The mindful self-indulgence of ALAN WAKE 2

Can interesting means justify God-awful ends?

I recently finished Alan Wake 2, Remedy Entertainment’s biggest hit to date that won the 2023 Game Awards’ Best Narrative. The game’s ending shocked me so much that it has been in my mind for weeks. Not because of a big twist or anything, but because of what the ending didn’t do: it didn’t “land the plane,” and considering how the game’s plot is literally all about how a story functions, this is equal parts troubling and fascinating to me. Well, more troubling than fascinating, but still. This is not a dunking essay.

I will eventually spoil the ending of AW2, but it will be clearly marked for anyone wishing to keep things fresh before they play the game. For anyone who does read that section, I still keep things a little vague, such as which characters these events apply to. I would argue, however, that being prepared for the ending would actually make you enjoy it more than I did, allowing you to adjust your expectations, as I believe that AW2 is less videogame and more of… something new. Up to you. Anyway:

At every writers’ retreat, after thinking about swimming in the lake and then deciding that all of us are too old to have that much fun, we exchange tales of horror around the campfire on why storytellers sometimes don’t “land the plane.” This is not a phrase that refers to whether a story was good or bad, but instead is about whether everything was tied up in the end – did all of the expectations that were created get addressed in an intentional manner that felt organic to the story’s needs? Or did it feel like some proverbial checks were not cashed at the bank, left in Mr. Potter’s newspaper after a prideful boast? Because every time it’s the latter of those two, it really feels to me like Uncle Billy fucked up and I might end up talking to an angel about whether I should jump off a bridge. B movies and adaptations are best known for failing on the plane front, due to either an overambitious-but-inexperienced creator, or impossible demands made by executives to appease their Almighty Spreadsheet. We all want to appease the Spreadsheet, it’s the reason half of our colleagues have been laid off from companies that had extremely minor financial issues. What were the companies supposed to do, just continue making a steady profit? Only idiots want a steady, sustainable profit.

There are more potential causes for an unsatisfying ending, of course. It can happen to anyone for any particular reason, whether it be financial, time related, or even an act of God. There’s a quote I love: “I just make things less and less bad until someone forces me to release them.” I can’t remember who said that, which is an example of me not landing the plane. Whoops! The artistic process is an unknowable one, and life is hard and we’re all just doing our best. At least, that’s what writers say until the first-years on the retreat make their way back to their bunks, allowing the remaining campers to spill the actual horrors of the world: that there are people who choose to not land the plane. I know, terrifying. I really wish I was sponsored by BetterHelp right now, because then I could send you their way for therapy, but I’m not, so don’t. Don’t you dare get better without getting me some sweet, sweet sponsor cash. Alan Wake 2 is one of these intentional plane crashers, but a fascinating element of that choice is that it involves the self-reflection of the game studio’s entire past and future, creating something both frustrating and wholly new.

The original Alan Wake was already an interesting creation before the sequel dialed up the weird. Released in 2009, the year that can only be described as economically good and not bad, AW is a deeply flawed game that straddles two different ideas without really leaning into either of them. It has heavy self-referential meta-narrative elements integrated directly into its own plot that are reminiscent of Italo Calvino or The Stanley Parable, but instead of spending time developing these ideas into something transcendent, it instead focuses on gameplay composed of a cool idea involving light and an uncool idea of shooting monsters so repetitively that you begin to think guns are boring. The game really reminded me of a B movie: great ideas with poor execution. But I didn’t fault Remedy for it. They were coming hot off the heels of their megahit Max Payne, a series about a hardboiled detective using bullet-time gunplay that was later adapted into a terrible movie starring Mark Wahlberg. Don’t worry, this is apparently one of the biggest signs that a game is successful. 

Following Max Payne and Max Payne 2, and after transporting many euros to the bank, Remedy made the smart decision to completely reverse course and make something more literary than explosion-ary. However, they took the classic wrong turn that leads someone into their own asshole. It happens to the best of us — the turn is right before Resenting Your Peers Avenue. You see, Alan Wake is about a novelist who has written about a hardboiled detective for so long that he’s gotten depressed and has decided to take a vacation in the mountains of Washington state. While being angsty and mopey, he ends up in a (quite transparently intentional) Stephen King-esque supernatural phenomenon in which a dark force harnesses the power of Alan’s writing to make the world a nightmare. As is the obvious course of events, Alan must refer to story structure and writing ideas in a quest to save his wife from a shadow prison in a lake that is actually an ocean. Navel-gazing, to be sure, but still interesting and a new idea in videogames at the time! Unfortunately, Remedy also felt the need to stay close to their roots, deciding on gameplay of the “shooty action" variety. You know how every Stephen King book follows its references to Maine with a gunshot and a chase scene? Neither do I, but Remedy insisted it be so. 

Pulled in too many directions, the story ends with a terrible cliffhanger, the type that is clearly a placeholder for a real ending. The literary plane, seemingly, crashed in Cauldron Lake’s lake-that-is-an-ocean, but in a way that I have empathy for, as the studio clearly was in a growth phase – life is hard and we’re all doing our best. The game was moderately successful, selling enough copies for Remedy to wander in search of an identity for the next decade. They cruised along, making mediocre titles until they came up with Control, something that took the best possible lessons from Alan Wake and delivered something wholly unique and rewarding, and a game I still think of periodically. It even involved guns, but they actually felt fun this time and didn’t conflict with the tone of the story. Wonderful! All seemed well, and any missteps seemed to be footnotes in the past - necessary stepping stones on the way to greatness. That is, until a followup episode (I refuse to use “downloadable content” casually, it is a followup episode you heathens) of Control revealed that it was actually a backdoor setup for Alan Wake 2. That’s right, there would be a sequel to Alan Wake a whole thirteen years after the original. At this point, everyone collectively said “Are you shitting me? Remedy figured things out, why go back to the extremely flawed sophomore year? Good God, don’t put your college-course creative writing pieces in public view! Someone stop them!”

As you may have guessed based on the aforementioned Best Narrative award, Alan Wake 2 was not an embarrassment. It was not the best narrative of the year (Citizen Sleeper had an outstanding finale in its followup episode, Tears of the Kingdom had one of the most rewarding endings I’ve ever seen, and I keep hearing great things about Goodbye Volcano High. Final Fantasy XVI’s story, on the other hand, was embarrassing, and Baldur’s Gate 3 does great things but has huge pitfalls due to its player-created narrative style. This parenthesis has gone on long enough to be considered a sub-newsletter, we’ll call it The Game Awards Make Me Leave My Body. Thanks for reading, like and subscribe, and back to the main piece), but AW2 was very intentional and a lot more capable than the previous entry. The titular novelist must escape the predicament caused by the cliffhanger of the first game, this time by creating new stories with the help of a younger woman of color in the FBI. The gameplay this time around is that of survival-horror, which is much more in line with the tone of the narrative, but it’s not perfect: there’s too much eventless backtracking in the name of a collectathon, and the large, open spaces lead to many monsters feeling predictable instead of terrifying. Effectively, this is a less fun version of the Resident Evil 2 remake. And the big final battle on Saga’s side is excruciating, grinding all momentum to a halt.

But that’s the simple, cut-and-dry critique of what didn’t work. The storytelling of AW2 is where things get interesting: Saga is an FBI agent who must solve the mystery of Alan’s disappearance while Alan must craft a new story to escape a supernatural prison. This leads to gameplay that involves using different story premises on the same location to see how events might move forward, which is actually a real tool that can be used when writing a story in the real world. Remedy figured out a way to make the player feel like they’re discovering how an overarching story can best function, while keeping it fun and interesting. That is a massive achievement. They also have figured out how to grasp tone more consistently, leading to many actually terrifying moments that are thrilling, and the fact that something like this has become a high profile hit in the videogame world is great for both the medium and for media literacy. However, as I mentioned at the top of all of this, the plane has an unfortunate fate.

******Spoilers begin now******

CW for a fictional case of depression, trauma, and suicide.

Throughout the course of the game, Alan is confronted with the fact that he is stuck in a loop, constantly dealing with the previous loop iteration’s consequences. As the climax rears its head, a truth is revealed: Alan is not stuck in a loop, he’s in a spiral. Things are getting worse with each iteration. As this occurs, a main character is found to have become so despondent with their situation that they have chosen to end their own life, and another character tries to prevent their own child from dying. 

These stakes and their clarity are excellent. They are presented in a consequential, organic manner that feels true to the situation. You are right there along with them, and let me tell you, the suicide is beautifully tragic. When I saw it, I had to take a moment.

And then the ending retconned it.

As the credits roll, the character who has committed suicide suddenly appears, revealing that they had faked it with the intent of driving Alan to the bottom point of the spiral so that he can go through everything again, only with a more positive spin. Then the title screen appears, revealing that you have to play through the game a second time to get a good ending. This second playthrough is very minorly different, primarily only really changing the actual ending and a couple moments along the way.

Folks, this is not how you do an ending. It does not matter how interesting and artistic a move you want to make is. You do not retcon your most tragic, moving moment in a story. A way to do this semi-successfully would be to place a lot of clear hints that something was wrong with the suicide, but then the suicide would have lost impact, which may be a thought process that Sam Lake and the rest of the team may have gone through. But emotional moments are the heart of any story. Without emotional moments, a story is just a wikipedia page. Oral storytelling was used for millennia because humans understand information when grafted onto an emotional arc. Achieving a reaction within your audience is a huge event, as it requires a lot of setup and payoff. Retconning that away is a rugpull that just frustrates the audience for the sake of more navelgazing. Nier already did the multi-playthrough bit anyway, and not one moment of it felt like a rugpull – on the contrary, it always felt like a natural progression of everything that came before. 

******END OF SPOILERS******

I’m troubled by this kind of choice due to the fact that the rest of the story makes it clear that Remedy knows the importance of emotional moments. A very similar kind of situation occurred in another high profile hit this last year: American Fiction. It’s a blisteringly funny comedy about Black writers and the outrageous, tragic expectations the world puts on them to make trauma-porn. A great-but-flawed film, it won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay while Flowers of the Killer Moon suffered a Kubrick-level snub. AF is, like Alan Wake, also a great story about writing, which then also chooses to do a heady, non-emotional ending for the sake of seeming clever. 

This disregard for the audience is not, in fact, clever – it is self-indulgent. A story is a living, breathing thing that requires the author(s) to listen to and decipher what the story needs as it is created. No matter how mindful and intentional you are, a rugpull that ignores the audience is one that ignores the story as well, revealing that the creator prioritized their old plans instead of adapting to what evolved. Listening to the story is the essence of good writing, and both of these high-profile, award-winning pieces about the nature of creation failed this mandatory requirement. I am immensely frustrated by this, and also worried that so many people still voted in favor of these flawed works. Voters chose the scary campfire story, clearly without the knowledge of what it was.

I do, however, need to pull myself together here. While the ending did not land, many other parts of Alan Wake 2 (and also American Fiction) did land. They both did a lot of good outside of their endings, and endings have an imbalanced level of responsibility on their plate. They have to be surprising and inevitable, a singular vision and commercially successful, virtuous and horny. A good ending that pulls off a coherent contradiction is a miracle, something so difficult to achieve that it really does make the plane metaphor feel apt, and it’s what makes the audience feel just right when it happens. So yes, AW2 biffed the ending, and the disregard voters had for this kind of flaw is one that makes me clutch at my pearls, but it effectively changes the nature of the beast.

Instead of calling Alan Wake 2 a videogame, I would say that it’s an exposed, honest journal entry of where its creators are artistically. The game’s loop is akin to an artist’s need to revisit the same themes repeatedly, making minute changes and improvements each time. And this is literally what the Alan Wake games are, repeated loops for the studio to try again. Remedy seems to create a new entry after every breakthrough of theirs, which means that in ten years we’ll see Alan Wake 3 after Control 2 bombs and they have to reinvent themselves yet again, this time with a new IP about, I don’t know, time or something? AW3 will then frustrate me, but it will be because it shows so much potential from a studio that is doing what we should all be doing: self-reflection. If we all take a moment to look at ourselves, we’ll find that there are more important things than landing the plane. It’s still pretty fucking important, though.