WAKE!

A great and absurdly overwritten, overdesigned & ploddingly paced game. Gratuitous exposition beating you down & down & down until Garth Marenghi (Wake) can escape the darkplace, a dim Mauve Zone/Silent Hill analog. Drawing from Twin Peaks: The Return, The Night House, True Detective & a little bit of Vanishing on 7th Street(?!!), Sam Lake is so buried under the weight of his influences that he rarely finds his own voice.

Contained in here is an efficient, stripped-down survival horror game, full of winding paths, plenty of fleshed-out re-visitation of areas that make Bright Falls a real sick Place to be by the end. Saga’s mindplace asks you to build your evidence to produce your own objectives (often to an insane degree of detail, where you find out you must speak to someone, as you are in that very moment standing in front of them). Rendering every objective and clue a physical, tactile object does align the player with the characters - who are (especially Lake) idiots.

Remedy have inverted the small puzzle-intermissions from Control into the entire structure of this game, all winding, looping, shifting architecture (a trope they indulge in here with glee). Enemies are relatively bland but encountered infrequently enough it was almost a non-issue (compared to the excessive waves of Control). Many of the kitsch FMV sequences were underwhelming, but it was where they were layered directly into the world that it worked for me, transparent membranes of Max Payne’s Lake/James McCaffrey in silhouette just hanging out and talking complete nonsense (I love him).

Honestly this is a case where the energy, humour and confidence of this overwhelming mess tips into endearing. Not to mention the absolutely beautiful soft, dimly-lit spaces in here that I'd be happy living in (especially the retirement home and Nu York apartment). Between this, Death Stranding & recent RE titles I begrudgingly accept that sometimes photorealism is valid & not just dull marketing for graphics cards. WAKE

Edit: RIP James McCaffrey! <3

I have a very cynical viewpoint on AAA storytelling, often seeing it as faux-meaningful and vaguely cinematic. Alan Wake II, by contrast, is neither merely appropriating cinematic technique or falling back on rote nonsense. It's certainly nonsense, but it embraces that - it's an intentional mindfuck that truly pushes the AAA game narrative not necessarily in its contents but in its mode. There are countless points throughout Alan Wake II where Remedy's approach to storytelling actually feels sophisticated and provocative. And sure that's a low bar (when you discount your TLOUs, your Red Deads, your God Of Wars - the really marquee stuff) but Remedy leaps so god damn far over it.

By fusing live action and traditional game cutscenes here, Remedy has created a new way to convey information that is both surprisingly harmonious and purposefully discordant. Alan Wake II is clearly aware of the "rules" that curtail AAA storytelling and break them, breaking its own narrative framework in the process, breaking the fourth wall implicitly. Remedy knows that we're playing, and Remedy leverages that fact - even if Saga Anderson never turned to me, winked, and said "isn't this nuts!" We get as close to that line without passing it as feels appropriate, for a game concerned with asserting that games are a vehicle for storytelling that can and should do a lot more to remix the medium's affordances than it does now.

This is also just a really damn good survival horror game. It's genuinely scary and violent in a way that few games, I find, are able to be - reaching a sort of arthouse horror tenor that recognizes tropes, either leaning all the way in, or working to effectively subvert what's been wrung dry. Sound design, art direction, novel worldbuilding choices - they converge in such effectively unsettling ways.

Alan Wake II, when you become enmeshed in its illogical yet oddly contiguous world of postulations and terrors, is a new high-water mark for what AAA games can be. The ambition on display here is so well and truly beyond the overwhelming majority of its peers.

But this is also an extremely flawed game at its core, on a gameplay level. The combat is a major sore spot, significantly lacking enemy variety to the point of any sense of threat dissipating - the extremely limited foes all require the same rinse & repeat strategies. But these monster closets can become unnecessarily punishing when the checkpointing feels all sorts of wrong, forcing you to retread unskippable dialogues before retrying an encounter after those exchanges, in the worst moments.

Navigating the world can be a chore as well, constantly brushing against an unhelpful map and a world that - both intentionally and unintentionally - gets you turned around even when you backtrack through the same environments end for end, time and time again.

These issues wouldn't be so apparent if the game was 10ish hours long instead of 15 about, a pace that's further hampered by a narrative-switching structure that gives you all to much freedom at points. It often left me feeling more confused than empowered.

So there are doubtlessly a lot of issues with Alan Wake II, many of which aren't in the game's contemporaries. But those titles aren't attempting to be anywhere as boundary-pushing or inventive as this. Alan Wake II falls short because it tries VERY HARD to be more than you'd expect from a modern survival horror title, a modern AAA title overall. And in this case, I value that creative intent far more than I magnify its mechanical issues.

This is a flawed masterwork, but perhaps the most important and necessary game of 2023.

just like alan wake is a horrible author who writes insanely long books with super deep lore, here's my stupidly long review of what might be the best game remedy has ever made. (no spoilers)

if we go back all the way to 2010, alan wake 1 comes out and honestly that shit got shoved under the rug. not a lot of people knew about it, and remedy was trying to make ends meet after the rise and literal fall (sell-off) of max payne to rockstar (max payne 3 was fucking amazing though don't get me wrong).

regardless, remedy needed a new guy, they needed a new dude to be their cover-boy. in walks alan wake.

alan wake is an author (and probably redditor) with some pretty obvious mental issues. the first game (if i remember correctly, im too lazy to google) involves him finding his wife who disappeared in a strange town where strange things are happening based on the plot of his recent novel, which he doesn't remember writing. to sum things up and put the lime in the coconut, it wasn't too bad. i mean, it wasn't a stellar title from remedy as they've made absolute bangers like max payne 1 and 2 (no 3 does not count, rockstar did that, shame on you) but nonetheless it was definitely an interesting new tale that delved into a lot more mystery and horror than a lot of other remedy games (albeit the baby scenes in max payne 1 are fucked up so give those a huff if ur tryna get depressed). all-in-all the game ended on a kind of "the fuck?" note. not much was explained, for good or for worse.

alan kinda got shoved under the rug for a fat while (we don't talk about american nightmare) and remedy went on to make bigger shit with the help (MONEYY) from a little friend called EPIC GAMES. with some of that "fuck you" money in hand, they went on to make quantum break and, you guessed it, control, and boy oh boy, only 1 of those were good.

control got hella praise from critics, bunch of awards, the whole lot. the game was and still is impressive. the graphics are sexy, the plot and themes are neat as hell, remedy was clearly on to something.

so they cooked for a fat bit from 2019-2021 and what do ya know, alan wake: remastered is coming out. no way, they bought it back from microsoft (apparently) what!?! why would they do that-

ALAN WAKE 2

alan wake 2 is a god damn video game. what it looks like from the first few trailers is a heroin-filled john wick walking the streets of new york with a flashlight and a bunch of other third-person resident evil/silent hill inspired stuff. whatever, right? we've seen this before already-

WRONG.

turns out it's actually a survival horror detective mystery meta plot that will have you thinking: yep, twin peaks. also it just has whatever sam lake thought would be cool (including max payne, we'll get to that).

what you get is a game that literally ties in the universe of control, quantum break, and alan wake, all into one. and just for the god damn hell of it, sam lake goes and brings back max payne's original voice actor and face model (sam lake himself), renames him to "alex casey" (get it, cause he's a detective who solves cases???? also cause rockstar owns max payne now???) and shoves him in the game cause why the fuck not.

as soon as this game opens, you are hit with nothing but questions and absolutely no damn answers. it's just you and the game, and you're off to the races. you start as a fat naked man muttering random shit, walking through a creepy forest (i won't say anymore for spoilers), then you get one of the sickest title cards in any video game

you play from two perspectives, saga anderson, and alan wake himself. saga anderson, an fbi agent tasked to solve a murder case in the town of caldron lake with her partner alex casey (max payne), and alan wake, the mentally-insane author who's been stuck in the alternate realm known as the "dark place" for over 13 years, basically continuing off directly from where alan wake 1 ended back in 2010. navigating these 2 character's stories (in any order you want, im serious), you slowly uncover the insanely confusing but gripping plot and answer all those questions you had in the first place. BUT, unlike alan wake 1 where you'll only be saying "huh", this game gives you access to a place called the "mind place", a separate room you can hop into at anytime during gameplay with the click of a button, and put together evidence you've uncovered on a literal bulletin board. this mind place will be your best friend, and will help explain a shit ton of story and keep you on track with the plot, as it gloriously simplifies a lot of the confusing subtext that the plot has sometimes.

from a haunted forest filled with murder rituals, a meta talk show straight outta joker (ur laughin???), the streets and subways of new york filled with wandering deadly shadow beings, to a god damn amusement park named "coffee world", this game's got it all baby.

im only 6 hours into this game, everything i've explained so far has only happened in the span of that time, and this game has 20 hours of playtime if you ONLY focus on the main objective, and keep in mind, THERE'S TWO FUCKING CHARACTERS WITH TWO SEPERATE FUCKING ARCS.

buy this god damn game already. masterpiece remedy, masterpiece.


My notes after beating the game (15.5 hours)

It is Halloween night and I have accomplished my goal of beating this beast on this very night with Jack shit to do cause I’m still sick so I can’t do much whatever.

This game was a fantastic fucked-up rollercoaster from start to finish, there were definitely some parts that had me SCRATCHing my head (ending included) but I knew that going in, cause this is Alan wake, and if we’ve learned anything from past remedy titles like control and the first Alan wake, getting an ending that makes sense isn’t in the cards. So a long ass YouTube explainer will do it for me later tonight.

Overall, despite its confusing ending and overall very confusing 3rd act, I’m still blown away by this shit. It’s right in my fuckin jellies and it’s just a fever trip that SPIRALS from start to finish. A must play if you’re new to Alan wake, and a must play if you’re a veteran Alan waker.

All my wakers rise up. This game is rad.
SCRATCH that, it’s phenomenal.

4.5/5

Alan Wake writing the most twisted fucked up horror story he can conceive: The dark darkness encroached darkly upon me, I noticed my shoes were stained red with blood, red blood, on the ground pooled the crimson ichor of a bloody ritual murder enacted in the name of the Dark Lord of Darkness himself; Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, The Father of Lies, the Lord of Flies; Satanas, Diabolus- The Devil.
Remedy writing the most twisted fucked up horror story they can think of: Imagine being trapped in this guy's writing

My Child: Lebensborn concerns the fate of the children born to the Lebensborn program in Norway after the Second World War. I was not aware of such a program before I came across this game but it did a good job of explaining it specifically in the case of Norway as well as attempting to explain why these children faced the abuse they did without veering into apologia.

I am going to provide a few links below but without going into too much detail, the Lebensborn program was an initiative by head of the SS Heinrich Himmler to promote the birth of "biologically valuable" children as per the Nazis own racial eugenics policies. It took place all over the occupied territories but Norway especially given its place in Nazi racial ideology. The Nazis would set up centers for women giving birth to children from soldiers/ss officers away from the judging eyes of their families and neighbours.

After the war, many of the women involved in the program and even just suspected of having slept with german soldiers were punished severely with public humiliation and even arrest/internment. As the game points out, at times these women were treated more harshly than people who had actively collaborated with the occupiers, mostly due to a misogynistic "their bodies belong only to norweigans" attitudes.

The children born of the program faced mental and physical abuse by the general population following the war, hatred for the nazis and their ideology being channeled into mistreating children who had nothing to do with it beyond the circumstances of their birth. Many were even interned in mental asylums for years following prevailing psychiatric consensus that they must be mentally stunted.

My Child Lebensborn follows a single parent adopting one of these children, a boy or a girl depending on your choice. It follows essentially the same core mechanics as Pou or other pet simulators, which seems insane to say about raising a human child but thats genuinely what the mechanics most resemble, taking care of hunger, cleanliness and boredom of the child whilst having to go to work monday through saturday with limited time to do everything from sewing clothes, cooking, bathing the child etc.

You follow this routine as little (klaus in my case) starts to go to school at seven years old and starts to wonder about their biological parents as well as facing bullying from the schoolchildren and even the teachers at the school. There is a walking dead style system of dialogue choices pushing Klaus into either hardening his heart to endure the stigma he will have to deal with and trusting no one or trying to keep whatever innocence is being taken from him by the cruel conditions hes facing. Its genuinely heart breaking stuff, it makes me wonder what I would do if I ever had childen myself and dealt with such a horrible thing happening to them without inmediately flying into a white hot rage and doing something impulsive.

There is also the subject of either investigating and sharing Klaus' parentage with him, including also whether or not to try to explain what the nazis were and why their actions are responsible for the bullying he endures whilst also making clear that none of this is Klaus' fault, which is hard for a kid to understand and for an adult to explain.

I don't really have much of a conclusion here, this game was honestly upsetting, but in a way that is obviously intentional. I think I would just encourage anyone who's read this far to read up on the stories of these children which are documented below. I would also encourage people to visit the Children of War website, I believe part of the profits made from the game go to the NGO.

https://mychildlebensborn.com/about-us/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lebensborn-program
https://www.thechildrenofwar.org/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-chosen-ones-the-war-children-born-to-nazi-fathers-in-a-sinister-eugenics-scheme-speak-out-771017.html

Ok, I've got this, uhh, something something, "ludonarrative dissonance", Citizen Kane, A very young medium, German Expressionist Cinema, Rosebud, Recap of the plot, Donald Trump interview footage, Using the language of cinema to tell the story, using game mechanics to tell the story.

I think thats all... oh wait! Sonic had a rough transition to 3D, gotta get that one in there. Anyways [witty punchline about the Citizen Kane of Video Games] now subscribe and shower me with likes!


Okay Okay but for real, having you mash a button for like 10 seconds to pull the cover over the deceased Kane's body is a (intentionally or not) masterful parody of narrative videogame design.

A game of immeasurable power and relevancy. Undoubtedly something that deserves a sincere reevaluation given our contemporary woes and social unrest. With the luscious visual designs borrowing from Romanticist values and a breathtaking score by Jessica Curry, in ways this feels ahead of its time, achieving an overwhelming sense of isolation through the usual tropes of the "walking sim" genre. It's the massive scope that makes all the difference. What's told here is a richly drawn tapestry of a town populated by complicated people reckoning with complex events; the chief being the apocalypse itself. Or at least the end of "their" world as they know it. This game engages with annihilation as it is happening, and the intimate traumas and regrets and buried revelations that are unearthed when civilized society is pushed to the brink of oblivion. It is an expressively funereal and thunderous experience. My only qualms fall on what was probably time/budget restrictions; the interior designs becoming a bit monotonous and the way some of the areas bleed together can be disarming. Needless to say the game is consistently enthralling, finding various methods of connecting dread and beauty together through its aesthetic and voice talents, entwining them in poetic fashion.

An ethereal dance of light and darkness, cosmic by definition. It's rare to see a game take such a brave yet absolute trek into the unknown. Encompassing feels like the correct word.

Slightly expanded sequel to the first game, where the overall product is fantastic again, but the story unfortunately cant manage two main characters as in depth as it wants to or pretends to, especially not with the length it has. Short and concise games are good, but not if you want to make as expansive and grand of a story as Insomniac is trying here. Peter Parker is a paper thin character in the entire story except the ending, and Miles Morales has so much more to tell but gets shoved into the background whenever he is in the spotlight for a few minutes.
Also combat pacing is still very sloggish and way too long.

next up on this boring wednesday, is a song to get your blood pumping

Barely misses the mark on true five star status- at least for now- if only for how the Leon run slightly drags towards the end (climaxing with the final Mr. X battle which might be the game's only real misstep). By this point it especially hurts after having experienced the superior Claire run and believing the game to be utterly perfect. Beyond that though, this is a genuine AAA horror masterpiece in every way. Skating on narrative (and almost meta) surrealism and packed to the brim with iconic moments of fright and gruesome delight, Resident Evil II's greatest strength is its sheer efficiency in crafting pulpy thrills and placing the naive player in constant states of panicked laughter and sweat-filled anxiety. Simply put, it is just so scary and yet so fun and swings violently between those two modes with immense confidence in itself. In ways this might be the most successful of the franchise on how it balances that dynamic even if it stumbles at times in a way REmake and IV don't. Even still, the extended Sherry and Ada segments, exploring the nonsensical police station and its labyrinths beneath, the bastardized nuclear family illustrated by the Birkins, the abominations lurking in the sewer, the corny expletives shouted by the protagonists when confronting the ass end of biological existence.. and of course the marvel that is Mr. X- a creation so ingeniously straightforward as to suggest inertia but is rather a stroke of mastery by the developers in constantly turning the tables against the player. These and more are all elements that display an insane level of prowess so rarely found in horror games. It is one thing for something to feel bluntly oppressive in its atmosphere (the easy path I'd say) but it's another challenge entirely to structure your overall design in empowering the player yet engulfing them in sterilized environments that instigate vulnerability at every turn. Down that hallway, turn a corner, up a flight of stairs, something's following from behind (or not?), hear a sound from the other side of the room.. perhaps through the walls. It is three dimensional terror that transcends logic and in effect reality itself. The game is its own consuming nightmare and Claire and Leon are themselves manipulated pawns in a manufactured world of ever shifting spaces. I have faith in whatever they're cooking in the next remake.

A very nice open world with an incredible amount of stuff to do, but this game's raison d'etre is milking you for money via a waifu slot machine, so they're deathly allergic to doing anything interesting with the game they've built on this chassis. People have already taken this game to task for the predatory nature of gacha mechanics, for openly aping Breath of the Wild's style (and doing it worse), etc., so I want to take this in a different direction and focus on what keeps the best parts of this game from being better:

Dungeons required for progression are locked behind a time-gated resource, with rewards that rotate based on the day of the week. The combat is serviceable and I could easily see myself grinding these dungeons if it let me (a la Diablo 3, spamming Nephalem/Greater Rifts). Many rewards are locked behind a story with countless unskippable, intrigue-less conversations - no human character that you actually see on-screen will do anything meaningfully villainous outside of the opening cutscene. It's a shame, too, because their writers have shown that they can actually create worthwhile stories in this universe - there's a fairly compelling storyline in Liyue about a lesser god whose kingdom collapsed around her, and it demonstrates the kind of stories that can fit in this world if you're not afraid of a character getting dirt on their clothes.

Every playable character is palatable, inoffensive, marketable anime slop. Male characters exist in three flavors: Twink, Tall Serious Guy, and Itto. Female characters represent a few more archetypes, but you're still not going to be blown away by the creativity on display here. Give me more varied characters, Mihoyo! You underestimate how horny people are - you can get way more adventurous than this and still have people dropping stupid amounts of money out of sheer thirst. Give me a silver fox character, give me a character with even 5% more body mass, give me an actual-ass evil character (not just assertive! I want evil!).

Why am I actually rolling for these characters, anyway? Optimal gameplay demands that I use one character 80% of the time, with the other 20% split between the remaining characters in my party - you swap them onto the field, trigger their abilities, and swap them out. Unless you're releasing a new character for the Main DPS role, there's no reason to give them interesting mechanics - not that this really happens anyway. Implementing new game mechanics is hard, and I acknowledge that, but Mihoyo has the money and the time to justify it. Currently, the most adventurous set of mechanics in the game belongs to Childe, whose abilities act as a stance system, swapping between ranged and melee - second place goes to Beidou who - wait for it - has a counter-attack on her basic ability. I'm hoping that with the eventual release of Lyney and Lynette we'll see a tandem character, but this would be radical compared to what's in the game now.

Genshin Impact has given me the worst gift possible by being a game that gives you valuable rewards for your time investment, but not interesting rewards. There's so much potential being left on the table here due to a complete dearth of ambition, but rough edges don't sell.

not only is melee island one of the video game spaces that i truly want to visit, it really feels like a place i could visit, because it's such a consciously artificial place staffed by jaded workers who are barely interested in maintaining the image of a pirate cove for the latest clueless wide-eyed sap to wander into, and that feels more real and true than any game about a mystical world of pirate lore could possibly be.

the stories this is riffing on - robinson crusoe, treasure island, pirates of the caribbean the ride - are all positively ancient, and are as ramshackle and weary as Melee Island is itself, an island trapped in a cynical world of t-shirt prizes, used car salesmen barely maintaining the facade of their role on the stage, and guys in bars who would much rather be talking about LOOM, the revolutionary new game from LucasArts that boasts a serious and complex fantasy story that uses its experimental interface, to eschew the traditional paradigm of graphical adventures than the tired old pirate role they're trapped in.

time has left a lot of these jokes languishing in the same contextless past that they originally drew on, but the greatest joke of all, the joke of this ridiculous fake invention of what a Pirate was that never had any basis in history, being perpetuated long past the point of relevancy by a staff that truly doesn't really care, has aged like the finest vintage now that disney is the one maintaining melee island.

game kind of falls part imo once you actually reach the titular island but everyone should visit Melee Island at least once in their life. the sets are held together with duct tape and string and the refurbishment job they've done is deeply suspect, but it's still a once-in-a-lifetime destination. just be sure to keep the visitor's guide handy.