Stories come naturally to people. Many experts in the field of psychology and sociology have advocated for a vision of the human mind that centers itself around key narratives, organizing events as best makes sense both rationally and symbolically, instead of a more cut-and-dry database approach. Not only a way of understanding the world, but as a way of assigning meaning to our experiences. Far from being controversial, we readily admit this conception of the world ourselves in casual conversation; expressions like “that is the game that changed my life” are so commonplace as to pass unnoticed in everyday life. Alan Wake is not only a title that, itself, deals with the human need and tendency to narrativise, and our relationship with the stories we create, but it is also a title that indeed changed my life.
Coming out in the same general period of time for me when gaming was crossing over from lifelong hobby to a genuine passion, and something I sought to understand and master more holistically, Alan Wake touched a raw nerve in me. As I always like to put it, a game about an insomniac stumbling through the woods in the dead of nights, hopped up on coffee, reading scary stories and listening to unsettling music is tailor-made to my sensitivities, and honestly my day-to-day experience. As I’m sure you can deduce, dear reader, I also fancy myself something of a writer, and just like Alan Wake, I find myself constantly at odds with the products of my own creativity.
Remedy sucked up all the oxygen from the collective gaming press a few years ago as they tripped over themselves to shower Alan Wake 2 in praise and accolades. As of the moment of writing, I have not played it despite it being a game that I have been wishing for and eagerly awaiting for over 10 years. The reason is simple, as the poet Tyler once sung: “I don’t want to miss a thing”. Given that I’ve already waited such an extraordinarily long time, and accounting for my dim wit, I didn’t want to be caught off guard by a reference to a game from over a decade ago that “I’m pretty sure I remember well”.
In this small series of articles, I want you all to accompany me on a trip down memory lane, covering the complete “Remedy Connected Universe” as it pertains to Alan Wake, so that I can get a better perspective on the themes and game design of the series before playing its latest instalment. Tonight, we will be talking about the original Alan Wake, so let’s get to it!
Stephen King once wrote th—nah I’m just messing with you. I’m not going to repeat Alan’s silly monologue. But indeed, Alan Wake starts off wearing its influences on its sleeve by quoting them outright, and doing little effort to hide them otherwise. The strange alchemy that makes up this title congeals in an action horror self-described thriller, bearing a light influence on the gameplay from Max Payne, cinematography taken from David Lynch, and narrative style derived from Stephen King. A mixture that proves more cohesive than it might strike initially, with most of its flaws stemming from execution rather than premise.
The monologue, or rather, narration introduces us to our main character, setting, and conflict in a succinct way. Alan Wake is a writer, often ruminating on the demands of story, genre, and the emotions they are meant to induce in the reader. In his nightmares he is often haunted by darkness, sometimes ordered to reach a lighthouse that will give him sanctuary by a reassuring voice that offers him guidance through his dreams, such as teaching him to stave off the forces of darkness using light. Once the player gets through this brief tutorial, Alan wakes up (hehehehehe) gasping for air to the sound of his wife calling him.
Alice Wake is introduced as a reassuring and dependable wife, trying to comfort Alan from his nightmare, and encouraging him to cheer up now that they’ve arrived at Bright Falls, a pacific-northwest town so picture-perfect it’s uncanny. They two have come here as an escape, trying to help Alan with his insomnia and stress, a result of not being able to write a page in years. However, the hopes of a retreat away from the persona of “Alan Wake, writer” are quickly dashed, as the first people in town that Alan interacts with are a local radio host asking for an interview after recognizing him on sight, and a diner waitress so devoted to his works she personally brought a cardboard cutout of him to decorate the place.
After a meeting where a woman by the name of Barbara Jagger hands Alan his keys in the most ominous way, only for his truck to be chased moments later by the man he was actually there to meet, the couple eventually make it to the cabin and the events of the main plot quickly precipitate themselves. As they argue over a typewriter Alice bought for Alan, hoping the idyllic Washington town would grease the wheel of his creativity, the power suddenly goes out. Alan takes the chance to storm out of the conversation, knowing his wife will not follow due to her severe nyctophobia
Alice screams for help only moments later, leading Alan to rush back in looking for her. Finding a broken railing and an open door, he runs to the edge of the water only to see her sinking deeper in. Without hesitation he takes a deep breath and jumps after her. A quick fade to black after, we find him bleeding in a car crash. As he stumbles into the night, he finds a series of pages purportedly written by him as part of a novel called “Departure”. The manuscript narrates him being chased by men taken by darkness, intent on killing him. It only takes a moment for this story to come to life as Alan finds that the same methods for survival taught to him in his dream are now reality, and his only hope to make it through the night.
As the plot progresses it is revealed that the town of Bright Falls, and Cauldron Lake especially, is home to a mysterious energy that can harness creative energy to affect reality. In the past it has had an influence over a local poet, Thomas Zane, and a band of heavy metal musicians called the Old Gods of Asgard. Alan must reconstruct the history of these artist’s battles with the Dark Presence under Cauldron Lake to better understand how to rescue his wife through his own creativity.
The narrative structure of Alan Wake often leaves most of the storytelling in the beginning and end of each chapter, often establishing an objective during the daytime, with the main chunk being the Player controlling the writer’s nightly escapades through the forests of Bright Falls; downing demons and picking up pages on his way to the actual destination. It is during these middle sequences of chapters that the players are finally given a chance to truly familiarize themselves with the intricacies of combat.
The flow of fighting is methodical, slow paced, consisting of a two-step process to kill almost all enemies. The darkness that has taken the people of Bright Palls paints ebony their souls, and bestows them with infernal might. Alan must first blast away this coating of darkness before he can hope to do any actual damage. This is initially done with the flashlight, though later on he will acquire bigger and better tools for the job such as flares which provide a brief deterrent and a safe space upon which the taken dare not tread, or flash-bangs providing such intense luminosity that they take out enemies all by themselves like a traditional video game grenade.
The second step then consists of the all too familiar gunning-them-down which comes as second nature to any veteran gamer. At Sam Lake’s insistence that Alan be unfamiliar, and somewhat inept, to real-life action situations his arsenal is rather conventional and the way he uses them mostly unimpressive. Using only four weapons: a revolver, 2 varieties of shotgun and a hunting rifle, Alan Wake will go onto taking down dozens if not a couple hundred of the taken by the end, in a fashion that is almost diametrically opposite to Max Payne’s.
Where Payne had effortlessly run-walked in that fashion all too familiar to game heroes, Alan’s natural pace is a brisk walk with an optional sprint that his feeble writer constitution can only sustain for a few seconds. The policeman’s best strategy had been to jump straight into the crowd and take them out quickly with his dual pistols, whilst Alan Wake’s best bet is to always fight on the back-foot: Shining the flashlight on the enemies one by one, taking quick and routine pauses to stun enemies trying to encircle you, and securing the kill with a rhythmic one-two-three tap of the trigger.
There are corollaries to the gameplay, such as Alan’s flashy dodges that will trigger a cool slow-mo if done in the nick of time, or set pieces that essentially turn a car into an armored vehicle on account of its powerful headlights, but the gameplay quickly becomes second nature. Like much of the ambiance, it is not really horrifying but does a good job at fostering tension. Forcing the player to literally zoom in and stare down an enemy slowly walking towards them while a crowd closes in from all angles never quite lets you relax or stop looking to the corners of your vision, even if you are convinced that you can come out on top.
The simplicity and novelty of Alan Wake’s combat is both its best asset and its greatest weakness. All but eliminating the possibility of a quick kill except when using powerful ammunition like flare guns or grenades, makes even the smallest of skirmishes take a moment. What can be a fun and somewhat hypnotic routine with the right framing, can quickly devolve into monotony and repetition should it start to lose you.
It speaks to the limitations of its combat system that when this title needs to really push its action over the top, it does so by putting you in situations that fundamentally bypass at least some elements of it. Whether it be the final sequences of the game pitting you against poltergeists that require you to scramble to generate as much light as quickly as possible, as they take no damage from bullets and are incredibly difficult to dodge; the famous concert set piece with a light show that partly takes cares of enemies’ shields for you; or the DLC’s dreamscapes that have you illuminating ghostly script in the air to materialize tools or environmental hazards.
Alan Wake’s mechanics do not fail at being a horror game, it is very clear that while down paced and tense, this is an action game straight and through. And while it remains satisfying, coming out the other end it is hard to say that any fan of shooters has to experience this combat. Not to mention, despite ammo being the only thing the forest has to offer besides collectibles and story additions, on a normal difficulty run there will never be enough enemies around for you to worry about your supplies. And even on the hardest difficulty, while you might empty out a couple weapons in an encounter, you can always rest assured you’ll top up and be fully prepared for the next fight.
Indeed, all of the tension in Alan Wake is merely an illusion. A magic trick created by the sound design, environment, and story. This is far from a bad thing, it is not only the intended experience, but also a powerful spell in its own right. Running off into the woods in search of a page, a thermos, or just out of curiosity, can quickly turn the expansive forestry you traverse unnerving as the shadows close on you and demonic hissing and whispering begin to take over the sounds of nature. Whether you are sure in your capacity to take on the oncoming threat or not, it’s hard to shut down the part of your brain just begging you to get the fuck out of there.
The game’s signature visual trick is, of course, its interplay of light and dark. With blindingly white beams so intense they make the darkness beyond its reach seem all the more oppressive, and oily black shadows that writhe and sometimes seem to swallow the very air. A curious trick, tied to the metaphors of the story, is that both light and dark seem to refract unusually in Bright Falls. Refracting and shining more like they do underwater than how they do in everyday life, evoking other comparisons such as the behavior of oil in deep sea, which Alan himself uses in his manuscript.
When not embroiled in the existential battle for light and Dark, the game’s visuals and music remain surprisingly quaint and mundane. Doing its best to portray small-town Americana as learnt from the works of David Lynch, you can expect traditional locations such as the diner with bright red seats, the pier, the gas station and the local church, all alongside an inconspicuous original soundtrack and inoffensive licensed music like Harry Nilson’s “Coconut”.
The small diversions and extra tidbits do wonders for fleshing out the experience and make this seem like a more involved adventure than it actually is. Take away the collectibles, the flavor text and the daylight exploration and there is little that differentiates most of the middle chapters in Alan Wake from each other. Where the final two chapters of the game are dynamic and bombastic, seeing Alan traverse the entire town as both inhabitants, architecture, and the very lighting try desperately to kill him. And whilst the introductory remains simple and contained due to its place as a first trial, the middle children can all blend together and even a small plot with a man pretending to be Alice’s kidnapper does little more than burn some time establishing some rules about the magic system only to then be cut at the quick and not mentioned again.
A lot of this can largely be attributed to Alan Wake’s famously troubled development, as it was originally conceived as an open-world game with a day and night cycle. In this hypothetical version of the game, you would have to procure supplies during the day to survive each coming night, and this is a big reason why an entire town was modeled and later on only used for linear levels, as this idea was later retooled into the conventional linear experience that was released.
But it’s after dark when Alan Wake reveals its most fun novelties. Your nightly outings will often be scored by a variety of original and licensed songs, some courtesy of Remedy staples Poets of The Fall and others by beloved artists like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Levels will often see you finding a radio or a television to enjoy the curious local night programming in which you can hear the citizens of Bright Falls muse over the strange happenings of the town with the disregard one might discuss a missing pet, or an episode of Night Springs: Sam Lake’s take on The Twilight Zone as another frame of reference for the curious brand of kooky spooks that the game is going for. These are always a short joke, and none of them are a masterclass of writing, but as fun small vignettes they add a lot of charm to the game, and a couple of them have never left me since I played the original title all the way back in 2010.
The feeling that Night Springs evokes might be the most appropriate summary of Alan Wake’s charm as a whole. A sort of reflexive “hey, look at this, isn’t it neat and weird?” impulse to show it to other people, in part as an effort to solve many of the lingering questions it offers. Because make no mistake, while Alan Wake has a lot in its mind, and it is no sophomore at any of the topics that it tackles, it offers far more questions that it has answers. It is often happier to simply acknowledge complicating factors to its ideas, only to toss the ball back at you in favor of sending Alan tumbling back into the night.
But what are these ideas? Well, for all the jokes about Remedy’s lack of subtlety, its more overt explanations of the story’s themes really only facilitate the game coating itself in even more subtext once it is certain you have picked up on the main allegory.
The game’s central metaphor is restated again through its six chapters and two DLCs. Alan’s creative writing is the light, fighting back against the darkness of uncertainty, self-doubt, and negative impulses. The dark is an oppressive lake or an ocean, whilst the light is sanctuary and a breath of air against it. This is made all but text in the DLCs especially, where a central mechanic is using the flashlight as a metaphorical device to materialize Alan’s words in order to get deeper into the magical dimension known as The Dark Place.
Most of the story’s themes revolve around what the game’s own Emil Hartmann dubs “The Creator’s Dilemma”. Alan’s personal motivations and demons in this entry being both guilt over abandoning his wife in a crucial moment, as well as an immense amount of self-doubt over the effects his writing is currently having on the town, what it might imply for his sanity, and the last two years in which he has not been able to write a word after a failed attempt to branch into different kinds of fiction.
The latter eventually proves to be his defining characteristic. This is no surprise given that his stock introduction is usually “My name is Alan Wake, I’m a writer”. These are themes I found extremely personally resonating, as someone that used to introduce themselves in the same manner many years ago. If the fight with Alice at the beginning of the game did not give it away, later flashbacks shed more light on the extent to which Alan’s personal life had been crumbling due to his frustrated creative endeavors.
Where before Alan used his gift for the word as a way to comfort Alice, passing onto her a family heirloom to help her cope with her nyctophobia, in recent years his character had been mostly irritable and evasive. Looking for inspiration and escape in the bottom of liquor bottles and lashing out at his wife when coming out empty-handed, this only compounded Alan’s guilt. Later sections in the story make it abundantly clear that Alan sees Alice as his muse, the source of his best and most radiant creativity. Whether he sees his failure to write as a failure to her inspiration, or whether he resents what he perceives as a fading of her positive influence, the end result was still an increasingly fraying relationship as a direct result of his troubled writing.
Alan Wake could then best be described as a story about the tribulations and requirements of creativity, and what crafting your identity around your ability to create can do to you. During most of the main game, despite being forced to under various threats, Alan can only bring himself to write while under the influence of the evil only known as the Dark Presence. It is only near the end of the story where Alan, of his own accord and fully lucid, can bring himself to sit in front of a typewriter and try to create an end to his story.
The DLCs pick up exactly after these moments, once Wake has fully immersed himself in The Dark Place and has decided to use its dark magic to his advantage, his creativity is fully unleashed. However, surrounded by demons both inner and very much real, and without guidance in this new style of writing (both the horror genre, and the spooky reality-bending type) Alan’s narrative instincts quickly come unhinged. The DLCs see you battling Alan’s deranged ID seeking nothing but to unleash its frustrations and hate onto its conscious self through its writing. Using his written word only for the purpose of crafting the most horrific scenarios it can throw itself into.
Here is where a lot of Alan Wake’s subtler contemplations on storytelling and creativity tie into themselves to make the whole story more cohesive. One of Alan’s often repeated concerns is the demands of the horror genre. Convinced that the Dark Place will only respond positively to the most airtight story he can create, he often worries about what constitutes “bad magic”.
Alan tries to learn from the failure of Thomas Zane, a poet gone missing in the 70s that once made his abode in Cauldron Lake’s diver’s isle. Most proof of Zane’s existence and life has since been eliminated from existence as a result of his battle with the Dark Presence. Much like Alan, he once lost his lover, Barbara Jagger, to the waters of Cauldron Lake. He tried to use the powers of the Lake to bring her back with magic, but she “came back wrong”, with the darkness only wearing her body as a disguise, his real lover lost to the waters. Zane continued to do his best to fix his mistakes, writing himself a fail safe to leave messages behind and proceeding to write himself out of existence to dive into the Dark Place in search of his wife
This isn’t just backstory to the setting; Zane often guides Alan through the night and provides him with supplies and even magical pathways. Though it is implied that, just like Barbara Jagger, this is merely a “bright presence” intent on battling the darkness and not the real Zane. The parallels between Zane’s story and Wakes are obvious, and serve as a way for the story to offer thoughts on what exactly is an “original story” and the exact boundaries and shapes of influence, and inspiration.
Late in the story it is revealed that Zane’s role in the ongoing battle between Alan and the darkness is larger than he initially let on. Through his fail safe messaging method, which states that any object protected within a shoebox will be immune to any attempts at rewriting reality, Zane left behind a page written specifically for Alan along with a gadget. The page in question describes Alan’s childhood memory of receiving “the clicker” from his mother, an old light switch which he believed had the power to drive away the monsters hiding in the dark, and which he had gifted to Alice for these same reasons.
Whilst Alan tries to question Zane as to whether this means that he himself is a product of Zane’s imagination, the answers he gets are unsatisfying at best. This fear and criticism of a man’s writing can also be seen in minor antagonist Agent Nightingale’s way of mockingly addressing Wake with a different famous writer’s name as to diminish his own achievements. However, the game’s larger themes and its constant references to other artists, both fictional and real, sheds a light on the idea that all creativity ultimately stems from other creative artwork. That creative endeavors are both imagination and craft put together for singular purposes, but that these at the same time stem from the world and situations that bred them.
These ideas are best exemplified on the other group of artists that Wake receives aid from in his battle against darkness: Retired rockers Old Gods of Asgard. Though initially written as a pair of ailing, borderline senile old men, as the story progresses brothers Tor and Odin Anderson prove to be a lot more than that.
Used as another example, just like Alan, of the dangers of unbridled creativity, the Andersons are initially portrayed as debauchery-loving rock stars way over the hill. Paying the price in old age for a life full of excess and often escaping whenever they can to continue partaking in more. However, later on it is revealed that their poison of choice is none other than the dark waters of cauldron lake brewed as moonshine. Quite literally drinking all of the negative manifestations of their creativity as a way to put them into their music.
The two brothers really did go as far as to legally change their names to Tor and Odin to better embody their image of the “old gods” for the stage, and it is rumored that Odin cut off his eye in a stroke of rock excess and devotion to his persona. But developments in the story quickly begin to suggest that their stage characters may in fact come with some real god-given gifts way beyond those that cauldron lake usually confers to creative types.
Just like the Odin of myth, Anderson has received a wisdom that sees through time and Tor can summon strength mightier than a man far his younger and is perhaps able to command thunder. However, their most interesting aspect is what they imply about the written word specifically.
Though I describe them in fairly dry terms here, all of these oddities of the Anderson brothers are described in-game with the same prose you have heard a thousand times about other rock stars. Their biographies of their days of youthful excess might as well be a page out of Kiss’s book and their description of becoming different men onstage could just as well be ripped off from reviews of Judas Priest’s latest tour. Right down to the, perhaps a little insulting, remarks that once they take to the stage “they really perform like much younger men”
The Andersons themselves also make use of the ambiguity of language on more than one occasion. Originally portrayed as a fit of senility, they choose to refer to Alan as “Tom” throughout all their conversations. However, once Alan has the opportunity to sit down with them, they explain to him that after understanding all the dark secrets of Cauldron Lake, they willingly gave up any expectations of being perceived as sane by those not-in-the know. They explain to him that they understand he is not Zane, however, as someone occupying the same role as him, they didn’t bother to make a distinction. This casts Alan as someone that, at least for the Anderson’s purposes, is fulfilling his role as “Tom” rather than himself.
The musicians send Wake to retrieve an old song from their homestead, telling him that it contains a message that will help him battle the darkness. This song is the haunting Ballad “The Poet and the Muse” interpreted by Poets of the Fall. While in universe it explicitly tells the tale about Zane and Jagger, it is important to note that almost all of the language in the song could easily be read as actually being about the Wakes without needing to reinterpret any of it.
Perhaps my favorite play on this motif is not one in dialogue, or even one directly tied to the Andersons, but a manuscript page that can be found in this same chapter as Wake makes his way to the farmstead. Having been separated from his manager Barry, both continue to make their way there separately. As Alan continues picking up prophetic manuscript pages, one of them reads as follows:
“Barry turned when he heard the heavy footsteps and saw the movement: the man-shaped shadow lunged at him from the bushes, an axe held high.
Barry screamed and threw up his hand. The world exploded.”
While most of Wake’s prose is usually quite plain and uncolorful, I always thought that description for being hit with an axe in the head was extremely expressive. Being that the obvious reading of the text. However, once you make your way to Barry’s encounter with the taken, you find that in truth the world exploding was nothing but the Andersons’ pyrotechnic display going off right on top of Barry, blasting away the Taken with sheer light and saving his life. Thus, fulfilling the page’s story in a different way. Yes indeed, it is the “No man born of a woman” style of cheating fate all over again.
The final main theme at play is that proposed by the presence of Dr. Hartman, a psychiatrist specializing in treating creative types at his retreat near Cauldron Lake. Portrayed as an antagonist and obstacle from the word go, and later revealed to have collaborated with a criminal to manipulate Wake’s writing under the guise of knowing the location of his wife, there is every reason to think that the game’s opinions on editors, consultants, and otherwise “meddlers” in the authors process is that of a right old prick.
However, it is worth contrasting this with the presence of Alice and Barry in the story. Both are portrayed to be heavy influences in Wake’s writing, and whilst they respect his boundaries and his personal creativity, I think what seems to set them apart from Wake is what they do not do.
How can money, advantages, and personal gain not be in the mind when creating in a society such as ours? Lest that you were born with a silver spoon in mouth, we all have to struggle in the job market just for the right of continuing to live and be sheltered. A creative endeavor is but an indulgence to those who need it, and one it’s hard to afford. Indeed, even if you make a rejection of money, fame, and other advantages that creativity may win you at the door of your proverbial studio every time you set out to create, you have allowed it to color your vision. It is this frame of mind, of writing as a means, as a way to obtain an objective that I believe Hartman represents.
Where Barry Wheeler is constantly asking Wake whether he’s been able to write another word, his inquiries often stop at that. Whereas Hartman has made a career for himself out of massaging those words, brushstrokes, and notes out of every troubled artist that comes his way. He forces them out by his own means. When faced with the Dark Presence, his reflexive response was to find a way to manipulate other people’s works and feelings to his own advantage. Whilst he, self-admittedly, “is not a creator” he is quite happy to bring as much of a forceful hand as needed into other people’s chest if it means he can get what he desires.
This, in a way, follows nicely after Thomas Zane’s (Hartman’s mentor) story. Where he once inadvertently wielded the powers of Cauldron Lake to wondrous ends, so much that it led him to inhabit Diver’s Isle as his permanent residence, and though it did cost him, the moment he decided to use this magic consciously and transactional, to bring his lover back, was the real turning point that cost him.
Similarly Hartman’s retreat at Cauldron Lake is adorned with paintings, sculptures, and books dedicated to him, offered to him as gifts, or otherwise works in process by his current in-patients that he subtly checks in with as he walks you through its hallways.
Contrast this with what concerns Wake and the Andersons’ creative processes. Whilst yes, Alan does want desperately to get his wife back, his method is never to just throw himself at the typewriter and create until he can achieve his ends. This is, in fact, exactly what the Dark Presence encourages him to do to further chaos in the town during his missing week. Instead, Alan is constantly worried about what exactly the story demands of him, about what rings true, about the words he should use, about what plot line might create “good magic” to surpass what he calls Zane’s “bad magic” in his attempt to transactionally exchange art for his wife.
The Andersons, on the other hand, stand at the opposite extreme of Hartman. Being the rockers brought down by excess, they function as the story’s stand-in for an artist that is written entirely out of passion and self-gratification at the expense of the kind of planning and calculation that, say, might prove beneficial when battling evil forces. As such they end up being its only survivors, but also deeply scarred and in a kind of strange dependent relationship with the Darkness in cauldron lake. A sort of addiction to dealing with larger-than-life experiences.
Alan Wake is a story about creation, but it’s also a story about its perils. It’s a story about what creation demands of you, and perhaps more insidiously what you will come to demand of yourself if you decide to become a creator. It is a game about what happens when you allow your creations to take such a center-stage in your mind that they come to control you more than you do them.
This much is apparent as much as Alan’s “worth” as a creative and as a person is constantly in question, with everyone and their dog feeling free to opine on his personality and output. Alan’s narration of events dealing out insights into his acuity but also showing us his incompetence for the situation in almost equal measure.
It’s a game about breaking free about what you suppose your “creative vision” is. About rejecting those who you’re compared to, and embracing those you’re actually similar to, about taking inspiration from strange places. About coming to find that your work is not as original, nor as unique as you thought it was.
Despite it all, this is a very unique game, for a very unique audience. It doesn’t stand alone, and it doesn’t have to. Games like Yume Nikki speak to the power that dreams hold over us, and it does so in a similarly heterodox and even-handed way that explores both its horrors and its delights.
If you were to ask me, what is art and creation, I’d tell you that it’s a compulsion. I’m a person that’s never quite come to terms with the real world. Though I study and I learn to better understand it, something about reality has never quite been all “there”. Art in comparison, has in the best of time managed to make me feel real in a way that nothing else has.
The emotions in me evoked by a record have, more often than not, been felt more vividly in my own skin than my own reaction to many personal tragedies and achievements. And I vividly remember many passages of my favorite novels because after reading them, my own life made more sense to myself.
So why do I write? Well, I write because I have to. I’ve never had any doubt of that. Though my body of work is not as prolific as I’d like it to be, rest assured that much like Kafka and Pessoa, when I die some unfortunate sod will see themselves up to the task of flipping through hundreds of pages of original novels, and ramblings about David Bowie, Lucky Star, Math Rock and whatever else has caught my eye in this life.
These are questions I struggle with on a daily basis. And the existence of Alan Wake did, back in my teens, give me a lot of solace in knowing that there was another person that could understand all this inner turmoil that I’d accepted as entirely my own. And not only that, but a person that dealt in the same strange, horror imagery, rock music, and cult movies that I also loved.
I think there is a lot of value in that. And I think having so many particular narrative ambitions, in conjunction with its strange mix of mechanics and iconography continue to make Alan Wake one of the most unique titles to ever hit shelves even this many years after its release.
In its final moments, Alan Wake embraces a bittersweet tone that sums up the dilemma of creation very well. Alan begins the process of crafting a story that he believes will free everyone from the dark magic afoot, and yet he does this at the price of sacrificing himself. Far from this being a defeat, it is seen as a taking of agency on his part. And yet, at the same time, he can’t help but reflect on the enormity of the task he has set upon. His famous final words of the base game, referring to the dark magic that influences his creativity being “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean”.
