the Lake House doesn't seem particularly sprawling, this is Alan Wake II, where they find a way to make relatively small locations have big impacts. Backtracking once new keycards are attained looks likely to be a big part of how the DLC will do a lot with a little.

It's quite different from Night Springs, which mostly re-used locations from the main game. This is a whole new area, and one that feels a bit like a miniature Oldest House, between the familiar Blackrock safe rooms and the office mundanity juxtaposed with the bizarre and horrific.

A few things confirmed: The Oldest House is still under lockdown following the Hiss invasion. This also means that everyone still thinks Zachariah Trench is the Bureau's director. There's even an old official portrait on the floor of an office - the ones that are replaced with Jesse's the moment she picks up the Service Weapon at the start of Control.

I was given to understand that the Lake House was none other than Hartman's old facility, but if it is, it's been seriously rebuilt, becoming a modernist structure rather than the rustic lodge that Hartman had. Whatever its architectural pedigree, though, what is going on inside is troubling:

The Marmonts are a married couple - Jules and Diana. Jules is apparently the more effective social navigator of the FBC's internal politics, while Diana at least sees herself as the more serious scientist. While these specialized skills had previously made them a killer team, something - possibly Alan's writing, as we find some manuscript pages here that have made them into characters of his story - has turned them against one another, instilling resentment.

More troubling is a project that involves making an algorithm of Wake's writing - the team has designed a number of automatic typewriters that are being fed an approximation of his writing style in the hopes that they can elicit his profound effect on reality within their own parameters.

It feels like a commentary on generative AI like Chat GPT - of course these FBC research dorks would think it was a great idea to automate creativity.

They're also working with a painter named Rudolf Lane (who was one of Hartman's "patients" at the Lodge) and now we have freaking paint monsters who appear entirely immune to bullets and flashlights.

While there are a lot of familiar elements from Control (including a three-phase looping area) this is still very much in the survival horror mode of the rest of Alan Wake II - if you were expecting the ample resources of Night Springs, think again (I'm out of healing items on my current run, and had a fight that took me maybe four attempts to make it through).

I appreciate that the expansion takes a good long time for the monsters to appear. You get to soak in the atmosphere and mood. Having been to only two floors below the entrance on the ground floor, I also get the sense that I'm not going to run out of expansion too soon, which is nice.