It’s fragmented, and you need to fill in the gaps and piece it together.” Getting weird And that was very much the thinking in Control as well. But if something nags at you, you keep coming back to it. Alan Wake says in his own words: ‘The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest and what we’ll remember in the end.’ Whereas if we wrap it neatly, people are satisfied and might be emotionally in a good place, then they forget about it and move on to the next one. “I really love not being given easy answers,” Lake says. That’s not just a fun bit of flavor text, but a sort of mission statement for Lake’s work. He points back to the Stephen King quote that opens the first game: “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations,” it reads in part. Lake shares that idea and has baked it into Alan Wake. Not giving the answers doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t have answers to give. What fun is a mystery if someone else solves it for you? His work is cryptic, but there’s purpose in that. Rather, he wants to give his audience the box of puzzle pieces to play with. Lynch has noted that he doesn’t want to solve his mysteries for his audience. It’s a gameplay hook that brings to mind Lynch, the Twin Peaksdirector that has been a major influence on Lake’s work. That experience makes me feel like a more active participant in the game’s central mystery, physically allowing me to piece leads together. Here, I’m able to take any clues I’ve collected and pin them up on an evidence board. I’d also get to spend a lot of time inside Saga’s Mind Palace. It’s an absurd set piece that feels totally consistent with the oddball nature of the world around me. My adventure would take me to a meticulously detailed theme park called Coffee World, where I’d fight off some Taken baddies while navigating around caffeinated attractions like The Percolator. ![]() While the structure is familiar, the Saga chapter I played is teeming with creative energy. What’s interesting to me is that Alan Wake 2, from its early concept document to what the game actually is, is much closer to that original structure than any other Remedy game has been.” Epic Games The world was still built for an open world, so you get that illusion. ![]() And then it was supposed to be a free-roaming open-world game, and we were struggling with that a lot. “We were exploring very different IP ideas before we landed on it. “ Alan Wake had a very convoluted path of finding its identity,” Lake tells Digital Trends. The final version that we’re getting in October is actually closer to what the series almost was originally. ![]() Speaking with Lake during the preview event, the creative director explained that the sequel went through several iterations over the past decade. It’s certainly a pivot from the first game, leaning more into traditional survival horror design, but it wasn’t a surprise for Remedy itself. Like a recent Resident Evil game, I explore every nook and cranny of a richly detailed world grabbing items, solving the occasional puzzle, and engaging in third-person shootouts with monsters that aren’t unlike Resident Evil 4’s villagers. While the character is totally new to me, there’s a familiarity to the gameplay. Rather than controlling Alan Wake, I’m following FBI agent Saga Anderson as she investigates a small town. The first half of my demo would throw me into familiar and unfamiliar territory in the same breath. If the first game was Twin Peaks, Alan Wake 2 is very much Twin Peaks: The Return. The two chapters I played weren’t just a total reinvention of the first game’s formula, but an avant-garde horror experience that wears its David Lynch influence on its sleeve. Alan Wake 2 is more True Detective than Twin PeaksĢ new Control games are in the works, Remedy road map revealsĪlan Wake is finally getting along-awaited sequel in 2023Īfter playing a lengthy demo of Alan Wake 2 earlier this month, it was immediately clear to me that Lake and Remedy had a lot of pent-up creative energy they were dying to unload.
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