The Oddness of Magic's Instant Storytelling and the Lack of Block Structure

 When you have four or five primary releases a year in a game that is mostly about narrative-agnostic gameplay but that nevertheless has deep lore and stories, things get weird.

March of the Machine is the grand climax to the Phyrexian storyline that, at least in its current chapter, started perhaps with the arrival of Vorinclex on Kaldheim. The Phyrexians were the big bads in the earliest days of Magic, and while the notion of a grand, ongoing story that would go on for many years, rather than more thematic visits to periods of time, places (mostly on Dominaria,) and such, the first real lean-in to Magic as a storytelling (rather than vibe-promoting) medium came with Tempest Block (sort of Mirage Block before it, which introduced many of the key players).

The thing is, there's a kind of compression that happens. This is particularly true given the shift in recent years away from year-long block storytelling and to largely standalone sets.

As an example, the original Kamigawa block introduced a world where spirits were at war with mortals, and how that conflict shattered what had previously been a comfortable status quo. We then had two sets to see that conflict escalate and then come to its conclusion.

Perhaps more specifically relevant to the current story, Invasion Block took three sets to play out the invasion of Phyrexia, with the initial victories and defeats, the, again, escalation and ultimate climax of that war playing out over a year of releases.

But in recent years, Magic has tended to only get to the "war" part in a single set. War of the Spark was certainly built up to - the seeds of Nicol Bolas' plan were planted over the course of a few years, with elements like the Immortal Sun and the Planar Bridge seeded in earlier sets.

But Bolas' arrival on Ravnica and his defeat all took place in a single release, meaning a story that was temporally compressed such that you were getting the beginning, middle, and end all at once.

War of the Spark came out the same year as Avengers Endgame, as well as the final season of Game of Thrones. 2019 was a year of grand finales (little did we know that it would also be the beginning of a plague of epic proportions, though at least in the US, we didn't really see much of it until 2020.)

But once the cards were previewed, every moment of that eponymous war was on display, from the initial invasion, the terrifying dreadhorde invaders, to Gideon's heroic sacrifice and Nicol Bolas' banishment.

We're getting exactly the same thing here.

Indeed, the parallel with the MCU is rather fitting. Phyrexia: All Will Be One was something like the Infinity War to March of the Machine's Endgame - the story in which we find out heroes are outmatched and they suffer their worst failure before they can turn around and find a victory.

The thing is, we have to ask a question: what is the unit of Magic storytelling?

Invasion Block in its entirety, which included the Invasion, Plane Shift, and Apocalypse sets, I'd argue, was a singular story, with the sets representing the beginning, middle, and end. The larger saga had been continuing for some time - Tempest Block, with its own parts being Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus, was a story that was part of that grander narrative. Urza's Saga focused more on the past as a kind of backstory-filling-in flashback/prequel. Mercadian Masques continued the story of the modern heroes, and then Invasion Block brought that story to a conclusion. I can't tell you how successful it was, because this mostly took place during what I think of as my first "Magic Interregnum." Tempest Block was the last set I played primarily with physical cards during my first foray with the game from ages eight through eleven. I wouldn't really play again until Kamigawa's block in 2005/2006.

The thing is, I sort of get the sense that, in the rush to showcase new planes and the game mechanics of those planes, Magic kind of rushes through the story.

This is particularly noticeable with March of the Machine. The trailer for the set shows us a literally broken and dismembered (but still alive) Karn lying helplessly before Elesh Norn, only for a newly ascended Elspeth, who has become an angel, to come down and fight her. The trailer ends with a card preview - Mirrodin Avenged, which shows a restored Karn holding Elesh Norn's severed head up.

So, perhaps my very first exposure to the plot of March of the Machine is what I imagine is its climax and ultimate victory.

And sure, it's possible the story will be more complex - that killing Elesh Norn doesn't put a full stop to the invasion. But... it must, right? The way this is presented, this moment is clearly meant to show that yes, the good guys win.

And I love it when the good guys win. Phyrexia is a great, creepy villain, but we like scary villains because it makes it that much more satisfying when our heroes take them down. I never doubted for a second that this climactic clash with the Phyrexians invading basically the whole Magic multiverse would end with the Phyrexians defeated.

But it's jarring to see that moment before I get a sense of basically anything else that happens during the war.

See, I think that only a few years ago, March of the Machine might be released in the fall as the first set in the "War of the Machine" block, and maybe we'd get something like "Triumph of the Machine" as a second set where things look particularly bleak, with a conclusion in the spring called "Fall of the Machine" as the heroes manage to turn things around and finally defeat the invasion.

Now, to be fair, this year has been set up as the Phyrexian conflict year. Dominaria United put their threat front and center, and the modern-era story of Brothers' War was a continuation of that. And Phyrexia: All Will Be One could be said to take the form of that first, failed attempt to solve this issue.

But I still feel that, in the old block-based design, this would be at least two blocks - one focuses on the looming, insidious threat as a kind of mystery, ending with the unleashing of the multiversal conflict, with the next focusing on the conflict itself.

This also has a mechanical aspect.

On a mechanical level, blocks historically (Mirrodin onward) focused on a new plane, and those planes tended to have unique mechanics or themes. Mirrodin was the artifacts-matter plane. Kamigawa was (at the time) the "legends matter" plane. Ravnica was the "two-color deck" plane.

And so, in each block, the first set would broadly introduce the themes they were working with. Then, those themes and mechanics would be played with in subsequent sets.

Say, for example, you had a mechanic called "Fubar 2." During your upkeep, you can spend two mana to create an artifact that has "at the end of your turn, this artifact deals 1 damage to any target." You play through the first set and every card with Fubar specifically has Fubar 2. But then, in the next set, you get cards with "Fubar: pay two life." Now, the mechanic starts to become more interesting, and might work in decks that couldn't really make use of the old Fubar 2 cards. And then, in the third deck, there are now spells that do something when you Fubar - "when you pay your Fubar cost, discard a card and then draw a card."

Because we hop between stories and settings with nearly every set these days, we don't tend to see these mechanics develop and evolve.

What's even stranger is that even when we do stick around, they still don't.

Consider our most recent trip to Innistrad. As someone who loves the aesthetics of Gothic Horror, but never played during the original Innistrad or the Shadows over Innistrad blocks, I was very eager to play those. And to be fair, I liked Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow a lot (I think probably leaning more toward the former). But it was strange to me that in some cases, mechanical ideas that were introduced in one were absent in the other. Midnight Hunt created "decayed" as a zombie keyword that was a penalty, but allowed (in theory at least) much cheaper creature token creation.

But, in the next set, which was set on the same plane and took place right after Midnight Hunt (as far as I know,) rather than expanding upon this mechanic, they simply used a different mechanic for zombies, Exploit.

Are the two synergistic? Absolutely - getting cheap creature tokens that you can use as sacrifice fodder for exploit cards works great. But there are no exploit cards in Midnight Hunt and no decayed cards in Crimson Vow.

Now, I realize that there might be some element here of being an old man yelling at clouds. And it's not as if I can complain that some new designer is ruining everything - Mark Rosewater was lead designer during my second Magic heyday such as during Ravnica's original block, and he still is.

But I do wonder if this direction for the game has undercut it both mechanically and story-wise. When I look at the most popular decks, they tend to fall into classic archetypes, scooping up all the most efficient and powerful cards that fit in a certain array of colors. It's rare that any of these put a strong thematic focus on any interesting new mechanic, because the likelihood of such a mechanic being strong enough on its own in a single deck to beat out some strategy that just picks all the best cards from the scattered sets in the Standard format is low - you're only going to find cards that care about that mechanic in one out of eight sets in Standard.

Alan Wake: The Signal and the Writer

 Alan Wake is a fairly quick game, and the DLCs that are packaged as part of the Remaster from a couple years ago (and the version of the game I've played) are similarly short. Each can be done in an hour or two, I think - I definitely did The Writer in a single sitting.

Somewhat similarly to Control, the enemies in Alan Wake aren't terribly distinct from one another (I'd say Control has a much clearer variance in things to fight, though the vast majority remain Hiss-corrupted FBC employees) but I think Alan Wake isn't really interested in providing a menagerie of strange beings to fight.

The ending of Alan Wake's main game places some limitations on the nature of its DLCs, so I'm going to put a spoiler cut here for a 13-year-old game.

Damage Types and Rage

 We don't know whether we'll be getting the "Mage" group or the "Warrior" group next in the One D&D playtest. But while I am very curious to see how the Warlock will change (I suspect Wizards and Sorcerers will get relatively minor reworks, though the spell preparation changes could have major implications for the Wizard's spellbook) I think I'm more eager to see how the Warriors - Fighters, Barbarians, and Monks - will be transformed.

Of these three, the Barbarian is the class I've played the least - I think in total a single one or two hour session with possibly no combat, and at level 1. I've run a campaign with a Barbarian now for three years, though, so I've seen it from the other side.

The thing that I find curious is a sort of implication of a lot more recent game design. First off, a lot of creatures that were republished in Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse had the damage types of their attacks changed. This is most notable with powerful legendary creatures like the various demon lords. (MPMM actually marks their second reprinting, as they were first published in Out of the Abyss before showing up with various archdevils in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes).

If we look at the MPMM version of Demogorgon and compare it with the ToF/OotA version, we see a couple of changes - the newer version has a bit more HP, for instance. But one of the most important differences, I think, and particularly for Barbarians, is that the old version's Tentacle attacks deal bludgeoning damage, whereas the new version deals force damage. Interestingly, the legendary-only tail attack deals a mix of bludgeoning and necrotic damage in both versions, but the new one's primary melee attacks deal force.

And that means that a Barbarian (who is not specifically a Totem Warrior with the Bear Totem defensive ability) will not be able to halve the damage of those attacks thanks to Rage - when they are hit, they'll take just as much damage as a Fighter or Wizard would.

Why might this change have been implemented? One possibility could be a very intentional nerf to the damage reduction of Rage, but I suspect that's not the reason.

Instead, there's this persistent oddity in 5E's rules where bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage are actually kind of each two different damage types. Supernatural monsters, usually like fiends, celestials, incorporeal undead, elementals, and golem-style constructs, often have resistance or immunity to these sorts of damage if they are coming from a nonmagical weapon.

As such, there's a sort of graduation point that you expect to happen around level 5 or so in which the weapon-wielding classes get access to a magical weapon - the most typical being a +1. While a +2 or +3 or other variants on the magical weapon types are often better, there's a profound transformation as soon as the character gets any weapon that counts as magical. They go from dealing the most commonly resisted damage types to a damage type that almost nothing resists - by higher levels, if you're fighting a demon lord, who has resistances to cold, fire, and lightning, and immunity to poison damage, the Fighter with a +1 longsword is going to have much more reliable damage than a Wildfire Druid whose main damage spells are all getting resisted (though to be fair, that's a subclass that should really consider getting Elemental Adept in Fire).

In addition to these changes to monsters, we've also seen that some of the class features in One D&D work a little differently.

Take, for example, the Devotion Paladin's Sacred Weapon. In the current game, this lets you add your Charisma modifier to your attack rolls and also causes the weapon to count as magical. But in the new version, it gives you the Charisma bonus but instead lets you choose whether you want the weapon to deal its normal damage or radiant damage (a type that, helpfully, very few monsters resist).

My suspicion is that One D&D intends to get rid of the distinction of magical or nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing, and instead make it so that magical weapons deal some other type of damage, likely force in the case of your simple +X weapons. This will simplify stat blocks by letting a demon lord like Demogorgon simply be immune to those kinds of damage, on the assumption that the Paladin attacking them is using a magical weapon that does other kinds of damage.

So, how does this affect the Barbarian?

Well, Barbarians' defensive bonus from Rage doesn't actually care about whether damage coming in is magic or not. You can hit them with a +3 warhammer and that damage still gets halved, magic or no.

Historically, a lot of these magical creatures with resistance or immunity to "kinetic" damage (to borrow a term from Starfinder) have a trait called "Magic Weapons," which causes their weapon attacks that deal kinetic damage to count as magical. This trait is notably absent from, for example, the new version of Demogorgon, likely due to the fact that their main attack does force damage anyway - and there aren't any traits or features that resist "force damage from nonmagical weapons." Interestingly, this does mean that the old Demogorgon has a slight edge on the new one if they were to fight one another, because the new one's tail attack would not do as much damage to the old one, as the bludgeoning damage from it is not magical.

Player characters almost never (with the exception of the Heavy Armor Master feat, I think - something that you'll note works differently in One D&D) care whether attacks are magical, so these traits seem to exist primarily to allow one monster stat block to be used against another - you could imagine a fight where the party is fighting a group of Demogorgon's demonic minions while the demon lord faces off against a Solar who is the party's ally. That trait on the old stat block would mean that Demogorgon could deal full damage to the angel, and the angel's equivalent trait allows them to deal full damage to the demon lord.

But it does seem that this change could, potentially, screw over Barbarians.

A Barbarian will typically have a lower AC than other front-line fighters. With Point-Buy, if you absolutely tanked all your "mental" ability scores to 8, you could get 16s in Strength, Dex, and Con (taking the +1 to three scores "racial" bonus), which would mean you start off with a 16 AC (or 18 with a Shield). Over the course of your Barbarian career, you'd probably want to get Strength to 20, and then spend two more ASIs getting Con to 20. Maybe you'd get Dex up to 18 with your last if you don't want to get any feats, which would give you an AC of 19 (21 with a shield) at level 19 or 21 (23 with a shield) at level 20.

So, you know, it's possible to have a high AC, but remember that this assumes you've taken -1s to three different ability modifiers.

More likely, your Barbarian is going to hover around 14 or 15 AC to start with and only raise it by a couple over the course of a campaign. But you counterbalance your low AC by halving most of the attack you're taking. (Having a d12 hit die does also mean more HP, though compared to a Ranger, Fighter, or Paladin, you're only really getting one more HP per level on average).

Now, perhaps that's enough - maybe Barbarians are too hard to kill in the 2014 rules (they do, after all, have other traits that make them very tough to take down). But I'm curious to see whether the designers are accounting for the fact that this new design philosophy is a serious nerf to Barbarians' survivability.

I could imagine a new version of Rage where, rather than resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage, it's instead resistance to the damage of attacks (or even more narrowly weapon attacks). We'll have to see what it looks like when the Warrior class group UA comes out.

Alan Wake's Episodic Structure and the Trends of 2010

 One of the things that's interesting about playing Alan Wake (Remastered) is that it's a glimpse into an era of gaming that, while I was certainly around for it, came over a decade ago and thus feels something like a time capsule.

There are some aspects that I find actually quite refreshing. There's zero sense of "progression" in terms of Alan's power as you play through the game. Most segments see you lose all the equipment you've amassed over the course of the previous one, and there's no resources that have you making a "build" where you choose, say, to increase your health or the power of certain attacks.

Now, I realize that this might sound like a veiled critique of Control, Remedy's more recent game. I don't mean it to be, but I just think that it's interesting and kind of fun to have a game where you're there to play through the story and the levels without thinking about "stats."

Another thing that is unconventional, though perhaps only today, is Alan Wake's division into "Episodes." Despite the fact that the story is about a novelist who seems to have somehow written a manuscript of the Stephen King-style horror story he's now living through, the game is broken up in a manner similar to a television show. (Evidently Remedy Studio has actually sold the rights to make a TV show based on the game, which I actually think could work pretty well). The game originally came out in 2010, during the era of "Peak TV" or the "Golden Age of Television," which... it's possible we're no longer in. Serialized dramas on TV were the center of the pop culture and, frankly, "screen art" conversation.

This was also an era in which some game studios envisioned a new structure for delivering game content - with "episodic" releases as a possibility. Half Life 2 (which had come out several years earlier, to be fair) had two DLC chapters that were referred to as "Episodes," and if memory serves, this was also embraced by TellTale's various story-centered games.

Now, you could argue that really what the episodes in Alan Wake are are simply a different name for "level," a gaming structure that dates back to Super Mario Bros. in 1985.

But Alan Wake leans heavily into the idea of approaching the story as if it's some serialized TV drama. Episodes begin with a "previously on" recap, just as you'd get with any serialized TV show (which can feel very silly when you've just finished the level they're recapping, but is great at helping you catch up if you take a break).

While Stephen King is an undeniable influence on the game (the shadowy "Taken" are perhaps more broadly from any kind of horror story, but the weird idea of selfish people trying to gain power by manipulating artists and a protagonist who has some other version of himself on another plane of existence "writing" this reality into being feels very Stephen King) another strong influence is David Lynch and his show (with Mark Frost) Twin Peaks.

King and Lynch are not usually included in the same conversations - King is generally seen as a popular but not really critically "important" writer (though I think as generations raised on King's books begin to have a say in the critical, literary "canon" that's changing) while David Lynch is an arthouse movie director that exists about as far as you can imagine from "popular entertainment" (though again, Twin Peaks in its original run was actually a hugely popular water cooler-conversation-starter,) there's actually a lot of shared DNA there. Both like to examine the darkness lurking underneath America's idyllic, small-town seeming utopias and often approach that with an eye toward the strange and the dreamlike (or nightmare-like).

Indeed, I sometimes think that David Lynch might actually play in the genre of cosmic horror, but his narrative style is so unconventional that critics place his works outside of the "genre" and into the "literary" or "arthouse" space.

Expressed as a video game, I think Alan Wake is fun, though I do sometimes feel like the actual "game" parts can feel like a sort of interlude within the meat of the game's entertaining value. Luckily, at least so far, none of the "trudging though the woods" segments of the game has felt so long as to wear out its welcome, but I think you could rightly criticize it for getting a little samey - ultimately, most of these segments have you just follow a relatively simple path and then do the same "shine your light as much as you can until you can pump some rounds into the Taken you're being attacked by" or, if you get overwhelmed, you usually get flares or flashbangs to take out a large number of them at once.

One thing I find interesting is that one of the "patients" at Doctor Emil Hartman's lodge on Cauldron Lake, where Alan spends a brief time being told that he's actually a schizophrenic who has had a psychotic break after his wife drowned and died (something he and we never believe for a second,) is a video game designer. At one point, we hear him ranting about how producers come in and force him to make changes to a game so that they can feel like they've got a fingerprint on it, and there's a joke about adding a Mullet to a game character, and how now the game has something called "Mullet Time," which I have to imagine is a reference to the heavy use of bullet time in Max Payne (Remedy's original claim to fame.) It even makes me wonder whether this is a critique of Alan Wake's own slow-motion camera effects when you dodge one of the Taken's attacks.

This slow-motion kind of speed-ramp is the most visually dated element in the game - something that feels like it was probably mind-blowing and cool in 2010, but now calls way too much attention to itself and kind of slows down the action.

There are also segments in the game where you can get in a car and drive around - sometimes using the headlights and the weight of the car to easily take out Taken who would otherwise be a bigger challenge. Now, don't get me wrong - I really like when an on-foot game can also see you getting into a vehicle, but it's also something that feels very much like a trend that was big in 2010 and maybe not as much of a deal nowadays (thinking back, I remember how the original Mass Effect had planets you could go to and drive around in the Mako, but those worlds were often pretty empty aside from one or two buildings you could explore. Half Life 2 also had extensive sections with a... hovercraft, I think? And later a little dune buggy).

Something I actually really love that feels dated is that the game makes use of filmed actors at times - specifically, when you find televisions that have another version of Alan speaking through them, we see the actor for Alan's appearance, Ilkka Villi, rather than the CGI facsimile that serves as the character model. This was something I loved about Control, which was peppered through with live action video of Matthew Poretta as Doctor Casper Darling (who is also the voice actor for Alan Wake).

Back in the 1990s, in the early days of video and computer games, this was more common - CGI was so rudimentary at the time that a lot of game studios simply chose to dress actors in costume and film them, and then insert the videos as cutscenes (for me, the most memorable performances were Rand and Robyn Miller as Achenar and Sirrus - and then the former also as their father Atrus - in Myst). This fell out of fashion by the 2000s, but I like that Remedy has chosen to keep this method in their toolbox - something that might have felt dated in 2010 but now feels novel once again.

What I'm finding exciting about the story of Alan Wake is that the "scary shadow people" as the main monsters you face are just the jumping off point. There's weirdness afoot, and these guys with axes and chainsaws who can only be killed after you've exposed them to enough light are just the obstacle to uncovering that.

Legacies: Back to the Forbidden Reach, a Tauren's Trauma, and a Human's Homecoming

 Patch 10.0.7 went live today, and in most expansions you'd get maybe some rebalancing and maybe some new bandaid on a partially functional game system in a patch like that, here we've gotten access to a new (well, technically not new, but new for most characters) zone and some interesting story quests.

Emberthal has tracked the Sundered Flame to the Forbidden Reach, where this less cooperative and altruistic group of Dracthyr have come to claim the power left there by Neltharion. They're not alone, of course - the three surviving Primal Incarnates, released at the end of Dragonflight's opening raid, have also come here to look for resources in their fight against us (it's actually kind of cool to see that Iridikron is not arrogant - he recognizes that we're a real threat, and that his team needs something to even the odds.) But while the Incarnates are there more or less just to tease the trip underground in 10.1, we're treated to a series of quests that show us around this new zone and deal with the dark legacy of Neltharion.

And, in fact, legacies - particularly problematic legacies - are kind of a running theme here.

Spoilers for quests that just went live ahead, specifically the intro quests to the Forbidden Reach, the Baine questline in Ohn'aran Plains, and the Human Heritage Armor quests.

Nyctophobia with Alan Wake

 Having consumed Control and its two DLC expansions, I found myself eager to explore the connected game (made abundantly clear in Control's second DLC, AWE) Alan Wake. This was a game I remember being intrigued by when it first came out in 2010, but never got around to playing. A few years ago a remaster came out, and given a relative cheap cost on the Playstation store, I got the game for my PS5.

The very first words of narration in this heavily narrated game are "Stephen King," and so it should be no surprise that the story of Alan Wake is meant to feel like it could be a King story. Taking place in the town of Bright Falls, it trades King's typical northern New England for the Pacific Northwest (a choice that might reflect the other influence of David Lynch and particularly his TV show Twin Peaks) but Bright Falls could easily exist in Maine as well.

In my delve into the idea of the New Weird, I keep finding myself thinking about the way that, despite his being the most popular living Horror writer, I've always felt that Stephen King doesn't quite fit into that genre neatly. That might be in part because my first King novels were the first few of the Dark Tower series, which set out to be an emphatically American epic fantasy. But the thing is, King's stories tend to get a little weird one way or another. Usually, whatever paranormal or otherworldly monster or threat is only one element.

Take The Shining, for example. The Overlook Hotel has some kind of evil presence (more complicated and alien than just ghosts, though it would be easy to mistake it for that) that drives Jack Torrance to homicidal rage, but at the same time, Danny Torrance has his eponymous Shine, which is some kind of enigmatic psychic power that isn't connected in any direct way with the presence at the hotel, other than that it helps him and his mom escape.

Alan Wake could be a King protagonist, not least because he's a writer (though he seems to be a kind of neo-pulp crime novelist rather than a horror writer).

Things get weird quick for Alan Wake. In fact, things start weird because the playable tutorial is set within a nightmare that just so happens to mirror future events, where a character he's written to have some nasty fate in one of his books comes after him for revenge - to the character, Wake is basically God, assigning a cruel fate solely for the purpose of drama.

We find that the nightmare occurs as he's sitting in his car on a ferry to Bright Falls (telling us this is an isolated little town if you can't just drive there) with his wife, Alice. While things are more or less normal in those first moments - just a local with a late night radio show asking for an interview with the famous author - things get, in this case, decidedly Lynchian as he enters a diner that must have been designed to look like the RR from Twin Peaks, and when he goes to pick up the key for the house he and his wife are renting, he has a bizarre interaction with a spooky woman with a black mourning veil, who gives him the key. Naturally, as he and Alice pull away, the man they were renting from runs out, yelling that they forgot their key.

To sum up: they get to the house, and we learn that Alice has a severe case of Nyctophobia - fear of the dark. Alan has to reassure her and get a generator running before she'll enter the dark house. Once she's settled in there, she reveals that she actually rented the place as an opportunity for him to try writing again - he's been suffering from three years of writer's block. They argue, he goes out to take a walk and cool off, but then something... strange happens. The lights shut off, and Alice screams, and he sees her sinking into the lake, and then...

He's in his wrecked car, teetering on the edge of a cliff. Trudging through the woods to get to a gas station where he hopes to call for help, he's assaulted by people from the town who are covered in some kind of veil of shadow.

This is where the game's combat loop takes form - Alan finds a flashlight and a gun, and you learn that you need to shine light on enemies to dispel the darkness that makes them invulnerable before you can shoot them.

And the nature of this corruption feels very Kingian - the named enemies (kind of bosses, but often also characters we've encountered previously) rant and rave with words they would normally use. The first "boss," a guy named Stucky, who was supposed to give you the key to the house on the lake, rants about renting cabins in a voice that gets distended and distorted.

But the truly Kingian elements that start popping up are when things get less straightforwardly scary and more weird and unexplained. Alan begins to find pages of a manuscript to the book he's been struggling to write, and the story he's evidently written describes almost prophetically what is happening or about to happen in the next moments. One of these pages describes being blinded by a television that spontaneously turns on when he gets to the gas station, and sure enough, that TV turns on, showing him in the cabin his wife had rented, ranting about his need to keep writing reality so that the world wouldn't end.

It's possible I just haven't yet gotten the rhythm of the game down yet, or it's possible that thirteen years is long enough for a PS3/Xbox 360 era game to feel kind of dated, but at least so far there are elements that feel a tad out of line with what I've come to expect from other games - particularly after playing through Remedy's Control. To be fair, the latter game's protagonist is, for lack of a better word, pretty much a magically-enhanced superhero shortly into the game's runtime, while Alan is just a guy trying to survive a nightmarish scenario.

One of the elements of the gameplay is that the sprint/dodge button causes near misses to slow down the action momentarily so you get a kind of speed-ramp shot of Alan dodging out of the way of a deadly swung wrench or bat. I can't decide if this is something that might have felt really cool thirteen years ago but now looks a little cheesy.

Light is your weapon and shield in the game - you need to shine your flashlight at foes for a certain amount of time before you can take them down, and you can expend the battery of your light to do so with greater speed, making batteries as valuable as bullets.

I'm not super far into the game, but one thing that's very unusual is that the story is broken up like episodes of a TV show. When you reach the gas station and are brought back to town by the sheriff, there's even music that plays that you could imagine playing over the ending credits of an episode. Next thing, you get a literal "previously on" recap and a flashback cold-open to Alan and Alice's life back in New York, reinforcing the idea of Alice's fear of the dark when they suffer a blackout due to a blizzard. The action then returns to the present, where we find that Alan has a missing week between his wife's disappearance and waking up after the car accident. Furthermore, he's told that the cabin on the island on Cauldron Lake hasn't existed for decades, raising the question of where the hell Alice could even be.

I'll leave the recap off here, but there's a general sense of mystery that goes beyond "why are these people getting turned into shadow-people who want to kill me?" And given the influences, there' no way it's going to be simple or expected.

Withdrawal from Control

 So, I really liked Control.

Having now completed the main mission of Control's second DLC expansion, AWE, I'm at a point where there's not really any big story-relevant things to do in the game anymore - just some side-missions that don't really promise a lot of interesting revelations (I could be wrong, to be fair).

AWE, to me, leaned in to the game's strengths more than the Foundation one. Foundation was, I think, longer, and did delve into the deep lore of the FBC and the Oldest House, while AWE served primarily to confirm that Control and Alan Wake take place in the same fictional universe. But most of what I got from Foundation was simply a series of elaborate puzzles in the Astral Plane - one of those blank voids that tends to have more power as a setting the less time we spend there. AWE takes place in a lost and locked-down sector within the FBC - the Investigations Sector - where the darkness that is the main threat from Alan Wake has infected things and mixed like chocolate and peanut butter with the Hiss. In Wake's words, the two enhance one another in terrible ways - a sound made darker, a darkness made louder.

Returning us to the brutalist offices and warehouses of the Oldest House in contrast to the more natural (if weird) caves of Foundation, there's more of an invitation to speculate on the functionality of these rooms that are, admittedly, really meant as a challenge for traversal.

We're probably past the statute of limitations on spoilers here, but just in case: Spoilers Ahead:

Actually, also, Spoilers for Stephen King's Dark Tower series as well.