Alan Wake II
This was originally posted on the 5th of July, 2024, in this Twitter thread.
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Starting off, I wanna mention the Herald Of Darkness performance at last year's Game Awards. While I had watched a video about the original game before and had been mildly interested in playing it, I think this performance alone would've been enough to sell me on the series. It's just so absurd for what I heard was a survival horror game, and it's just so oozing with passion. It piqued my interest in the series so much.
And welp look at that, this was my first time ever getting a Platinum Trophy on a game.
I didn't actually 100% the game though, the Platinum was just kinda generous.
Anyways, unfortunately the game was quite the mixed bag for me.
I guess I'll start off with a lot of my immediate problems with the game. The game to my knowledge doesn't tell you about how headshots deal more damage, which really sucks since without headshots every enemy takes a ton of bullets to kill.
I get that it's supposed to be weak to an extent, but feel like Saga's pistol was too underpowered. I feel like it should've been able to stagger enemies easier. Wolves in particular are a huge pain to deal with when you can't stagger them.
The flashlight being heavily nerfed compared to the first game while extremely understandable, was a little disappointing. I felt like it was a much less prominent part of the combat.
The very first area of the game, Cauldron Lake, was the most difficult area in the entire game to navigate due to it being a forest full of hard to see pathways, which gave me a pretty horrible first impression of the game's semi-open world format. It also bizarrely has really spread out checkpoints which made it the most punishing area in the game to die in.
It also doesn't help that things can get visually way too dark. I guess I could've messed around with the brightness settings to fix that, but then I probably would've had to repeatedly turn the brightness back down during daytime segments.
As for something not as immediately apparent, Saga's evidence board, while legitimately helpful for keeping track of certain things, was really tedious to fill out.
I also thought that a ton of collectables were a pain in the ass to find and/or collect. As Saga, finding collectables sucks because a lot of things are obfuscated by trees and rocks, and the map reveal radius upgrade you can get isn't available until near the end of the game, right before the point of no return, plus a lot of collectables require you to obtain certain key items first so you have to backtrack through areas to get a lot of things. The backtracking in particular probably would've been way more bearable if I had saved it all for the very end, but I didn't, so I ended up spending well over a third of my total playtime just backtracking through areas multiple times.
As for Alan, you can get a way better map upgrade for him way earlier on into the game, so finding most stuff as him was actually fairly easy, although some of the Echos still gave me trouble because they're never fully marked on the map. What was annoying as Alan though was how a ton of loot containers were bugged and just couldn't be opened, and how some collectables just wouldn't disappear from the map despite being collected, and how generally finicky trying to collect Words Of Power was. The game particularly annoyed me though when it permanently locked me out of the Subway area after completing the Theater, because I ended up missing only one Echo in the entire game.
Now for some positives, I like how all of the collectables have some value. Getting permanent upgrades in particular rules, but even just little lore tidbits makes each individual collectable feel valuable. I also appreciate how you can re-view/listen to videos and audios that you've collected. It was kinda weird honestly that you couldn't do that in the first game.
The live action stuff was expanded upon which was really cool to see. Even when you know it's coming, The Herald Of Darkness is awesome.
While I didn't like ALL of the puzzles, I appreciate that they occasionally added a little more depth to collecting things. The guns in particular felt much more eventful than I think they otherwise would've been without the puzzles. I'm sure some people hated them but, I actually particularly liked the math puzzles, because I kinda like math.
While I voiced a few complaints about it before, I do think the combat overall is more interesting due to the weakpoints and headshots systems which put a far larger emphasis on aiming compared to the first game.
The decrease of resources in general, combined with the overall more limiting inventory space leads to resource management being a far more prominent gameplay factor.
The increased weapon variety was also nice (although giving Saga 2 shotguns was maybe a little unnecessary). I especially liked the crossbow.
Being able to sneak past enemies was cool. There's a particularly nice tension when sneaking past the Dark Place enemies.
l really enjoyed the Dark Place's maps in general. The Dark Place's loose, dreamlike logic is utilized extremely well. The New York style setting was also a really nice change of pace from the usual forest areas.
Overall, I think I liked this game, but I had a messy first experience, and out of the 2 storylines Return and Initiation, I definitely loved Initiation more.
As fo the plot:
🚩 Spoiler Warning 🚩
I was a little disappointed (but not totally surprised) to see that Alan Wake's American Nightmare was seemingly irrelevant to Alan Wake 2 (Additional Context: I have not played Alan Wake's American Nightmare. I watched a longplay of it on YouTube). The direction Alan Wake 2 was able to take by ignoring American Nightmare was pretty interesting though.
Alan being a complete mess was a pretty interesting (and funny at times) way for his character to develop.
Saga on the other hand while likable enough for me to care about, wasn't particularly interesting to me. It especially doesn't help that her main motivator in the plot is saving a loved one which you (the player) never get to see in-person. Some of the story elements that unfold through her are pretty interesting though. In particular, the fucked up removal of agency in her life in which she's in-universe retconned into having divorced her husband and indirectly caused the death of her own child was pretty effective.
I feel like the cult red herring would've worked a lot better if the Koskela brothers didn't consider Saga to be their friend. Because they considered her a friend though, it felt kinda weird that they wouldn't trust her with the truth behind their cult.
Mr Scratch was kinda disappointing. He did actually work really well as an exploration of the plot's themes of madness, but as an actual character he was extremely one note.
As for those themes of madness though, I thought the game had pretty cool layers of twists. I wasn't very surprised when first learning that Initiation took place before Return, but learning that they were actually happening concurrently, but then that they actually weren't happening concurrently, and that Scratch vwas impersonating Alan the whole time in Return, but then actually no that was Alan and that Scratch was just within him, were all pretty good mixups that I did not see coming.
I thought the "It's not a loop, it's a spiral" line was a much more interesting thing to end with than the first game's "It's not a lake, it's an ocean", since I feel like it actually had ramifications for how I viewed the plot. I also just thought that calling a time loop a "spiral" instead is just a really elegant way of putting it.
Night Springs DLC
This was originally posted on the 5th of July, 2024, in this Twitter thread.
This was a pretty good set of twists on what Alan Wake as a game could be.
Episode 1 was a pretty funny and silly powertrip. I really loved the pinkish sky, it made the game very pretty.
Episode 2 was definitely my least favorite. I just didn't find it very interesting, and I had a hard time navigating around.
Episode 3 is really silly and all over the place (in a good way). It starts off kinda slow though due to the woods segment.
Overall, Episode 1 was definitely my favorite.
The Lake House DLC
This section was added on the 31st of October, 2024.
I didn't learn until this DLC released that the DLC is actually spliced into the main game, which I think is pretty cool. I beat the game before even getting the first DLC though, so I just played the DLC's separately from the main game.
I'd been missing some context for this game due to not playing Control, but it hasn't really been an issue. It became somewhat notable though due to this one "P6" fellah you meet, who's just not really explained at all. They weren't really important to the plot at all though, it was just a small, perplexing moment.
My favorite part of this DLC was the Painted Shadows. They're by far the spookiest thing in any of the Alan Wake games. It's a shame that there's only a few moments with them, but hey, they were some good moments. The jumpscares were kinda cheap though, since there's not really a clear way to avoid the damage from them even when you know where they are. Thankfully I never died from them. I don't even know if you can die from them to be honest. Judging by the achievements, you can actually kill them before they've jumpscared you, it just wasn't clear to me until after I checked the achievement list, which I did after beating the DLC.
Here's some silly physics object moments to end things off:
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