A Decade After Alan Wake

Ten years since Alan Wake originally released on consoles and I still think it’s Remedy Entertainment’s best game, and one of the most ambitious games ever made. There’s little doubt in my mind: it will continue to be one of the best games I’ve played for decades to come. This is a game that has been subconsciously gnawing at me since I played it; the blend of intricate plot, novel tweaks to game mechanics, and the oppressive atmosphere deliver a superb experience. If you haven’t played it, I suggest you do so immediately, because skipping Alan Wake is a massive disservice to yourself.

Have You Got a Light?

Almost everything you do within Alan Wake relates to using light to vanquish the darkness consuming people and objects of the world. Defeating the Dark Presence isn’t accomplished by just shooting enemies while running around sets: you need to burn away the protective dark barrier around the Taken and possessed objects before they can be defeated. This change is what really sets Alan Wake apart from almost every other action-adventure game; all enemies remain a threat while protected by the Dark Presence.

More novelty is found in the weapon choices used in the game; things normally ignored by the majority of shooters become very important. Non-deadly weapons, like flash-bang grenades, flares, and flare guns are the bread-and-butter of every playthrough, and give players the ability create strategies around space management. Using light is further worked into exploration by discovering directions to resource caches in phosphorescent paint.

This kind of radical shift in available weaponry is still a fresh experience today; the shooters produced by the triple-A industry are continuing to be incredibly uniform in style and content.

Dark Lustre

The atmosphere around Bright Falls consistently delivers for the entire game, and the transitions from idyllic small town during day-time into a malicious night-time horror play on the fear of the dark everyone experiences as a child. The exploration segments are visually and mentally engaging as you journey through the darkness and fog while keeping an eye out for lurking enemies.

The enemies and set pieces have enough variety and combinations that they’re never boring; all the enemies, being workers of the surrounding areas, are connected to the locations you visit. Each location is connected to others quite seamlessly: you must find ways to avoid obstacles, take trails around large ravines to arrive at destinations beyond, and as always in Alan Wake, move away from the darkness toward the light.

The beautiful coincidence of the visual design choice made within Alan Wake, darkness and fog being the main driver of action-oriented segments, is it has aged gracefully. It still looks good playing it today on a 4K monitor, however, the cut-scene videos are showing a bit of age, as the up-scaling causes artefacts. It’s not something that is terribly jarring, and the musical score immediately makes up for it.

Remedy Entertainment hired a real band, Poets of the Fall, to write the music for the in-world band Old Gods of Asgard. Old Gods of Asgard create songs with lyrics that tie directly into the plot of the game. The music both as background to the experience and part of the narrative is something I have yet to experience in any other title.

Malleable Reality

The best part of Alan Wake for me is the intricate story, unfolding in small, reality-bending chunks. Very few games attempt such an ambitious story, and fewer still managed to create something cohesive out of them. Alan Wake’s story doesn’t attempt to answer every question that arises from the events of the game, but those loose ends are precisely what gives the story longevity.

The story unfolds around a magical lake where writers can turn their creations into reality, but there is a malevolent entity present around the lake as well. This entity wants to be free of its prison and attempts to use several people to write its freedom; two of which are Thomas Zane and Alan Wake.

The story itself has multiple protagonists, but focuses on the immediate experiences of only Alan Wake. The events of the story are set up by several individuals: Thomas Zane, Cynthia Weaver, the Anderson brothers, and Alan Wake himself. Each person plays a crucial role in the events leading up to obtaining a broken light-switch from Alan’s childhood called the Clicker. Zane creates the Clicker, Cynthia guards it, Alan must acquire it, and the Anderson brothers guide Alan to it.

The moment Alan retrieves the Clicker is pivotal to the story because it temporally links Zane to Alan. Inside the shoebox, Zane has placed a page of writing, brought into reality by the magic of the lake, which creates the Clicker as part of Alan’s childhood — prior to this, Zane had written himself and the entity out of reality; only Zane’s possessions which were already stored within a shoebox would remain. With this action Zane demonstrates that the power of the lake is capable of altering past and future realities: he removes himself and all his work from the world and modifies a reality that has not come to pass. Zane takes things a step further by placing the Clicker both in a shoebox for Cynthia to guard and into Alan’s life, potentially creating an object capable of bi-location.

Yet all of what we experience within the game is Alan’s writing: every battle, roadblock, and set-back the Dark Presence creates is part of the story Alan writes to escape. The journey itself is of Alan’s design, but the destinations have been laid out in advance by Zane. Not to be outdone, Alan creates an intriguing ending to his own personal horror story: his escape and harrowing adventure all must lead him back to the cabin to complete the final page. Finishing his story can only be undertaken by making the story reality and experiencing it until its penultimate scene. Alan’s story blends reality and story together until they are indistinguishable; he creates a mobius strip of seamlessly blended reality and fiction.

There are two pages I think tie directly into the mobius-strip-story idea; one is only found in Nightmare Mode, which reads as follows:

I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it. In it, I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it. In it, I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it. In it, I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it. In it, I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it. In it, I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it.

— Wake Reads a Page

The other is available as part of the story itself:

Nightingale tried to make sense of the manuscript. It was disjointed and strange. He didn’t understand half of it, but it all rang true, impossibly true.

He took out his hip flask when he reached the page that described how he reached the page that made him take out his hip flask.

It wasn’t the booze that made his mind reel.

— Nightingale Reads the Manuscript

Both of these pages imply that the power of the lake is also capable of causing people to take specific actions; actions which Wake has already written and are coming to pass, as the script is played out. Nearly all of Alan’s story revolves around actions he takes, and he is essentially guiding himself to finish the story within the story, but to guide himself to that realized ending necessitates an already completed story. The Writing-Alan must have written the ending for Acting-Alan to undertake, but Acting-Alan eventually finishes the story to become Writing-Alan. If the story can only be finished within itself, Writing-Alan must have previously have been Acting-Alan. The game’s story seems to take place within a recursive framework of actions relying on previous Writer-Alans which rely on previous Actor-Alans which rely on previous Writer-Alans.

This seems to be the best way to defeat the Dark Presence, as it is capable of eventually returning from the Dark Place. Instead of attempting, like Zane or the Anderson brothers, to put it back to sleep, Alan traps it in a time-loop of events it is required to play out while freeing Alice at the moment the time-loop begins. Is there any actual proof of that? None at all, but that kind of speculation is what keeps this story so interesting to me.

Many more things occur within the story, but these highlight what I think is best about it: there is subtlety and depth to the plot of Alan Wake that remains unmatched by the majority of games ever created. Alan Wake shows some of the heights that video games are capable of when used as a medium for interactive story-telling.

Reach the Lighthouse

There won’t ever be enough time to explore every game, but I think that Alan Wake is one that deserves attention — especially if you enjoy horror-thriller. If the novel weaponry in the game isn’t enough to intrigue you, the full story definitely should keep your interest. Reach the lighthouse, finish the game, and decide for yourself if it’s real or just a dream.