Thirteen years after the disappearance of best-selling author Alan Wake, FBI agent Saga Anderson arrives in the small town of Bright Falls, Washington, to investigate a series of ritual murders. However, when the corpse of one of the victims revives in the morgue, this becomes clear The enclave is under siege by supernatural forces.
At the same time, Alan Wake remains trapped in the Dark Place, a purgatory in the form of a television studio where he is harassed on a never-ending talk show. Beyond, a nocturnal New York awaits him where his double, Mr. Scratch, is rewriting a novel that is influencing the reality of the outside world.
Remedy’s sequel features two parallel campaigns that can be played in any order, alternating between them at will Saga’s research, strongly influenced by the sensitivity of David Lynch and his seminal work Twin peaks (with notes by Seven, The silence of the lambs Yes True detective), and Alan’s metalinguistic disquisitions, rooted in the figure of Stephen King and his essays and ideas on literary creation.
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This way Saga can retreat into a mental space where he connects all the clues in the case with wires on a wall. On the other hand, Alan has his own writer’s office, where he recombines settings and plot points to change the settings of the nightmarish New York in which he lives. The two plots intertwine at key moments and end up coming together in a high-tension climax.
It’s obvious that Sam Lake, the game’s Finnish director, has spent much of the last decade creating the most convoluted plot imaginable, with lookalike evil, time jumps and a dreamlike atmosphere where things are not governed by a recognizable logic.
The characters in this story are unable to distinguish truth from fiction in a world where at any moment the pages of a manuscript can sculpt tangible reality, and neither can the player. There are extensive soliloquies on the literary conventions of genres (horror, thriller)the elements that intervene in the construction of the plots, the background of the memory and the very act of creation as a vital necessity, even more urgent in moments of absolute block.
It walks a very fine line between the erudite and the pretentiousbut when he risks succumbing under the weight of his own alienation, Lake manages to intersperse a brilliant sequence, like that of the musical, where the Poets of Autumn and the actors sing the writer’s biography while performing the most bizarre choreography imaginable.
They are moments of lightness that offer a respite from the darkness prevalent in their atmospheres and a meta-commentary that always finds a way to continue turning the circle.
Fact and fiction
Even Bright Falls and Watery, where the entire Saga plot takes place, are not typical American enclaves. The presence of a strong Finnish colony serves as an excuse for the studio to shed its specific identity with all kinds of details, from folklore to the prevalence of saunas, creating an environment beyond the tangible space that connects the land of a thousand lakes with the humid forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Saga investigates the murders in Bright Falls
At Remedy they have always experimented with transmedia approaches, but here they take things to another level. Many sequences, such as the interviews in the television studio, are shot with real images; but beyond that, the artistic direction is engaged in the projection of cinematographic images on the walls of the stages or superimposed on the screen, creating a fusion that is the basis of the idea behind the entire game: how fiction intrudes into reality, blurring its edges and altering our perception.
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The result is a work with an incontestable identity despite the playable frustrations that come with cumbersome combat. It is Remedy’s first pure horror game and the studio lacks the tables that Capcom exhibits, for example, in its Resident Evil.
In general, enemies have too much health, move too fast (wolves are a nightmare in themselves), and It all ends up leading to shootings that, while sporadic, last too long. and, what’s even worse, they force repetition. It is a factor that distorts the experience, drawing attention to the puzzles, the quest phases, an inextricable plot and the cutting-edge experimentation in the formal proposal.
Nonetheless, as an example of ergodic literature (very much in line with The house of leavesby Mark Z. Danielewski) is unparalleled in big budget games. It cost seventy million euros. The most expensive cultural work in the history of Finland.
Alan Wake
Study: Remedy.
Publishing house: Epic games.
Creative director: Sam Lake
Village: Finland.
Platform: PC, PS5, Xbox series
2023-12-31 17:09:27
#sofa #David #Lynch #Stephen #King