oh yeah, and I loved those games all the same. I think what makes them work though is that they were both adroit about working around the bad writing and never centering it. especially control like, in terms of the actual story of jesse faden basically nothing actually happens in game, and the few things that do are minor and not very interesting. it doesn’t ask you to care too much about all that, and the most interesting stuff in that game is what happens around the main plot and that stuff is great!
quantum break is much more narrative-focused but it’s also the most openly kitchsy thing they’ve done, and it starts with a ludicrous premise which primes you to not pay too close attention to detail or to plot holes or whatever. and plot of that game is so fun in a dumb way.
alan wake 2 has a lot of that going for it too but it basically shattered my suspension of disbelief within the first two hours of the game and it feels extremely unlikely to recover. double buffering these spoilers bc the game is still so new, but:
Chapter 1 Spoilers
very early in the game there is a scene where our fbi agent protagonist and her partner are in the morgue of the local police station with the corpse of a murder victim, the sheriff, and two other officers. the corpse reanimates and kills the two other cops present while the sheriff suddenly vanishes into thin air. after the altercation the animated corpse also vanishes into thin air, leaving the two fbi agents, two dead cops, and no sign of the corpse or the sheriff. and up until this point this game has been very gravely focused on procedural crime drama so like, it’s hard to ignore that this is now a new crime scene with two new victims and a very prominent missing person, and the protagonist and her partner are the only suspects/witnesses. two cops bust into the morgue saying they heard gunshots, and the protagonist just outright tells them everything that happened, and they just credulously believe her and let her and her partner go. like my god the cops were dumb and bad at their jobs in the first game like come on! it’s insane to believe that a highly trained analytical fbi investigator would expect anyone to believe that story in the first place! and the only reaction the cops have is non-cutscene incidental dialog where they’re like “how did that happen? that sounds like magic. magic isn’t real! is magic real?”, just leaning hard into the uneducated country bumpkin stereotype, and pretty much out of nowhere bc no one other local has been portrayed this way in the game so far and only one cop has been depicted as incompetent. like does this game want me to take it seriously or not?
but I’m keeping my mind open for them to flip the script on me in the way I kept hoping the first game would but never did. so far the game is loudly going out of its way to remedy (lol) the most egregious flaws of the first game, so it gives me some hope. but at least it’s an actual survival horror game and so far fairly competently done.
though my god remedy still hasn’t figured out level design yet. god bless them, they are masters of making tiny simple locations that are still confusing and way too easy to get lost in. I was hoping they’d figure it out here but it does not seem to be the case.
Oh noo, I kept checking out this thread hoping for the direct opposite of this post
AW1 felt like Sam Lake coming up with a setup that would let him explore the anxiety of having to make a proper follow-up to Max Payne, fruitlessly looking for his muse, being stuck in a writing hell and feeling crushed by expectations until realizing that moping solves nothing and the only way out is through, but whenever Alan is used to explore that anxiety, he comes off as either super whiny or self-absorbed. The script empathizes with that part too much and quickly loses interest in the possibility that yeah, maybe Wake is a hack/madman/psychotic asshole lost in his mind - the finale and DLC keep reassuring us (and him) how special he is in the end, and it makes all of the campy stuff in the margins feel empty and confused. Max Payne 2 worked way better in this regard since it never fully dropped the possibility that Payne is honestly insane, a 100% unreliable narrator (that one sex worker phonecall where you hear him act completely unlike in his own narrative!).
Also, stuff like The Old Gods of Asgard jokes always simply fell flat for me since it’s this nerdy one-note type of humor that grates on me - that one part where Remedy’s fav Finnish band is singing crap like “when I thought that I fought this war alone, you were there by my side on the frontline…” during combat in a random warehouse was way funnier to me
I do expect this game to have a more focused narrative than alan wake 1. like that game spends an enormous amount of time on narrative threads and characters that are just never heard from or even referenced again. and I should clarify that like, the plot-writing is just as bad, the actual moment to moment dialog writing is substantially better, and even the bits of in-game alan wake writing feel more like actual stephen king than a 3rd grader doing their first creative writing assignment.
there’s still too much entirely unnecessary voiceover but I don’t always hate that and at least it’s appropriate to the detective theme here. it’s still pretty pastichey but isn’t pure pastiche.
If you judge AW2 through the lens of a developer that holds American network TV in higher esteem than we might, then I think you can have a good time with this game. Essentially Sam Lake is European Kojima right? I’m approaching Lake’s game as an exercise in evoking the vibe of American network shows like Fringe and Hannibal. In that respect, I find it’s a quirky approach that does have a distinct auteur behind the vision.
