No point of this game looks justified to me. That is to say, it doesn't make sense why someone would make this. If someone presented me with the premise of this game on paper I would figure that they are insane and trying to kill my company, or are involved in some kind of
'The Producers' style financial scam. All of this money and bleeding edge tech and mixed media presentation to make what looks like a bad American streaming network series that gets cancelled after its first season that ends on a cliffhanger. The style, the look, the tone, the premise, the way people talk. The first game was a hacky "stephen king as a hat" genre piece of crap "throwback" to an era not liked by the creator, like JJ Abrams'
Super 8 maybe. This second one feels like the kind of shit town ensemble cast streaming mystery that ends up primary viewed as a recap video on youtube and worse. All chopped up with AI voice narration.
People say 'X-Files' and 'Twin Peaks', but that strikes me signalling for prestige that you can recognise those things. And the game is maybe throwing out signals to be recognised as that for its own prestige, but are there any actual fans of The X-Files or David Lynch here? I have never seen a Lynch fan express an interest in Remedy Entertainment. And Lynch is not an exclusive film thing. His influence on video games is massive.
Deadly Premonition looked kind of like crap at times. All the big open flat grass felt like a big budget game. The little houses sitting on flat fields like something out of an older EDF title. But what they were going for on the whole, they nailed. A town that felt alive, a cast who came to life as human. They didn't have the budget to scan Debra Wilson and raytrace her eyelash shadows, but this game nailed an eccentric human touch that's half of what defined Twin Peaks to people who I believe are actually fans of it, not just people who enjoy pointing out that something is actually a TwinPeaksvaniabornelike. This game didn't bring a town full of people to life with polygons, but by actually designing a novel game system and premise around wanting to present the live of virtual people more fully than had been done before. You can tell they cared because buildings are full of random rooms you can get lost in, incidental details are in places that make sense, everyone has a place in town that suggests a life. And the warm eccentricity of the characters themselves and
niceness of the town feel almost alien to present American sensibilities, but fit the America of Lynch's desired presentation, and still basically match how Japan and Japanese people are now. Which is of course why there was such an affinity between Lynch and the Japanese. This sense of
nice America. And Lynch never said this, the Japanese won't, but
no darkies front and centre is kind of an important part of that.
I flipped through a playthrough of Alan Wake 2 and kept seeing these weird mystery meat people who don't look remotely
town speaking in a tone which felt like a contrived
pleasant which might on paper meet an idiot's shallow idea of the spirit of Twin Peaks, but feels completely off, and uncanny if taken as a comparison.
The other obvious Twin Peaks inspiration in video games, I have screenshots I put up somewhere else for this, let me get them.
If you really like Lynch, this should have occurred to you before I just pointed it out right now. Has this ever come up in an Alan Wake discussion before? To compare it to Resident Evil? Especially early Resident Evil when Twin Peaks was fresh in cultural memory? The dreamy abstraction. The uncanny intrusions into quaint white civility. The bizarre masonic logic embedded into what should be mundane places.
But yeah, pine trees. Sure if you love pine trees just as pine trees then maybe Alan Wake 2 is doing something for you. And The X-Files and David Lynch did it for you just as Pinetreevaniabornelikes, but I think when people say these things they're grasping for connections which
spiritually simply
aren't there.
What is Alan Wake 2 actually doing well?
In my opinion you can't even say "graphics" because it looks so visually muddled and again
pointless. Death Stranding had scanned high fidelity human actors because it was a story about intimacy and human interconnection. Looking at the painfully realised, strained, wincing, sighing, smiling, crying face of Norman Reedus for 30+ hours actually worked brilliantly to get me on board with that. Looking at an actual human face in lifelike motion was necessary for the purpose and intention of the work. There is a coherent case to be made for requisitioning this bleeding edge expensive technology to realise the vision of Death Stranding. Why the hell shouldn't Alan Wake 2 have been made with the technology of Alan Wake 1? Or Deadly Premonition? Why shouldn't it look like an Xbox 360 budget game? Yes, those looked like shit mostly, but that fit what they were. Deadly Premonition actually looks fundamentally good in my opinion due to visual direction and generally purposeful design. While Alan Wake 2 looks unappealing. Muddy. Overdesigned. Like sub-netflix streaming content.
Every time I see a Western AAA release I see it as an existential crisis. An industry floundering at unprecedented scale and all but begging to die.
Someone convince me anything else is going on here. Someone convince me Alan Wake 2 should exist.
