Game Theory: This is not a review of Alan Wake 2

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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Do I like Alan Wake 2? It’s a question I feel like I should be pretty good at answering at this point, as a) a professional video game critic, and b) someone who’s been playing Remedy’s latest survival horror game pretty regularly for the last week and change.

And yet, I’ll be damned if I can come up with a good answer here. I admire it, certainly—but am I admiring genuine craft in its storytelling, world design, and gameplay, or just the sheer audacity that writer Sam Lake and his team are employing in trying to get away with some of this shit? Am I enthralled by its tense, quick-moving combat (a noted improvement on the fairly simplistic fights from the 2010 original, if not as robust as what Remedy deployed in the more action-y Control), or just riding a wave of ups and downs between the fights that go well, and the ones that go frustratingly, obnoxiously wrong? Am I dazzled by the rural vistas that have been crafted with deep love here, or just grateful that the game’s over-zealous lighting engine has eased up enough to actually let me see them for a solid minute?

Meanwhile, describing the actual plot of Alan Wake 2 is just begging to sound foolish. (I’ve been playing a game with my s.o. this week, and unlike Alan Wake 2, it’s a short one: I try to tell her about plot points from the game, and the challenge ends as soon as I can make her roll her eyes.) Loosely, though, AW2 follows two characters: The titular Alan Wake, an author who got himself sucked into a magical, reality-altering lake back in 2010, and who has spent the intervening 13 years trying to write his way back out (and haunting all of Remedy’s subsequent games in the process); and Saga Anderson, an FBI agent (with psychic powers, natch) who finds herself drawn into Wake’s story. Players start as Saga (the name is part of Remedy’s general obsession with Scandinavian culture, not shocking from a Finnish studio) but before long you’re freely able to switch between both protagonists, who basically exist in two separate games: Saga running around the familiar terrain of Bright Falls, Washington, and Wake in an imaginary, shadow-filled version of New York.

This bifurcated structure is just one of those ways Alan Wake 2 defies easy categorization, since it has massive implications for both the game’s pace and its tone. Saga’s adventure is more conventional horror, focused on open-world exploration as she runs around town, investigates ritualistic murders, and tries to find spots where Wake’s reality and hers overlap. Alan’s is more linear, puzzle-y, and deliberately disorienting, as he tries to literally rewrite reality to potentially open new paths to try to escape. (The game suggests alternating between the two characters regularly, which I endorse—if only because it gives you nice, long breaks between portions of the game being narrated with Alan’s portentous and heavy-handed writing, back in force from the first title.)

In both worlds, though, you’re doing basically similar things, i.e., using light to help you shoot monsters, and slowly accruing power-ups to help you scrape a little more killing ability out of your fairly limited arsenal of guns. As far as enemies go, Saga’s fighting the Taken from the original title, i.e., “Zombies that yell weird stuff,” and who have to be blasted with your flashlight before they can be meaningfully hurt; Wake, meanwhile, gets one of the game’s many clever touches: His enemies are shadows that hide in packs of other, harmless shadow-people, which instills a nice sense of paranoia every time one lunges toward you and you have to figure out whether you’re about to take a pipe wrench to the face. (Or, more likely, waste some precious bullets on a lantern show.)

“Clever touches” are basically Alan Wake 2's watchwords, actually. It’s a game that’s gotten more “Ah, that’s clever”s out of me than any in recent memory: Giving Saga a big clue board in her “mind place” to let you decipher her various mysteries? Clever! Using a bizarre talk show, hosted by Supergirl’s David Harewood, to deliver exposition and breaks in the run-and-shoot routine? Clever! Mixing live-action and in-game footage (a Remedy staple) to blur the lines between what’s real and what isn’t? Clever! But all of that also means that few games in recent memory have more clearly highlighted the difference between “clever” and “good.”

Take, for instance, what could be seen as the game’s most fundamental question: Is Alan Wake actually any damn good as a writer? I still have no idea—although the numerous purple and overwrought excerpts from his in-game Alex Casey books suggest that he’s not necessarily supposed to be, even in the eyes of Sam Lake and his team. But if the author of reality is a hack, does that excuse actual hackwork in the game’s narrative? It’s interesting, for instance, that both characters have a key puzzle-solving mechanic that basically involves reaching for a convenient deus ex machina to get around actually finding things out. (For instance, when Saga talks about “profiling” subjects, she’s just pulling correct answers straight out of the ether—no puzzle-solving required.) Is that sloppy writing? Alan employing sloppy writing as the author of reality? Another, malevolent party screwing with his design? Or, y’know, all of the above—meta structures being used to spackle over genuine holes in the way the story is being presented?

More to the point, is the game saying anything genuinely interesting about any of these clever ideas it’s making such liberal and flashy use of? Saga inevitably finds herself battling her assigned role in Wake’s horror story—but does that make her anything more than just another tragic heroine? Wake’s stuck in a push-and-pull with a dark doppelganger for control of his story—but it doesn’t make him a more interesting character, even after all these years. It’s clever, yes, unavoidably, aggressively clever. But is it good?

The person whose influence I find myself returning to, again and again, while playing Alan Wake 2 was, of course, Stephen King. (That’s not a revelation, mind you; “Stephen” and “King” are the first two words of the original Alan Wake, and Remedy has made no secret of the fact that the series is their effort to aggressively mash the author’s work up with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.) But the King it makes me think of isn’t the taut, brutal King of the ’80s, or the more placid master craftsman of the 1990s. This is, consciously or not, Remedy’s efforts to replicate the “kitchen sink” King of the 2000s, when his magnum opus, The Dark Tower, was hitting peak “Who says I can’t put Doctor Doom and the Golden Snitch from Harry Potter in my novel and call them out by name?” meta-excess. (This isn’t just because Lake appears, in one early live-action talk show sequence, as himself, as the actor playing Alex Casey, who’s based on old Remedy hero Max Payne—although that level of self-reference doesn’t hurt.)

When these big, dumb swings land—as they do with the game’s stand-out musical number, a staggering example of “Do you dare us to get this silly with this shit?” maximalism—they completely overwhelm the critical faculties of the person actually playing. (Or, at least, this person actually playing.) “I can’t believe they did that” is a powerful thought, and it can drown out a lot of “I wish moving through this forest wasn’t such a pain” or “Damn, these enemies score some pretty cheap hits.” (Nothing, meanwhile, can drown out, “I cannot believe you didn’t auto-save before this boss fight, Alan Wake 2, and are now making me listen to this dialogue for the fifth straight time.”) But they also leave the game sometimes feeling less like a cohesive experience, and more like the fodder for a future highlights reel. None of this is dire, exactly: If you’re just looking for a game where you run around and shoot monsters in pretty environments, you could do a whole lot worse. But it’s all just a little more prosaic, and occasionally irritating, than its self-applied hype wants to lead you to believe. I’m happy it exists, because nobody else is making games so fearlessly at this scale. In the moment, while playing, I often find myself thinking, “Wow, I love this.” But do I like it? I still have no damn clue.