Alan Wake II, a brilliant dive into the tortured mind of Max Payne’s creators

Flashback sequence. Released in 2010 after five long and painful years of development, Alan Wake It was well received by critics. If development studio Remedy started working on a sequel, it never came out, despite the first game selling 4.5 million copies. Alan Wake’s American NightmareReleased in 2012, it was not a direct sequel, but a spin off.

• Meeting Sam Lake, creator of Max Payne

The first game featured a character named Alan Wake, a bestselling thriller author. The latter, along with his wife Alice, rented an isolated chalet near Bright Falls, a charming town nestled in the heart of the United States, amid a mountain range. This escape was an opportunity for him to get closer to his wife, who understood him less and less, and to overcome the terrible anxiety of the blank page. Before sowing trouble in your career and putting your relationship in jeopardy.

But Bright Falls harbored a dark secret, and the lakeside cabin was not the refuge the writer had come to seek. When Alice goes missing, Wake goes looking for her and discovers the pages of a book she didn’t remember writing.

As he moved deeper and deeper into the woods at the cost of his increasingly vulnerable mental health, the pages of this book came to life. Darkness overtook Alan; The chalet became the front chamber of hell, and the majestic forest became a hunting ground for evil forces…

Stephen King to the rescue

“For Alan Wake, I really wanted to create a character that wasn’t an action hero with a mind; Hence, the idea of ​​becoming a writer. Added to this was the desire to make a supernatural thriller with elements that belonged. Horror genre. Stephen King It was clearly a standard meter, a necessary and absolute reference. He very often shows his craft as a writer in his dark stories. Yes, it was a natural cue” Sam Lake, Remedy studio columnist and game developer, told us when we caught up with him in 2016.

add: “This is Twin Peaks Which gave us the idea to start Alan Wake’s story in a small town called Cauldron Lake, between a river and a mountain. Just like in Twin Peaks, the forest is a place inhabited by evil. We also found that this environment worked very well in contrast to Max Payne; Offer a small town as a starting point instead of immersing the player in a big city like New York. It also enhanced the claustrophobic side we were looking for in Alan Wake.

Spin-offs aside, it took us 13 years – and two games in that time – to re-enter the cursed writer’s doomed fate. Opus, on which Sam Lake also holds several positions, from creative director to writing the script and even portraying a character in the game. In this case, an FBI agent named Alex Casey, the main character of Alan Wake’s novels…

But if Lake gives his features to this, his voice on the other hand is that of actor James McCaffrey, who is well known to fans in the Max Payne games. The choice is clearly anything but neutral as far as this goes Alan Wake II Navigating is a kind of Remedy-version, a world created by the studio after the first Max Payne game, with its tortured characters, interior monologues, neo-noir film atmosphere, etc.

Here’s the trailer…

Trapped between two worlds

Thirteen years later, nothing or very little has changed in Bright Falls, which is still imbued with its unsettling strangeness. A small town is threatened by a series of ritual murders. Saga Anderson, a successful FBI agent, arrives to investigate.

Meanwhile, Alan Wake, still trapped in a nightmare beyond our world from which he was unable to escape 13 years ago, writes a dark story to shape the reality around him and escape from prison. Anderson and Wake, two characters immersed in stories with different realities but closely related.

Set as a procedural and Scandinavian detective series, Alan Wake II takes the scalpel even further into the twists and turns of his ancestor’s tortured soul. A very meta and extensive story that takes about 25 hours of its rides (you’ll really need time).

Always in the model of the series, with its episodes and its final cliffhangers closed in music, as David Lynch did in his film. Twin Peaks season 3 (It’s no coincidence here either…), the story reaches an incandescent point, rarely reaching a reflection on the torment of the blank page and its frustration, parenthood, the reliability or unreliability of its memory, the nature of art, what it means to create…

To be honest, quite a dizzying and really complex, multi-layered story that we lost track of a bit at times. While Sam Lake clearly wasn’t working alone on the story, it’s clear that many of the themes discussed in the game are the product of his own questions, doubts, and aspirations.

Psychic lair diving

Alan Wake II combines elements of an investigative game. When the player plays Saga Anderson, he can pause the game, allowing him to enter an enemy-free space called the “Mental Lair”.

In fact, it is a visual representation of the thoughts of the saga, in which clues can be connected to reconstruct different cases, to connect witnesses to each other and crime scenes, etc. In addition to being able to perform profiling, i.e., “get inside” the heads of suspects and victims to interrogate their modus operandi and gather clues that will aid the plot.

Stepping into the controls of Alan Wake is a powerful revelation of gameplay. Hunted by an evil double as a character in The Dark Part of Stephen KingAlan Wake has no choice but to constantly write and rewrite chapters of a story (always dark, of course…) that literally come to life.

Trapped in its lair, writing as an endless loop can thus change the environment where it evolves according to the story. It’s easier to experience with a controller in hand than to describe, but the result is absolutely amazing and exciting.

As in the previous part, the player faces people controlled by dark forces and protected by shadows. They are very vulnerable to light and the player must take advantage of light sources to remove the shadow that acts as a shield before actually being able to take them down using the (small) weapon rack.

From pistol to crossbow, shotgun/shotgun, stun gun, flash grenade or other flash fire. And even on normal difficulty (i.e. level 2 out of the three offered), the encounters can be really painful, especially when you face a group of enemies that are very angry and/or create vicious ambushes…

The (terrible) call of the forest

While Alan Wake spends most of his time wandering around an absolutely evil and nightmarish version of New York City (fueled by Sam Lake’s Taxi Driver influence), it’s visually impressive and is actually a noir version of his doppelgänger. The saga takes place very much in the woods surrounding Bright Falls.

More organic and alive than ever, they are visually sublime, as well as a very oppressive crossover, constantly creating a diffuse unease. The forests don’t even wait for nightfall to come alive and unleash their evil forces on the heroine, like a hunt.

We often find ourselves running as fast as we can toward the light, or sometimes frantically searching for it. Moments of (brief) respite in the midst of spikes in tension that can sometimes be nerve-wracking.

As for the environment, special mention is made of the city of Water, where Saga also conducts an investigation. As if emerging from the middle of a sheet of fog, forgotten by almost everyone and populated by a gallery of characters, each more lunar than the other, as if time had frozen, he was back in an amusement park called “World of Coffee”. “.

A kind of abandoned and anxiety-inducing Luna Park, a kind of video game counterpart to the one seen in Carnival of Souls. A place that is both fascinating and utterly sinister, at the heart of past and tragic events just waiting to be rekindled…

race report

It carries a story that can twist your neurons and make its multiple interpretations to the point of vertigo, as well as infused in its form (brilliant, we can never say enough) with invasions of live sequences that look for art cinema, which makes absolute sense (and already experienced in the past in the studio), and above all Fits into the story with sometimes unsettling fluidity, Alan Wake II ultimately leaves more questions than it answers.

Two planned add-ons should take care of that. Პirveli, Night sourcesShould arrive in spring 2024. The second, called Lake House, still without a release date. Meanwhile, the latest game from the masterminds at Remedy is an absolute must. The wait was endless, but it was worth it.