Contrarian Corner: Alan Wake
Spoiler Alert: This article discusses specific plot points in Alan Wake, including revelations tied to the main storyline. Also, it spoils a Virginia Woolf story.
Contrarian Corner is intended to be a place for a more holistic discussion of games which have been the recipient of either an abundance of single-minded praise, or an undue amount of criticism. Our intent is not to contradict or undercut our own reviews, but rather to expand the spectrum of discussion on some of the most important games of each year. If you’re interested in joining that discussion, keep reading. Read the official review of Alan Wake for Charles Onyett’s extensive thoughts.
When I was younger my two worst fears were going blind and being homeless. They were scary not just because they would have been difficult to endure, but because they seemed like foreign concepts in my teenage world. I’d only just begun to pay attention to the tiny details of the things around me: the way I could see each individual fiber in the carpet while lying on the floor in my bedroom, or the way the leaves on the tree outside my window looked like they had blood vessels when viewed up close. Homelessness was, likewise, a total abstraction. I hadn’t even passed through high school, started a career path, or tried to build a family. To imagine myself abandoned to the streets after having failed at all those endeavors–which were still unarticulated mysteries in their own right—was so abstract it was almost meaningless.
Alan Wake is an action game about shooting things in the dark. You’ll mostly be engaged in combat against a shadowy legion of lumberjacks, the occasional swarm of night crows, and possessed objects like refrigerators, barrels, and bulldozers. The central innovation in these gameplay scenarios is the addition of a second aiming system. In other action games you’re limited to pointing and shooting with a gun, but in Alan Wake you have to point and shoot with a flashlight for a few seconds to weaken your enemy. Only then can you finish them off with your gun.
Aiming with a flashlight is operationally identical to aiming with a gun. They share the same controls and operate on the same principle of limited ammunition that periodically needs to be reloaded (flashlight batteries and bullets). This system adds some interesting tactical complexity, but the net impact is that enemies basically have longer life meters. They can endure double as much aiming and shooting, which makes choosing where and when to square your shoulders and point a bit more important. Keeping track of how much energy is left in your flashlight affects how long you can afford to aim before having to scurry around for a few seconds reloading batteries and bullets.
The other half of Alan Wake is a moody exploration game. Through its six episodes, each about the length of a movie, you’ll wander through darkly linear switchbacks trying to reach a glowing high point. On the way you’ll discover abandoned cabins, gas stations, a farm, a mental hospital, and a church. You’ll also collect coffee thermoses and manuscript pages, listen to a nightly radio program, watch a Twilight Zone homage on television, and study the historical details of Bright Falls at various tourist billboards. None of these collectibles affect the gameplay in the action-shooter portion of Alan Wake. Rather, they exist as distributed busywork that affect your completion stats in the pause menu, and sometimes add context to the meaning of custcenes.
Mechanically, Alan Wake is not about horror or fear, but redundancy. It’s about completing an action and then doing it again. The art and plot made me expect that some mystery would be explained with each finished setpiece, that some essential pattern would eventually emerge from the jigsaw of manuscript pieces. The opposite is true. I understood less about why I was killing lumberjacks, and why they required light to be weakened, at the end than at the beginning. I understood less about coffee (it’s a David Lynch joke!), Alan Wake’s new novel, and the “darkness” residing at the bottom of Crater Lake.
I think that’s a beautiful arc for a game–to end at a point of dissolution instead of resolution. It reminds me of the last pages of Viriginia Woolf’s The Years where the eighty year-old Eleanor, once a single woman of lung-filling ambition, ends up staring out the window in senility trying to remember what was supposed to come next while surrounded with the indifferent and self-obsessed energy of her young nieces and nephews. When Alan Wake concludes, after having fought a tornado of darkness with a flashlight, realizing, “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean,” I empathize. The final image is piercing, a white period on the black screen, followed by two more dots a few seconds later, turning the ending into an ellipsis. It’s a great way to end a movie about a writer’s search for meaning.
On the other hand, it has little to do with a game about shooting lumberjacks, crows, and haunted oil barrels in the woods at night. It isn’t all that connected to the process of collecting little glowing beads of light that, in the menu screen, magically transform into manuscript pages either. The conceit of playing a writer and, through progressing, gradually discovering the consequences of the creative choices made, is a terrific one. The game’s last playable section has a brief taste of one way a game about this experience might have been made. Instead of aiming at lumberjacks, Alan points his flashlight at words, causing objects to materialize to the sound of a clacking of a typewriter. Players can choose to bring a telephone booth or barrel into the world, or they can choose to ignore those details.
Yet, there’s no real choice in what to render. You have to make a bridge appear, and then the cabin on the other side of the bridge, but everything else is superfluous. Still, I can imagine moments built around this system, where there are actually choices built into the words. Not unlike Heavy Rain’s floating UI, a wide variety of scenes could have been built using this mechanism to make interactive the theme of writerly invention.
This might ruin continuity but Alan Wake doesn’t need continuity, only the perpetually unfolding cloud of new mystery. If games as huge and plot-oriented as Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV can have significant narrative forks in the road, there’s no reason Alan Wake couldn’t have. This is especially true considering how fundamentally illogical the entire plot is in the first place. Whatever continuity exists in Alan Wake, it’s certainly not worth preserving.
Alan Wake’s story is a swamp of homage. The first words in the game are a quote from Stephen King, and things only devolve from there. You might have thought setting a surreal mystery game in a small mountain town in Washington called Bright Falls would be an obvious enough reference to David Lynch, but Remedy has seen fit to add in every bit of elbow nudging and eyebrow arching possible to make sure the point hits home. Episode One ends with Roy Orbisson’s “In Dreams,” the same tune that an ambiguously dandy Dean Stockwell crooned to Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet.
There’s a colloquial sheriff, an FBI agent from the big city, and a cast of eccentric locals scattered around trailer parks and isolated farms. And there are coffee vessels in every conceivable location, both as collectible thermoses and as background detail. David Lynch really likes coffee. David Foster Wallace described him as a “prodigious coffee drinker” while visiting the set of Lost Highway. He was never without a cup of black goo to wash down his American Spirits. While no one in Alan Wake actually drinks coffee, or experiences its energizing and jittery effects, its image is borrowed and set on display everywhere as if it meant something.
Stephen King invocations are no less frequent. The concept itself is homage to The Dark Half. The presentation takes every opportunity to go weaving through the mountains with the same ghostly touch of Kubrick’s The Shining. Episode Four opens in a big stony lodge with an adjoining bush maze. The recurring character of a deep-sea diver cum astronaut who Wake seems to have invented as the light-giving alter ego combating the “darkness” smacks of King’s fondness for filling childhood artifacts with quasi-religious power.
The haunted environmental objects also have the King touch of taking classical fear pieces and increasing their volume and intensity. If one creaky floorboard is scary, why not make the whole house shiver with ghostly possession? The grasping of “the clicker,” a childhood scrap that now somehow has the power to ward off the greatest evil in the universe is another King-like trope, as is the conclusory fight against a tornado of darkness. It’s absurd and shrill in the same way as was his closing of The Stand with the hand of god setting off a nuclear missile; or It in which a few childhood friends held hands and simply wished away a giant demon spider that once was a clown.
Beneath the hollow references, Alan Wake’s story is about existential isolation. Wake has nothing left to achieve, personally or professionally. It’s precisely at this moment everything he’s done begins to disintegrate. He begins to pick needless fights with his wife and muse; he gets writer’s block and needs a purifying retreat into the wilderness to reinvigorate his sense of purpose. Everything Wake wants is behind him. Rather than looking forward to better understand the changes coming towards him, he goes into an isolation chamber to try and resuscitate the magical feelings of his past. Then a witch woman pulls his wife into an echo chamber at the bottom of an evil lake and suddenly getting her back becomes the only thing that matters.
In an evolution of the princess in Donkey Kong, Alice is the imperiled woman as an icon for the irretrievable past. It’s a poetic idea, an echo of the ember-stirring loss the poet David St. John described in The Shore, a collection of poems he wrote in the backwash of a divorce. “…maybe you’d have walked/ Here with me, or come after/ To see what kept me standing in the night –/ You’d see nothing. Only what / Dissolves: dark to dawn, shore to wave,/ Wings to fog, a branch to light.:/ The vague design that doesn’t come/ From me, yet holds me/ To it, just as you might, another time.” That kind of romantic sentiment is absent from Lynch’s work. Lynch’s most transcendent moments are products on an individual ego in romance with itself. When one Lynch character clings to another, it’s usually destructive and animalistic not heartbreakingly sweet.
Alan Wake enforces its sense of tragic nostalgia with the repeating image of Alice falling backwards into the arms of the old woman in black. How do you make a game about that? How do you make a system of rules that evoke that sense of hallucinatory loss and romantic abandonment? It can be done, but that’s not what Remedy has done. Alan Wake is a shooter about resource management, tactical position, and item collection. It can be satisfying, in fits and starts, to fight off swarming lumberjacks with a well-placed flashbang, or to manage to kill five successive enemies on a single battery charge; but what does that say about Alice? What does it say about the ego that seeks to destroy its own foundation once it’s climbed as high as it can go? What does it have to say about old women as the perpetual ciphers for evil, the less youthful and beautiful the more cruel?
Alan Wake is a hamstrung game, an awkward acne-faced pubescent that aims to be about something of which its systems confess inexperience. Fear and ignorance are close companions, which is what makes darkness fear’s perfect embodiment. Alan Wake is a game drowning in its own familiarity. Its episodes unfold in the same patterns, daylight conversations gradually giving way to long scrambles through the combative woods. You’re always fighting the same enemy, from the opening tutorial to the end gauntlet.
The point of entrance is usually a surprise, but the arrival is always expected. When I was fourteen and would torture myself about one day being blind or homeless it had little to do with either. I had just fixated on two arbitrary ideas that seemed safely unknowable from my suburban existence. Alan Wake is right about the lake and the ocean, but Remedy is wrong about the game in which they’ve put that sentiment. It’s not a surrealist horror game, it’s just a shooter.