This review contains spoilers
CHRONICLES OF THE SUNKEN WRITER #1: DEPARTURE
Creating anything is a personal struggle, be it solo or with a team. Any person in that process is their own protagonist and antagonist, with the result of their battle, their truce, being what we usually call art.
Remedy's Alan Wake exists in that struggle. On a basic level, it's a story about a writer's-blocked hacky author who gets taken by an all-consuming darkness that manifests through the mind, who feeds on ideas. It makes his unfinished story come back to kill him, until he finds a way to end it.
Deeper in those waters is the story of a 5-year development hell, stressed out developers, artists struggling through deadlines, trying to make it all work. Before it all clicked, they must have felt the story was trying to kill them too.
All of this is due to Departure. It's the most important word in this story. The game is not just a result of struggling with writer's block, it's the result of wanting to do something different. Of killing the hard-boiled cop that made you famous and then having nothing to show for years. Facing that horrifying blank canvas, unlike anything you've worked before, and trying to make something there.
That's where you can find beauty in Alan Wake's flaws. It's the best story on writer's block ever written because a lot of it IS the block, it's the old maps from an open world game being chopped into structured levels, it's the lighting they wasted so much time creating being used as a main mechanic, it's about going through this incomplete thing and seeing it come together, against all odds, discovering what it was supposed to be. Art-making as the art itself.
There's a reason Remedy's output has only gotten better and more distinct over time, and it all comes back to this. With Payne they discovered they can make art, with Wake they found their voice as artists.
Lastly, Alan couldn't defeat the darkness. He's trapped by it and forced to write and rewrite for eternity, a perfect metaphor for writer's block, but it ends with this slight glimmer of light.
To me, it makes sense that Wake has appeared in every subsequent Remedy game in one way or another. They wanted to make a sequel but for many reasons couldn't, so while they left those 5 years of development hell and went onto bigger things, Alan is still stuck there, doomed to be an unfinished idea.
All they want to do is save him.
Creating anything is a personal struggle, be it solo or with a team. Any person in that process is their own protagonist and antagonist, with the result of their battle, their truce, being what we usually call art.
Remedy's Alan Wake exists in that struggle. On a basic level, it's a story about a writer's-blocked hacky author who gets taken by an all-consuming darkness that manifests through the mind, who feeds on ideas. It makes his unfinished story come back to kill him, until he finds a way to end it.
Deeper in those waters is the story of a 5-year development hell, stressed out developers, artists struggling through deadlines, trying to make it all work. Before it all clicked, they must have felt the story was trying to kill them too.
All of this is due to Departure. It's the most important word in this story. The game is not just a result of struggling with writer's block, it's the result of wanting to do something different. Of killing the hard-boiled cop that made you famous and then having nothing to show for years. Facing that horrifying blank canvas, unlike anything you've worked before, and trying to make something there.
That's where you can find beauty in Alan Wake's flaws. It's the best story on writer's block ever written because a lot of it IS the block, it's the old maps from an open world game being chopped into structured levels, it's the lighting they wasted so much time creating being used as a main mechanic, it's about going through this incomplete thing and seeing it come together, against all odds, discovering what it was supposed to be. Art-making as the art itself.
There's a reason Remedy's output has only gotten better and more distinct over time, and it all comes back to this. With Payne they discovered they can make art, with Wake they found their voice as artists.
Lastly, Alan couldn't defeat the darkness. He's trapped by it and forced to write and rewrite for eternity, a perfect metaphor for writer's block, but it ends with this slight glimmer of light.
To me, it makes sense that Wake has appeared in every subsequent Remedy game in one way or another. They wanted to make a sequel but for many reasons couldn't, so while they left those 5 years of development hell and went onto bigger things, Alan is still stuck there, doomed to be an unfinished idea.
All they want to do is save him.