Something I Missed in Alan Wake II that Portends Control 2

 It's been almost a year since Alan Wake II's Lakehouse DLC, and nearly two years since the release of the game. While I haven't gone back and played through it again after finishing The Final Draft (new game plus,) it has sat with me all this time as one of my favorite narratives in a video game.

I have to confess: I'm a sucker for a good mystery box, even if they can often lead to disappointing endings. I watched Lost through college and a bit past it, and was very into the Battlestar Galactica remake at the same time, both of which had endings that seemed to kind of veer off in directions I wasn't terribly interested in.

In a bizarre way, though, the mystery boxes coming from Remedy's games seem to promise us that some things won't be answered (this is also true of FromSoft's souls-like games, though in that case, it's like "we ain't explaining anything here. Answers? You don't even know what questions to ask!") and this makes me kind of feel oddly inoculated against being disappointed in endings. I know that the "RCU" is only getting started, and for sure doesn't have an endgame in mind.

But there are hints of what is coming.

Now, while they're never made a significant part of the game's story, anyone who played Control and did any delving into its hidden lore will be well-aware of The Blessed Organization.

This para-criminal group (basically criminals who use altered items and objects of power) has mysterious goals, but we know that they're dangerous - they sent a deadly altered item to a radio station run (secretly) by the FBC, which killed an agent. And they seem to have distributed other altered items that have gotten innocent people hurt.

Two characters closely tied to Alan have connections to The Blessed Organization. Most directly is Barry Wheeler. Barry, Alan's agent and best friend (and lovable sidekick from the first game), traveled to Los Angeles after Alan's apparent death to act as executive producer on the adaptations of the Alex Casey novels, seeking to ensure A: that Alice Wake was taken care of financially and B: to ensure that the movies did justice to Alan's novels.

However, in going to Los Angeles, Barry met with Chester Bless, the likely leader and founder of the organization.

Barry seems to think of it as some kind of Hollywood social club, though he describes it as cult-like even as he downplays the creepiness of that possibility. (I assume that it probably takes a similar form to Scientology, an infamous cult that has a lot of members in the entertainment industry that did, notably, effect the largest ever infiltration of the FBI.)

Now, the connection that Alice might have to the Blessed Organization is a bit more tenuous. When we find the Wakes' apartment the last time in Alan's campaign, we find it totally packed up and emptied. The cardboard boxes into which things have been packed all say "Blessed" on them.

Now, of course, that might not actually relate to Alice directly because Barry might have been the one to see to the apartment being packed up after Alice's apparent (though thankfully not actual) suicide.

In one of her videos, Alice talks about meeting members of an organization that helped her regain her repressed memories from her time in the Dark Place (back in 2010). Every single YouTube content creator I've watched has assumed that this meant the FBC, and that she's describing the time she came into the Oldest House (she lived in New York, after all) and inadvertently sent The Thing That Had Been Hartman into his frenzy that destroyed the Investigations Sector.

I, however, have always held the idea that while Alice clearly did visit the FBC, she may not have gotten the answers that she wanted. And that Barry had arranged for her to meet with others studying the paranatural, i.e. the Blessed Organization, and maybe even Chester Bless himself. I think it's not an accident that Alice refers to the people who helped her as an "organization." Not, like a government agency or bureau. A word we see used repeatedly to describe this para-criminal group.

The Blessed Organization clearly has some understanding of these paranatural principles - they're not the well-meaning chucklefucks that the Cult of the Tree were. And I could imagine that they would find helping someone like Alice advantageous to their goals.

Alice, of course, has a dark edge to her - we've seen her, with the best intentions I'm sure, manipulate Alan multiple times: lying to him about why they were going to Bright Falls, and faking her death and allowing him to believe he had driven her to suicide. We know so little about the ultimate aims of the Blessed Organization.

But we might have a bit of a hint that I had totally missed:

Actually, before we get to that, let's talk about the Lake House DLC. While mostly a side-story that doesn't have enormous implications for Alan's story, largely self-contained, there is a really major hint for Control 2, which is when Estevez travels through the Oceanview Motel and Casino into the Oldest House, briefly, and meets with Dylan Faden.

Dylan refers to some kind of failure to prevent some catastrophe. While he seems free of the Hiss, or at least keeping it under control, there's something deeply wrong. And we get a series of visions that show something very crazy happening to New York City - some kind of containment breach, with things like The Mold and possibly the Hiss (though I really hope that after Firebreak we can move on to other threats - I don't want Control to be "the series where we fight the Hiss" given that it seems open to so many more possibilities) breaking out, but also the city folding in on itself.

It seems very likely from what tiny previews we've gotten that Control 2 will probably take us out into the city.

And that's where this email stands out:

Chester Bless told Barry that it was a good thing that he wasn't in New York anymore, because "something bad" would have happened to him if he had stayed.

Now, ok, sure: that's it. That's the thing that prompted this post.

But I think this really seems to confirm a lot about what is going on in Control 2. Something catastrophic is coming, and given his advanced knowledge about it, it seems highly possible that the Blessed Organization is behind it (I'll allow that it could be that they just know about it coming).

We don't know why Bless is gunning for the FBC. He does seem to have some connection to the Board - he pops up originally on the FBC's radar when he runs self-help talks that use a Surf Board altered item (or possibly an OOP) and cheekily refers to his methods giving people the "power of the board."

We know from Foundation that the Board sure seems shady - possibly more like a parasitic force upon the Oldest House and the FBC. The Former is in conflict with the Board, but even if our first interactions with it are hostile, it's also quite helpful to us later on. The Board does still have a lot of control (heh) over the FBC, but given that Jesse does not seem as pliant as Trench and Ashmore were, I wouldn't be shocked if Bless turned out to be some kind of contingency plan to destroy the FBC if it couldn't be controlled.

We do also know that the FBC has a deeply troubled and mixed history, often protecting people but also with several examples of abuse and overreach (you know, like most government agencies. Ever hear of J. Edgar Hoover?) I'm partially inclined to lend some benefit of the doubt to someone who would dedicate themselves to working against this agency (especially given what we saw in the Lakehouse - admittedly, the Marmonts were taking advantage of the Oldest House going silent for several years, but even someone as likable as Casper Darling did, you know, kidnap a child to put him through a dehumanizing training program). That said, I don't think we're going to get some reveal that the Blessed Organization are the good guys, actually, because we know that they've done things that have hurt civilians in very reckless ways.

And, you know, if they wind up causing some huge deadly catastrophe across the country's largest city, that's not, you know, the sort of thing that heroes do.

Anyway, this little snippet of an email doesn't really inspire a new theory, but it does feel like, especially with the context of Dylan's Lakehouse vision, near-confirmation that the Blessed Organization is going to play a big role in what happens in Control 2.

Sympathy for the Doppelgänger: Doubles and Darkness in Alan Wake and Silent HIll

 Having beaten Silent Hill 2, and having enjoyed the game (enjoy seems like an upbeat way to describe a game like that, but oh well,) I've found myself in my usual internet deep-dive, looking it up on TV Tropes and YouTube, scratching away at the game's mysteries and interpretation.

The remake came out actually the year after Alan Wake II, and both adopted similar gameplay developments, moving toward a 3rd-person-shooter style popularized in the Survival Horror genre by Resident Evil 4 (Alan Wake's first game is also, arguably, a 3rd person shooter, but in a manner I feel is looser and more action-oriented, which makes sense as that game was more of a horror-themed action game than survival horror).

While RE4 inspired a lot of AWII's gameplay, I think it's pretty clear that Silent Hill's more psychological/surreal horror were a bigger inspiration for Alan Wake's story (though I think in both cases, works like Twin Peaks played a big role, though SH2's debts to the movie Jacob's Ladder are certainly front-and-center.)

While conceptualizing a potential Ravenloft campaign (one that's honestly probably many years away given that I want to return to my homebrew setting after running a Ravnica-set campaign for over five years) I hit upon the idea of doppelgangers.

I think the doppelganger is one of the most potent tropes in horror, especially in psychological horror (a genre that, itself, melds well with both Gothic and Cosmic horror, as well as surreal horror).

Jung's idea of the Shadow lingers over much of the horror genre - even outside of psychological horror, the primal fear inspired by monsters harkens back to a pre-civilization version of the human mind, in which we're always threatened by animal predators. The very act of engaging with fear as an emotion, something that we try to avoid in most contexts, is, I think, something that Jung's theory of psychology would find healthy: a confrontation with parts of ourselves we usually keep hidden.

Indeed, the very idea of drama often has some related element to horror: think about how potent the classical tragedy was - we witness characters like Oedipus discover utterly shocking and revolting truths about himself. We, as a form of entertainment (and also worship of Dionysus, which was how Greek theater was treated back then,) imagine a story in which the protagonist is tormented and destroyed by terrors (in Oedipus' case, the terror of realizing what he had done in his ignorance). Even in heroic tales, our great heroes fight monsters - from Pericles to Superman, we yearn to see a confrontation with terror and death. Genre dictates mainly what the outcome is, though there's plenty of horror in which our heroes do succeed and survive, and one is left to ask what, on a fundamental level, is so different between a horror story with a happy ending and a rollicking adventure.

The answer, I think, is mainly tone.

But lest I go spiraling off in a discussion about drama itself, let me bring things back to the doppelganger.

Gothic horror is funny, because I think I'd argue that it's defined more by aesthetics than dramatic mechanics. Born out of the 19th Century Romantic movement, it's rare that we see examples that stray out of an 18th/19th century time period (perhaps sometimes in the very early 20th Century). Classic monsters like vampires, werewolves, and ghosts are the great staples of the genre (reanimated corpse-constructs are also a staple, but the trope codifier there is so iconic that it's hard to escape Frankenstein's shadow.)

But I think that another key element to Gothic Horror, and here I mean beyond its aesthetics, is the idea of the monster within - again, one thing that unites vampires, werewolves, and ghosts is that all of them were once people. These are not dragons or trolls. These were once people like us. And that means that within their very existence is the proof that something could push us to become a monster just like them. Vampires and werewolves in particular are notable for their infectiousness, and I think a lot of ghost stories are also predicated on this idea in a certain way: the ghosts in a haunted house might kill people (or at least drive them to their deaths) and thus make restless spirits of their victims, adding to the power of the haunting, just as a vampire's brood or a werewolf's pack could grow with each victim.

The victim is a potential villain: as we see with Lucy Westenra, this innocent young woman who is preyed upon by Dracula, and in the heroes' failure to protect her, she becomes a monster herself, preying upon children she abducts. Lucy begins as a sympathetic figure, but you could imagine that, if not put down by her former suitors (not going to get into the sexual politics of that novel right now, other to say boy,) she might have become her own legendary monster and figure of terror if left to her vampiric devices (I'm honestly kind of shocked that I've never heard of a horror story with her as the primary monster.)

Humans are, you know, complex beings. We have admirable traits, traits that have allowed us to thrive as a species, like altruism, cooperation, love, and empathy, but we also have inverse impulses as well: selfishness, factionalism, hatred, and contempt. Most of us, I'd hope, would favor that first group of traits, but even if we do, there's an awareness of the presence of those other traits, whether conscious or not.

Again, though, I'm not here to talk about Gothic horror. I'm here to talk about psychological horror and the presence of the doppelganger.

See, the doppelganger, unlike the vampire or werewolf, whose beastliness, whose monstrousness, is self-evident in their form - claws, sharp teeth, animal-like fur (in Dracula's case, though the modern image of the vampire goes almost in the opposite direction by making them typically very smooth-shaven and pale, as if they're inhuman by means of not being animal-like enough,) the doppelganger naturally poses a question: Which of these is the real one, and which is the monster?

Psychological horror is built on the fallibility of perception. And perhaps no perception is more important to us than our sense of self.

Now, I will say, while Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 both deal with doppelgangers (fitting that these are both "2s" in their franchises - something I'm certain was intentional in the case of AWII but not so sure about with SH2,) they do so in very different ways, and from different perspectives.

Let's go to the spoiler cut, with spoilers for both games as well as the movie Jacob's Ladder.

Thinking About the Rhythms of Survival Horror, (and Thoughts on D&D Monsters)

 Having beaten the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 the other day, I've been giving some thought to the way that the game, and the genre, treats its monsters.

Not long before I played it, the previous game I had played on my PS5 was Diablo IV, and it's actually kind of hilarious how each game treats its monsters in almost precisely the opposite way.

Diablo, the series of isometric action-RPGs from Blizzard, is all about mowing down waves upon waves of monsters. While individual creatures take a few seconds to defeat in the early levels, very quickly the game has you churning through dozens if not hundreds of them, the classes built to allow you to have many stacking and overlapping buffs that make it likely that you won't spend more than half a second with any given monster. The challenge, thus, becomes less about overcoming monsters and more about increasing your monster-churning efficiency, with only seriously powerful boss monsters getting instant-kill effects that you have to dodge.

It's a totally different genre of game, of course.

In stark contrast, Survival Horror makes each monster a challenge. And it does so in a way that I think is interesting: monsters don't actually hit very hard. Even if a boss like Pyramid Head slashes into you, you're probably going to be fine as long as you aren't already at death's door.

The challenge is one of lengthy attrition. Silent Hill 2, as well as Alan Wake II, are games in which there's no "reset" in which you heal up to full health or get a bunch of ammunition. Your performance in the early part of the game can have an impact on the later part of the game. Or at least, I believe that's true in Silent Hill 2. Alan Wake II, and I think others of this genre (even going as early as the FPS/Survival Horror classic Bioshock) have behind-the-scenes difficulty moderation that grants more healing items and other resources if you're struggling.

I don't actually know if there's any such thing in the Silent Hill 2 remake, but I suspect there isn't. And I think they can get away with that because there's a FromSoft-level "tough but fair" approach to its combat. You have a melee weapon that is pretty effective, and every monster's attacks can be dodged if you read the telegraphs right and dodge at the right time. Thus, if you find yourself in a situation where you're out of ammo and low on health, you can still proceed - you just need to be extra careful (this was how I found myself in the last part of the Otherworld Hospital).

It does make me curious, though, if you're someone who has truly mastered Silent Hill 2, if you might reach the hotel with hundreds of bullets and dozens of healing items.

The approach to monsters, as well, is interesting. Within SH2, I think the worst situations I ever got into were when I had, like, 3 monsters attacking me. There were segments with more, like the shower room in the prison, but the clear intent there was for you to run rather than fight them all, with several low barriers to hop over and open up some distance with.

Every fight feels pretty intense, even if you're not terribly worried that you'll survive this fight with a Mannequin or Lying Figure. The intensity come from the fact that if you fail to dodge them once or twice, that's less health to survive the next fight.

I remember when I first played Alan Wake II, I struggled a fair amount with the Nightingale boss fight because I walked into the fight with only a few bullets - far less than what I needed to actually defeat him. The helpful reset at the start of the boss fight after I died only meant that every attempt put me back into this running-on-fumes position. Much of the fight was spent scrounging for ammunition.

Having remembered that experience when I went into the Final Draft NG+ mode, I came in far better-prepared. I also realized, on that second playthrough, that there were actually only a total of three enemies to fight prior to that first boss, the initial taken cultist and then two guys just by the Witch's Ladle. Perhaps I was far more efficient in fighting them, and that allowed me to have an easier time on the boss.

It's a funny thing: I adore Alan Wake II, but I do think that the Silent Hill 2 remake's gameplay felt a little more refined. There were, I think, no moments in which I called BS on the game if I died. By contrast, there were times in AWII, like my first playthrough's fight against Cynthia Weaver, in which there seemed to be some kind of lag that kept me from moving properly - in a fight where you have a lot of things to dodge. That was the weekend the game had come out, and I don't think I had as much of a problem on my Final Draft run, so this might have been some optimization thing that was fixed in a patch.

More to the point, though, SH2 is very efficient with its monsters. There are only really three types of rank-and-file monsters, though there are variants of them that show up later, or four if you count the grate-walking Mandarins (which I treated more like an environmental hazard, except in the fight where you have to kill one, which feels more like a boss). But as a player, I found that the lack of enemy variety wasn't really a problem: if anything, it was a comfort. I knew more or less how to deal with them.

I'd be curious to see if anyone has a full count of how many of each monster appear in the game. While there are some that spawn at scripted events even in places you've already cleared, I think generally there's a finite number of them. One of the satisfying parts of the gameplay loop is when you get to stop worrying about an area and just run through the rooms because you know you've already killed all the monsters there.

One of the things that I don't love about Diablo is how its "hordes of hell" take on its monsters makes even some of the big ones that feel like they should have a big impact kind of disintegrate in seconds. Likewise, if you do die in that game, it's often from something that happens so quickly that you barely had time to react to it.

I don't know that the Survival Horror "every battle is dire" is necessarily my sweet spot, but I do kind of like the idea that a monster ought to feel like a serious thing to overcome.

This post didn't start off being about D&D, but it got me thinking a little about TTRPG monster design. I've been poring over the Draw Steel rules books, and I'm really fascinated by the Werewolf, its level 1 solo monster. The thing has 200 Stamina, which seems like a ton, but I need to see how much damage a party of 1st level characters can put out before I can know truly how long a fight that should be.

It did occur to me, though, that one of the issues of balance in a game like D&D, especially at low levels, is the degree to which player characters can go down very quickly, and thus, monsters need to be able to go down very quickly so that the players can survive against them.

It made me think about how the issue might be with damage output.

I've been mulling over some ideas about how to make a more exciting monster in D&D, particularly a solo monster. As mentioned here, in a game like Silent Hill 2, the monsters are often fought on their own, but they still feel like a threat.

If I have something cool to share, I'll post it.

The Dark Poem

 Periodically, I re-watch (or at least re-listen to while playing computer games) Monty Zander's mind-blowingly elaborate "Beyond the Lake," a 5+ hour review and critique of Alan Wake II - a video essay that embraces the game's collaborative and mixed-media approach by itself integrating multiple original songs, animations, and even an interpretive dance routine. Much like the game itself, it's one of those works that does more than you thought the medium was capable of.

I haven't actually re-played Alan Wake II since beating its Final Draft new game plus mode in I think early 2024 (whenever it came out,) but the game lives rent free in my mind, as the saying goes. Distance in time from actually playing it has given my brain less fuel to speculate upon its deeper lore, but periodically I remember the feverish, corkboard-and-red-yarn theorizing that the game is built to inspire, and I feel a desire to dive back into it, if not in actually booting it up again and playing through once more, then in getting into that tin-foil-hat mode.

In Control, mention is made of Thomas Zane being a Finnish filmmaker, not the (presumably American) poet that we first met in Alan Wake 1. Jesse insists to her therapist that she knows him as a poet, even quoting the poem that Emile Hartman seemingly misinterpreted to inspire his work, but in her adulthood, Jesse knows him as the filmmaker.

Filmmaker Tom is perhaps the great enigma of Alan Wake II. While Mr. Door oozes mystery, in a sense, the mysteriousness is front-and-center, and seems to be something that he acknowledges. Tom, though, gaslights us. What the actual hell is this guy?

On a meta-level, it's disconcerting that he's sort of a more "real" person than Alan. Alan is of course played by two different actors, with Ilkka Villi providing the physical performance and Matthew Poretta providing the voice. The recording of Tom Zane and Casper Darling's meeting found in the Final Draft introduces this troubling implication that Alan might actually be a creation of these two - played by Villi and Poretta respectively, and in each case, the actor is the only one playing the part.

In meeting Tom, though, the guy cannot stop reciting poetry. He claims that he's just play-acting as the character he played in his most popular film, Tom the Poet. But it just does not seem trustworthy. Among the poems he quotes, some are found only on the This House of Dreams blog, a little ARG project I think possibly just created by Sam Lake alone, but which, if canonical, would have some grand implications.

My favorite theory regarding Tom Zane is that he's some kind of parasite - whether he's a real human person or some kind of Dark Place monster, I think that he's appropriated the identity of Tom Zane for his own purposes, and he seems to be moving on to Alan, casting himself as Alan in the film Yoton Yo.

If we are to assume that the Thomas Zane from the first game was a benevolent presence (something that is admittedly dubious given that he's the one who introduces us to Mr. Scratch in a manner that seems to imply he doesn't worry much about the harm Scratch can cause) it leaves poetry itself an ambiguous signifier.

When Alan visits the murder sites in the three primary locations in the Dark Place, we see poetry scrawled on the walls near the bodies or body-facsimiles of the "boss Taken" that Saga faces. Each death in the Dark Place is similar but distinct from the fates of these people in Bright Falls. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find clear screenshots of these poems on the walls of the Dark Place, and I genuinely don't remember if these are the same words as the Dark Poem that we find in the Final Draft.

The Dark Poem, or perhaps the three dark poems, are found only in the Final Draft. In Monty Zander's video, he has frequent collaborator Marina Ryan perform the three Dark Poems as verses in a song. which is now the way that I will inevitably always hear these words.

The author of these poems is up for debate: is the real Thomas Zane, still the poet, sending these out? Is this probably-fake Tom Zane, whose agenda remains so mysterious through the end of the game, the author? What are these poems or this poem trying to tell us?

Let's go line by line and read them to see if we can come up with some theories.

Dark Poem 1:

The writer of the first word

Not the writer of the last

with the terror of the light

and the shadow cast

    Ok, so right away we've got an interesting question to consider: who is the writer of the first word? There's of course the Biblical idea that "In the beginning there was the Word," from one of the Gospels, which implies God is the ultimate author of reality (and ties into my fantasy/sci-fi philosophical idea about a world of words versus a world of numbers, but that's a tangent). In the most basic sense, though, as the story develops, Alan comes to realize that he needs to collaborate, and to let others into his creative process, in order to escape the cycle. His Dark Place trilogy began as a lonely, frankly solipsistic endeavor, but allowing Saga to become part of his process (not to mention all the other collaborators) allows him to ultimately emerge victorious in the end. That said, in a more sinister reading, if we link this to "parasite Tom," we have the idea of a new author taking over a project someone else began.

    The second part of this verse does draw an interesting parallel with the Herald of Darkness song, which is that the brightness of the light is what allows shadows to be cast. As that song is warning us that Alan carries Scratch within him, being both Champion of Light and Herald of Darkness, that causal relationship between the two sides is a source of terror.

The third eye now opened

to project the night

This is the moment

to write

    Well, we certainly get some third-eye imagery in the end of the game: Alan is shot with the bullet of light once he allows the Dark Presence to enter his head, and its glow appears similar to a third eye, a symbol often associated with wisdom and enlightenment, a kind of spiritual awareness.

    But Alan's third eye projects light. Here, the third eye is opened to project the night. Is this the same ironic conflation of opposites, where that light allows him to project shadows?

    I think we should also consider the following: film is a medium based on the projection of light, using the film itself to filter out some of that light in the form of colorful shadows that form images. The interplay of light and shadow is the very essence of film, which Parasite Tom is so firmly tied to. However, film is derived from photography, and that very same relationship between light and shadow is also the domain of Alice Wake.

    Of course, Alan tried to just give up, to stop writing at one point in the hopes that at least he wouldn't harm anyone else. Ultimately, that decision was untenable - the story would be told one way or another.

This is the ritual

to lead you on

Your friends will meet him

when you are gone.

    The latter half of this, of course, is the deeply cryptic and worrying words of diver Thomas Zane when he introduces Mr. Scratch at the end of the first game. Zane's "don't mind him" comment is worrying because Mr. Scratch's clearly sinister vibe doesn't seem like something a benevolent supernatural force should be so quick to dismiss.

    This whole chorus is what we hear echoes of the Cult of the Word chanting, but it's never 100% clear to me to what extent the echoes that Alan experiences in the Dark Place are actual, real crimes that the real Alex Casey investigated, or if they're closer to the novels that Alan wrote, or if they're neither, and are instead "rough drafts" of the crises Saga will encounter in Return. With the Cult of the Word, there's a sense that this is an occult ritual to lead a victim (Casey maybe? Alan maybe?) to their doom, but simultaneously, we know that Alice is working behind the scenes to try to lead Alan through this confrontation with the darkest parts of his nature to bring him to enlightenment. (Crazy thought, is the "him" that his friends will meet actually the evolved, enlightened Alan, and "you" his current, struggling self? Was this never about Scratch, actually?)

Dark Poem 2:

Lost on the shore

between the forest and the ocean,

the owl and the deer

reflected in motion.

    The game is all about dualities, and here we create a duality between the Forest - Bright Falls and its environs - and the Ocean - the Dark Place - the two places where the game takes place. Both are types of places that have a grand and mythic significance in the collective unconscious, both of which can be mysterious, but in different ways. Here, the forest represents familiar, mundane reality, while the ocean is this realm of imagination. Likewise, the owl and the deer are, of course, symbols representing Alan and Saga, respectively. Alan's writers' room has a taxidermied owl, and Saga's field office (and Mind Place) has a mounted deer's head. Creatures of day and night, a predator and an herbivore. Now, I don't totally get what "reflected in motion" means, though perhaps this is simply talking about how the two reflect one another as the co-authors of this story.

In his room, he will hurt her

In hers he is caught

His story ends

Her story does not

    Boy, this feels freaking potent, but it's not easy to interpret. If this is still referring to Alan and Saga, the two rooms could represent their mental rooms: when we play as Alan, we can always flash back to the Writer's Room, and the implication is that this is actually the "real" Alan who is writing the story of the one that's traversing the Dark Place. With Saga, we can transfer to the Mind Place, which takes the form of her field office at the Bright Falls lodge.

    By writing her into the story, and creating this narrative where Saga is broken by the loss of her daughter, he has done a whole lot to hurt her. But does she "catch" him in her Mind Place? That I can't really say so definitively.

    In a weird way, the idea of whose story ends reflects the non-Final Draft ending - in that, Alan is dead while Saga waits as her phone rings to find out if Logan is alive, and so we get an ending and a non-ending. But the Final Draft kind of inverts this: Alan awakens from this seeming death, now the Master of Many Worlds, while Saga gets a clear answer that yes, Logan is alive and well and they should be able to reunite.

    On a meta level, though, I could also see this as telling us that Alan's story has reached its conclusion: I honestly think it would be fine if there's no Alan Wake III, because he can continue to be a character in future Remedy Connected Universe titles. Saga, however, has only had her first brush with the Weird, and whether she goes to work for the FBC or just continues to explore her parautilitarian powers, I could imagine she's got more story to tell (like exploring her relationship with her father, Mr. Door).

This is the ritual

to lead you on

Your friends will meet him

when you are gone.

    Again, the chorus is the same, its second half being the words that Thomas Zane (poet/diver) left Alan with at the end of the first game.

Dark Poem 3:

A pale balloon in the sky

float and sink deeper.

Night springs when bright

falls for this sleeper.

The surface disturbed

the reflection now a traitor

in the cavity of the skull

turned to a crater.

This is the ritual

to lead you on.

Your friends will meet him

when you are gone.

    The "pale balloon in the sky" is a big question mark for me. It could be a description of the moon, but what significance that would have is not something I can think of. I do find it interesting that we see kind of inversion here: float and sink deeper, which mirrors the Herald of Darkness chorus line "diving deep to the surface." In the song, we have a word associated with descent but a destination above us, while here, we have a word associated with ascent and a destination (deeper) suggesting downward movement. Filmmaker Tom does quote one of the shoebox poems from This House of Dreams when we first meet him that describes "a window in the floor and a door in the ceiling," and this idea of disorientation is a big motif throughout the game, especially Alan's half of it.

    Night springs when bright falls of course both references the TV show that Alan worked on and the town that both games take place within. And, as one could have thought since the first game, the names of both seem to mirror or complement each other. Brightness falling and night springing up are the twin elements of a cycle where day turns to night. Perhaps this also refers to the dark side of Alan taking over, as we later see it does when he becomes Scratch - if he's the "sleeper" named here.

    Now, the notion of a surface being disturbed, revealing a reflection as a traitor, is really, really interesting. Tom, of course, looks just like Alan, despite clearly being a different person (I'm not willing to commit to the notion that they're multiversal doppelgangers, as suggested in Time Breaker). Of course, when we look into a still body of water, we can see our own reflection as clear as a mirror. But if that water is disturbed, the reflection is broken. This will ruin the mirror effect, but might it also allow us to see past the surface of the water and look past to what is actually under the water? Whether literal or not, that's a really, really potent image.

    The idea of a "skull turned to a crater" feels very much tied to Alan's fate to be shot in the head - which actually happens to him twice (at least,) the first time by himself, each version thinking the other is Scratch, and the second time by Saga with the bullet of light. Both moments are tied to his taking in the Dark Presence, first unwillingly, and next as part of a sacrificial ploy. (I was about to reference something about "her heart is a crater and we have filled it" only to remember that's a World of Warcraft thing.)

And we end once again with the usual refrain.

Ultimately, this kind of cryptic poetry is designed to drive fans like me insane trying to piece it all together. Alan Wake's story does certainly have a lot of mystery box elements, though I hope that there's some intentionality to it all. We may never actually know the true nature of Thomas Zane, though I really think the recurring poetry within Alan Wake II continues to cast doubt on the notion that Tom the Filmmaker is telling the truth about Tom the Poet.

I Can't Stop Thinking About Alan Wake 2

 For basically a year, after I finished the game the first time around in about two days, I've been sitting around going "man, I'd love to play a game like Alan Wake II." But that's the catch: what game is like Alan Wake II?

The whole thing, the whole reason for this obsession, is that it's really unlike anything I've ever experienced in a game before.

Last year was my induction into the Cult of the Remedy, playing first Control, then Alan Wake Remastered, that a few months before the release of Alan Wake II, one of the longest-anticipated sequels in video game history.

However, unlike most games that are stuck in development hell for over a decade, AW2 wound up being a masterpiece - a game that, upon finishing, I went into my apartment's front room and told my best friend/roommate that this game was the most artistically ambitious game I've ever played.

Was it perfect? Hell no. I struggled on the Cynthia Weaver fight because some bug kept locking me out of doing anything (something I think later patches fixed - the fight's also just plain hard). Alan Wake II is messy, but messy in a way that feels entirely because the game is striving so hard to do something so unique, and in most ways, it nails it.

I've written before that I like the action-gameplay of Control better. I cannot wait until Control 2 comes out, though I know that it won't actually start full development until next year.

I would love to go back and re-play Control, but I keep getting cold feet every time I get the prompt on Chapter Select or New Game that warns that doing so will erase all of my saved progress.

Really, Remedy? Really? You couldn't give us a couple different save files? You couldn't give us a New Game Plus mode? You really need me to just throw away the fact that I beat Mold-1, Hartman, all of those mini-bosses and side-quests, if I want to just experience the game again?

Even if I do bite the bullet and start a new game, I realize that nothing will compare to the feeling of entering the Oldest House for the first time. The profound mystery, my first time seeing Ahti, the nervous laughter I shared with said roommate as I facetiously repeated "oh yeah, everything looks totally fine here," while encountering monitors with "lockdown in progress."

But as much as I adored playing Control, and will still hop into my endgame save file and just look for Hiss to fight for the fun of it, it's very clear to me that Alan Wake II saw a quantum leap (not a break - I never played that one) in narrative ambitions.

I mean, when I sat in Poet's Cinema and realized that Yöton Yö was beginning to play, and then realized that it was a 20 minute arthouse horror movie just... there, for me to watch if I wanted. Holy shit.

The live-action, FMV experiments in older Remedy games, from Alan Wake 1's writer's room videos and Night Springs episodes, to the probably-too-far "TV-show in a game" concept of Quantum Break, to then, the more restrained Darling videos, Hotline calls, and occasional glimpses of Courtney Hope in live action when the Hiss try to take Jesse over, it's something they've been trying to refine.

Alan Wake II feels like it utterly nails the use of live-action. It's... it's just incredible.

This game has lodged itself in my brain - the three main chapters for each of its player characters feel as iconic as Brinstar, Maridia, Norfair, the Wrecked Ship, and Tourian do (those are the regions of Planet Zebes in Super Metroid, for those unfamiliar).

One of my favorite relaxation activities is watching video essays on YouTube - about lots of things, but particularly games, especially for people who have really interesting takes on them. While Jacob Gellar has not yet come out (at least on YouTube) with an Alan Wake-dedicated video (given his focus on indie games, this might be just on the other side of the mainstream line for him, though I believe it was his top game of 2023) I've also, in my searching for excuses to just think more about the game, become a big fan of Monty Zander's 5-hour long "Beyond the Lake" critique.

I've watched it 3 times. I don't think that it'll be the last time I watch it either.

To give you an idea of how amazing this game is, it inspired this Scottish YouTuber to make a 5-hour-long critique that, just like the game that inspired it, is a transmedia experience with poetry, original music, and a fucking interpretive dance routine.

The game is an incredible work, and one that really has interesting things to say - about depression, about memory loss (Zander makes a compelling argument that the game is, in part, about dementia), about the art and the value of collaboration, this last point being driven home by how the public-facing "auteur" Sam Lake, Remedy's creative director, made a game that emphasized how much he needs other artists around him to create games. It's honestly a beautiful idea, especially in an era of egocentrism and growing isolation.

And it's thorny - our title character's moral standing is left up for you to interpret: is he just trying to survive and not at fault for the bad things that happen because of his story, or is he using the people he writes about? Likewise, is the character revealed in the post-credits sequence to have been guiding him all along a secret guardian angel or a manipulating gaslighter?

I think you could make the argument that the game engages in some Mystery-Box storytelling trickery that has grown extremely sour in the past 20 years. I'm willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt because I don't know that it's really making any promises about revealing anything.

I have been following the stories about the game's profitability - I think it may have just broken even, after about a year, which I'm sure is not what AAA-studios want, but if this at least means that the game is now officially profitable, I hope that it will also mean that Remedy can continue putting out works of art like this.

The game's year-later DLC, the Lake House, is intriguing in its own way, a sort of micro-story (that is also apparently accessible from the main game, though I have to imagine it would be a very weird, pacing-wise, as I think it basically comes right before the Dark Ocean Summoning climax. Also, while I did beat the final boss of the DLC, I went back and replayed it and just couldn't seem to repeat that (not sure if it reset the difficulty to Standard, come to think of it).

But the Lake House honestly mostly just whetted my appetite for what comes next.

I know FBC Firebreak is coming out I think next year (trying not to think about what else happens next year) but while it does seem to be a PvE-focused game that will tell a story, I'm not sure how likely it is that I, as someone who doesn't really do online games other than WoW (grandfathered in from playing it for like 18 years now) and Magic the Gathering Arena (a game with next to zero actual non-game interaction with other players) I'm...

Look, we'll see as details emerge.

It's tough, though: I do have a friend who introduced me to Control, but he also doesn't do horror games, and so while I think he's seen a Let's Play of Alan Wake II, I don't know that he'll be as into such obsessive discussions as I really want to have.

So, I'm basically shouting this into the void of the blogosphere. This game has lodged itself in my consciousness. I feel lucky that it exists.

But it's all we're going to get for a while. So, I started playing Hollow Knight. I might write about that in a bit.

The Lake House's Implications for Control 2

 I just beat the second and final DLC for Alan Wake II (sadly I found I needed to downgrade to the lowest difficulty on the final boss - I don't mind scrounging for resources between fights, but I'm terrible at doing it during a fight). The Lake House takes place within the eponymous FBC facility that was built to monitor Cauldron Lake after the 2010 AWE in Bright Falls (aka the events of the first Alan Wake game).

Naturally, given the presence of the FBC, there are some big ties into Control, and some things that portend what we might be dealing with in the next Control game (not counting FBC Firebreak).

Let's talk about all of that past the spoiler cut:

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.

Approaching Alan Wake II's Anniversary and Anticipating The Lake House

 Some time this month, we'll be getting Alan Wake II's second DLC, The Lake House, which will ultimately put the capstone on what we get out of the game.

It's funny, playing games with such replayability or merely a huge demand on your time, like World of Warcraft or Elden Ring, I still find that this game I spent maybe a total of 40 hours in to be one of my favorite gaming experiences.

I just love the utter insanity of the story it tells, the strange meta-narratives, the deep mysteries (which I'll admit might largely be mystery boxes with nothing inside) and the audacity of its creation (I mean, there's literally a 20-minute art film you might just miss if you walk out of the movie theater too eagerly).

The game was compelling, but not in the way that makes me necessarily want to play through it again and again. A big part of what makes a game replayable, I think, is how you can try to do things differently. But the story to Alan Wake II is singular (well, double, given the Final Draft). And ultimately, that's fine - because even if I'm not booting the game up every chance I get, it nevertheless swirls around in my brain constantly.

Halloween is my favorite holiday, and every October, I sort of feel an anxious desire to make sure that I honor the spookiness in some way - which can be a challenge as I'm an utter lightweight when it comes to horror movies (one of these days I'm going to watch past the first episode of Midnight Mass, I swear).

I'm really eager to play the new DLC, though I'm also trying to temper my expectations. Night Springs was fun, but boy did I go through it quickly, I think finishing the whole thing in an afternoon and the next morning, with big breaks in between episodes.

At the very least I assume the Lake House will be just one story with one protagonist (though who that will be remains to be seen,) which might make it feel more substantial.

But I guess especially after the absurdly enormous Shadow of the Erdtree (still haven't attempted Radahn following the nerfs) I need to recall that this isn't going to be as substantial as a whole other game. (Seriously, Shadow of the Erdtree would be, on its own, probably the biggest FromSoft game ever if it weren't for the existing main game of Elden Ring).

I am eager, however, to see what kind of tantalizing mysteries are introduced here - generally, the expectation is that just as Control's AWE expansion teased Alan Wake II, the Lake House will probably tease Control 2.

Then I'm curious just to see if the gameplay is shaken up in any serious way - Night Springs gave you more resources than you could ever spend, turning the Survival Horror game into more of an action shooter (or some approximation thereof). The trailer for the Lake House sure looks more horror-oriented, but we'll see.

Anyway, I'm just happy to get into this.

Alice Wake: Secret Hero, Potential Threat?

 Alice Wake is a key figure in both Alan Wake games. Alan's wife is the reason why Alan gets swept into the Dark Place, and in all of his thirteen years trapped within it, Alice is his motivation - no conclusion to his story would be acceptable, in his mind, unless Alice is safe in the end.

In the first game, Alice is, honestly, just kind of a damsel in distress. We get some flashbacks to the Wakes' lives in New York, and we see what looks like a happy marriage with just a few odd elements: Alice has an intense fear of the dark - a phobia that goes beyond the mild unease that adults typically get (I'll confess here that I might be a little abnormal as a 38 year old who still gets a little spooked sometimes when I wake up needing to use the bathroom in the middle of the night - though typically only after I've been thinking about some kind of scary story - but Alice has it a lot worse than I do).

There's even a bit of male-gazey portrayal of her, as she is taken by the lake and washes up on its shores wearing nothing but a t-shirt and some lingerie panties. (I think it was the Lady of Lore's overview of the game that really called out that she needs to find some pants).

Really, though, if there's one note that sticks out as more specific and also, well, more problematic, it's that Alice reveals after they've arrived at the cabin that she wasn't just arranging this vacation for Alan to get away from the stress of his writer's block, but that she contacted a psychologist to treat Alan without getting his consent beforehand.

Now, Alice has no way of knowing what a monster Emil Hartman is, but there are some serious ethical concerns about this. I think that Alice thought she was doing the right thing, but it does mean that she ultimately manipulated Alan into going there. There's some room for debate, of course - Alice's move seems almost like an intervention, except without the tried-and-tested safeguards to make sure it's effective and fair.

The Alice of Alan Wake II is, I think, a far more interesting character. We only see her via the video diaries of her "The Dark Place" photography exhibit, making her one of the characters in the game who never shows up within in the actual game world.

The victory of the first Alan Wake game is that, while Alan has trapped himself in the Dark Place, at least Alice has been allowed to escape. What we discover in the sequel, though, is that this escape has not been all that it's cracked up to be.

Initially, Alice is in mourning. As far as anyone can tell, Alan drowned in Cauldron Lake and died. This, after a period of mental instability and drug abuse, is a depressingly plausible scenario. And while the game never really touches on it, the family and loved ones of victims of suicide are often held responsible for not doing more - I remember when Robin Williams died, his daughter Zelda was harassed on social media. Hard enough to lose a parent, but now the world is after you as well?

Alice is an artist, like Alan, but between the two of them, she's not the "successful" one. Alan is the breadwinner for them, his Alex Casey novels selling enough (even in our modern era, when there are so many other forms of media to distract people from reading books) that they can afford a pretty comfortable life. Alan brought work Alice's way by having her do photos for the covers of his books - which is simultaneously kind and also kind of devastating. Alice's most lucrative expression of her art has been in subservience to her husband's art.

When Alan disappears, not only does she lose this life partner (and it doesn't seem like the Wakes were particularly social - Alan basically had a best friend in his agent Barry Wheeler, and Barry and Alice didn't even really get along. And that's all we know about their social lives) but she also loses the foundation of her financial security.

Her decision to get Alan help from Dr. Hartman was probably motivated out of concern for Alan, but there was probably also a fear that if Alan didn't start writing again, they'd run into financial difficulties.

I don't mean to paint Alice as a villain because of this. I just think it's worth noting that Alice was in a really tough position.

Mourning and grief are one thing. The financial problems get more or less solved (or at least deferred) by licensing the rights to the Alex Casey novels so that Hollywood can make movies of them. Artistically, it's not really satisfying, but then again: it's never really made explicit if Alan's novels are actually, you know, good. They're popular, for sure, but I think there's this lingering insecurity in Alan's personality that he doubts his own skill as a writer - his fear of messing up Return keeps him in the Dark Place for 13 years. And I could imagine that there's a part of him that judges himself for writing pulpy detective novels. They're popular, sure, but can he really call himself an artist?

(My stance is that all art is art - there's no minimum quality something has to have to be art. It might not be good art, but it counts.)

Alice earns enough money from the film rights that she's not destitute, but money's the least of her concerns - she starts seeing Alan... or a monstrous thing that looks like Alan, in her home. She's forgotten about her own time in the Dark Place, and so it's the sort of thing that she would be inclined to write off as a grief-induced hallucination, except that she can't. So, she uses her art to solve the problem: she sets up cameras to take photos of Alan's visitations, rigged to motion sensors.

The success of this venture - capturing the screaming, horrific visage of "Mr. Scratch" - simultaneously reassures her (that she's not just imagining things) but also disturbs her (because, you know, weird supernatural stuff happening).

We know that she visits The Oldest House at one point, invited by the FBC to make statements about the photos and what she remembers of what happened to her husband. Her proximity is what sets off the transformed Emil Hartman and his rampage in the Investigations Sector.

Now, here's a point that I'm going to argue that I haven't seen anyone else make: In her video diaries, she talks about meeting with an "organization" that helps her retrieve her memories from her week trapped in the Dark Place. Every single online content creator I hear talk about this story says that this organization is the FBC, typically stating it as an objective fact.

I don't think it is.

I think Alice's interactions with the FBC are limited to the time she visits the Oldest House to talk about the photos she has been taking.

Instead, we in her emails that she and Barry Wheeler have become friends after Alan's disappearance, despite their earlier friction (the details of said friction being left unsaid). Barry has been handling the film rights, and moved to Hollywood to act as executive producer to the Alex Casey movies, feeling a responsibility to Alan to try to make sure the movies are faithful to the author's vision, but also to ensure that the money that they make is helping Alice.

And it is in Hollywood that Barry Wheeler is brought into what he jokingly refers to as a Cult in Hollywood, which anyone who played Control (well, anyone who played it and also followed the between-the-lines stories in the various collectable memos and audio tapes) will recognize as the Blessed Organization - what appears to be a paracriminal organization that, among other things, has killed FBC employees and seems to cause chaos with many of their experiments in the paranatural.

The presence of "Blessed" branded moving boxes in Alice's apartment and her use of the word "organization" to describe the people who helped her recover her memories points, in my opinion, to the notion that through Barry, Alice was put in touch with Blessed, and it was they, not the FBC, who aided her.

Another bit of circumstantial evidence: "organization" maybe can be used to describe a government agency or bureau, but I often associate it with independent entities - I think she'd be more likely to say "I met with some people from the government" or "from a government agency," but "an organization" not only fits the default noun for how we've named the Blessed Organization, but seems broader than necessary if she were talking about the FBC.

The exact goals and philosophy of Blessed are unknown - we see them primarily through the lens of the FBC, though even they haven't necessarily put all the dots together.

If we imagine that the FBC is all about control and suppression (and safeguarding things, to be fair) the Blessed Organization might be the direct opposite - a force of radical freedom, where they just unleash chaos to see what happens.

And for that reason, I think it's plausible that a curious, consequences-be-damned Blessed representative (maybe Chester Bless himself) would be eager to draw forth the hidden memories in Alice Wake's brain.

From there, though, what of Alice?

Well, Alice serves as a kind of guiding light for Alan in the second game. But she does this in a pretty painful way.

The real climax of the story, or at least Alan's story, is when we discover the truth about the shooting in the Writer's Room. One loop's iteration of Alan finds the manuscript supposedly written by Scratch and tries to edit it to prevent its horrors from being unleashed. Another loop's version walks in, and, believing that it's Scratch there editing those pages, shoots him in the head. Why is he so full of anger, so willing to jump at the chance for violence? Well, sure, there's Tom Zane's exhortation to kill Scratch for all that he's done to them (right before Zane pulls a weird, sinister move, grinning and flipping it so that he's holding the gun to Alan's head, only for their deadly confrontation to wind up being a trick of filmmaking) but the real reason is that, in Alan's final trip into Parliament Tower, he finds the final video from Alice's Dark Place exhibit, which purports to conclude with footage of her suicide, jumping into Cauldron Lake.

A narrative has been constructed - that Scratch haunted and menaced Alice unceasingly, and that Alice felt the only way to escape the horror was to end her own life. Blaming Scratch for her death, Alan shoots his prior self, thinking that the man editing the manuscript is the monster. It's a twist of irony - Alan's the monster all along. And it's right at that moment - maybe because of that moment, that Alan awakens on the shores of Cauldron Lake, summoned forth by a ritual that has not yet even taken place.

But it's doubly ironic: the rage and grief that pushes Alan to his most monstrous self is based on a lie. Alice didn't kill herself. She entered the Dark Place. And she even acknowledges that the horror and pain that Alan has gone through was her doing, there to put him on the path he needed to ultimately succeed.

In other words, she manipulated him.

The morality of this is ambiguous. After all, Alan believes he needs to write a horror story in order to save the world, but in doing so, he condemns everyone from Carl Stucky to Cynthia Weaver to become monsters whom we have to then kill. Was it possible to succeed without all this death?

So, was Alice's plan, which involved convincing her husband that she had killed herself and then also getting in a position to murder another version of himself, all for the greater good?

I think it's all done with the best intentions, but you know what they say about those and the road to hell. As we said before, Alan's actions are all done for a higher purpose, but how much of it is strictly necessary? Could a less tortured mind have solved this all a lot more easily?

And what would it mean for Alice to now be an agent of the agenda of the Blessed Organization? What darkness has she brought with her? Alice comes off as a source of wisdom in Alan Wake II, as if she figured all of this out much, much quicker than Alan ever did. But does she actually get it all? Or is she also out of her depth?

What and Why is Night Springs?

 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.

Night Springs Episode Three: Time Breaker

 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.)

Night Springs Episode Two: North Star

 The ultimate impact of Night Springs on the lore and vibes of Alan Wake II is likely to be minimal. Ultimately, I think the main goal of this DLC has been to let us play around in the world with different characters and different vibes. I'll admit I was hoping for this DLC to be a bit more substantial than it is - more like Control's Foundation and AWE expansions, which were certainly shorter than the main game by a lot, but still felt like big chapters with a real arc to them.

Night Springs is what I'd describe more as bite-sized content. I could imagine blasting through these again at some point if I'm really eager to play through some Alan Wake combat, but honestly, combat was never AW2's strongest suit.

It's important to note that the cost of this DLC was pretty low - I think both packaged together as an upgrade to the "Deluxe Edition" was like 15 bucks, so if we're calling this $7.50, it's not a terrible amount of content for that price (by contrast Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree is a whopping 40 bucks, so I'm expecting a pretty massive chunk of game for that investment).

Still, I guess I loved being immersed in the story of Alan Wake II so much that I'd have perhaps liked to pay 25-30 bucks for a meatier expansion. We don't know when or how big the Lake House DLC will be, but I think we're really going to have to set our sights on Control 2.

All this being said, while short, there's some fun stuff to this.

The second Night Springs episode is North Star, which has us stepping into the shoes of Jesse Faden, the player character from Control. This clearly takes place before the events of that game (though it's also very "alternate timeline" so that might not be a necessary distinction. The episode actually has a weird parallel with the plot of Control, where we arrive at a strangely desolate location where Jesse's brother is being held, only to find that some strange and alien force is infecting the people there.

Unlike Number One Fan, these enemies do have darkness shields, but like the previous episode, ammo (and now batteries) are plentiful. I realized I was trying to carefully line up headshots and was getting my ass handed to me and then remembered that I didn't need to be so conservative and blasted away as if I had the Grip form of the Service Weapon.

North Star takes place in Coffee World, where some kind of weird alien strain of coffee has taken over the minds of the people kept there. Sheriff Breaker (or, rather, "The Sheriff," as no one is explicitly named in any of these stories) is our one friendly face. Most of the episode revolves into trying to get into the warehouse (the Kalavala Knights workshop,) where we think the brother is being kept.

There are a few puzzles to solve - fairly simple ones - and a few Coffee-Taken to take down.

It's super fun to be able to play as Jesse again, but I also think that unless there's some big twist in episode 3, the stand-alone nature of these episodes feels like a bit of a bummer given how important story and lore are to these games.

Night Springs Episode One: Number One Fan

 I've now played through the first of the three Night Springs episodes. It's short - I don't have a great estimate of its length as I had a long birthday phone call in the middle of it.

This one centers an unnamed fan (obviously Rose Marigold) who lives in a weirdly charmed world - essentially, it's the world of her strange fan-fiction (actually, technically speaking it's not fan fiction because it's not based on an existing story, unless you count Departure or Return). She's a perfect Mary Sue character, and that's reflected in the gameplay: you start off with a pump-action shotgun and a hunting rifle, and you have about 300 shells for the former.

So, basically, you need to throw out the typical careful Alan Wake II gameplay strategy and just smoke every enemy you come across. Healing items are not infinite, but relatively plentiful, so basically if you ever wished you could just go hog, this is for you.

The scenario is absurdly silly: a "bad boy" evil twin of "The Writer" whom the narrator/player character loves has shown up on a motorcycle, and claims to have kidnapped him, and unleashed a bunch of "Haters" to attack him.

The map is basically just the Bright Falls area, starting at the Diner (in this case "Nite's Diner") and going out through the boatyard and into the woods toward the Valhalla Nursing Home (or just, in this reality, The Writer's home). There's a boss fight with the evil twin, with some truly absurd developments over the course of it.

The whole thing is pretty quick and simple. I was waiting for some haunting, jarring descent into horror or at least psychological weirdness, but it's mostly told simply and straightforward.

If this is the typical length of the chapters, then this DLC is going to be probably closer in scope to the first Alan Wake's DLCs, the Writer and the Signal. I'll confess I'm maybe a little underwhelmed, but we'll see how I feel after getting through all three chapters (the second is the Jesse Faden one).

What I'm curious about is how these will play with the balance of the game. Number One Fan is mechanically pretty much unchanged from regular AW2 gameplay (now, feeling like an idiot, I never checked to see if Rose had her own Writer's Room/Mind Place equivalent) but the ample availability of ammunition and the lack of darkness shields on the enemies makes the whole thing feel more action-heavy.

While the map is basically the same as in the base game, with some barriers that appear to keep you on a narrow path, there's a lot of fun, cheeky design. In particular, I laughed out loud when I was going to find the evil twin on a beach and I came across two signs, one on top with an arrow pointing forward that said "NOT THIS BEACH" and another below it with an arrow pointing to the right saying "THIS BEACH."

There is this kind of open question as to whether Rose's enthusiasm for Alan tips into inappropriate territory. Here we see the unfiltered version of her obsession, and there's something weirdly childish about it. Also, we get several shots of Rose in wide-eyed wonder while absolutely splattered with blood (of people who don't like Alan's writing. I mean, yeah, they're also violently attacking people, but if Rose thinks of people who aren't a fan of his writing as being mindless zombie-like monsters that are totally worthy of being blown away with a shotgun, that's... not super healthy?)

One note here is that Alan - sorry, "The Writer" - calls out to her through a couple of means. The first is through one of those plastic singing wide-mouth basses. This actually reminds me of one of the Dead Letters from Control in which a person claims that one of these is possessed by the devil. I don't know if that's meant to be a connection or just another piece of weird, surreal Americana.

It's also fully possible that there are hints and details in this that I just didn't clock because I don't have the context. There are two other chapters to play through, and I'm very curious to see what the through-lines might be.

Night Springs Out Today

 Well, it's a happy birthday for me! Alan Wake II's first of two DLC expansions is out today, and we got a trailer for it yesterday at Summer Game Fest.

We'd gotten a general description of Night Springs, but now we're seeing what it will look like.

The DLC has three chapters, each with a different playable character (neither of which is Saga or Alan).

I don't know precisely what scenario each of the chapters will be, but we do know who the three playable characters are: Rose Marigold, Tim Breaker, and Jesse fucking Faden.

I'd be tempted to do a deep-dive on the trailer, but given the DLC is out either already or later today, it seems a bit silly not to just go straight to the primary text.

Still, from what I can tell, Rose's DLC will likely take the form of the fan-fiction (or, I guess since she's just writing about a scenario in her real world, simply self-insert fiction) that we find fragments of in the Alex Casey lunchboxes. That means shooting zombies with shotguns and possibly romancing both Alan Wake and Mr. Scratch.

Tim Breaker's appears to involve the strange polyhedrons that he's encountered. But he also seems to be on a set, getting directed by Sam Lake.

Jesse Faden's I have the least sense of.

I'll be very curious to see how this plays out, and what the narrative justification for all of this is. Sam Lake says that they'll be something like "What If" scenarios, but given the changeable reality of the Remedyverse, that doesn't seem like it would make them non-canonical. He also said they were going "out there" with these, acknowledging that it's not as if they hadn't gone pretty out there in the base game.

Anyway, I'm pumped. I doubt this is going to be hours upon hours of gameplay or anything, but I'm just excited to have an excuse to jump back into this game.

Poison Pill, Ducks, and Nite's Diner

 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.

Space invader, looking cute in a human suit
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 Spring, psycho killer on the run
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.

Endless versions of this town, Buck hold of the Elder God
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, caught in an endless time loop
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.