Losing Control With Alan Wake
Imagine if you will a writer. A man whose trade is in the written word. A man who lies professionally for an audience. A man who twists the lives of his creations for his own amusement and that of others. Alan Wake is one such man. He is soon to find out what its like to be a character in one of his stories, trapped alone and in terror… In Bright Falls.
Alan Wake is a ten year old game that everyone is getting excited about again thanks to Control’s upcoming AWE expansion. In preparation for AWE, I decided to go back and finish the original game in this shared universe, so that I could have the proper context for when Jesse Faden uncovers the mystery and truth behind what happened to Wake ten years ago during an Altered World Event in the town of Bright Falls.
Alan Wake has kind of been a game that interests me. The one thing I knew about it is that the ending was supposed to be exceptionally confusing, a mystery that left people guessing. AWE is even supposed to explain what really happened, after all. But if I’m being honest, it didn’t seem all that confusing? But we’ll get there eventually.
I suppose I should also mention that this comes between playing Control’s main game and playing the AWE expansion that supposedly serves as a sequel of sorts to Alan Wake. I’m actually writing this the day AWE launched, because I’m exceptionally lazy and all I know how to do is procrastinate, even though I beat Control back in July. I have played through Alan Wake, the two DLCs, and his American Nightmare, though. These are my feelings about the game before I play AWE, but after playing Control first. Honestly, even compared to my usual variable level of quality, this might not be as good simply because I might rush it just to replay Control in a new light and play through AWE.
(There are minor spoilers for Control, including one late game event I reference in passing)
Writer’s Block
Writing about Alan Wake feels kind of surreal in that in some ways the entire plot revolves around writer’s block, and trying to overcome it. I’m not a big fancy writer of genre fiction like Alan Wake the character is. But I do write. Sort of. I mean, I write these essays. Even if I turn out about three of them a year. I also write fiction. Or at least, I used to. When I was younger. I don’t anymore. I wish I did, but my brain just won’t let me. Any time I think about solidifying an idea, or turning something into an actual long form prose story, I just can’t bring myself to do it.
At best I started writing a backstory for a character in a Star Wars Saga Edition game that didn’t really get off the ground. It was 5,050 words long, not counting the random scribble of plot outline on the first page. That’s not much, and I didn’t even finish it. When the game fell apart, I told myself that I would keep going, and I did, for a bit, but then I stopped. I told myself that I’d start over and rewrite it to be less fast paced, since I could just write a story instead of a short story.
But I didn’t.
I keep telling myself that I’ll write an SCP article, or a Tale. But I haven’t.
I keep telling myself that I’ll revive one of the previous ideas I had, from twenty or ten years ago, where I had plots and characters thought out and could think of new ones every day if I tried. Or one of the ideas I had that was all about just building a world. But I haven’t.
Alan Wake’s writer’s block isn’t the same as my writer’s block, but I can definitely feel the frustration in not being able to write. Even if his frustration and the inability to write comes from a place where the pressure of success has gotten to him, while my success doesn’t quite exist.
Honestly, I have trouble just writing these critical essays. I know they’re better media analysis than CinemaSins or Gaming Sins videos, but there are so many other people so much more talented and clever than I am, and I know I don’t even live in their shadow. Hell, this was originally going to be an essay on Control, but I couldn’t focus, and every time I tried to transcribe my notes I made livetweeting Control, I felt stupid and underwhelming. Then I wrote the Murdered: Soul Suspect essay and it spiralled out of, well, Control to the point where I couldn’t bare editing it and just pushed it out the door, hopefully without too many spelling errors.
It feels a bit silly to compare my writer’s block with that of the person, fictional or not, who actually has creative things that he can be proud of, but oof. Its still relatable. It still makes me think about my own lack of productivity.
Coming This Fall
Alan Wake is ostensibly inspired by Stephen King. That is, both Alan Wake as a character and Alan Wake the game. Stephen King is even name dropped a few times, both by Alan and Agent Nightingale, who constantly seems to list off every famous writer he knows whenever referring to Alan. Bright Falls certainly does have a bit of that feel about it, but this sleepy little town is more of a Twin Peaks thing. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen Twin Peaks, so I can’t really go into detail about the similarities. But I also have only read Eyes of the Dragon, the least Stephen King book Stephen King wrote, so… 🤷♀️
But Alan Wake really takes a lot more from television than novels. In each episode there’s a television set hidden in plain sight, enticing Alan to relax for a bit and watch an episode of Night Springs, a Twilight Zone style weird fiction anthology. Each episode of Night Springs is some silly little microfiction about two minutes long narrated in a Rod Serling impression. Examples include a professor who created a device to ensure that probability is always on his side whenever he shoots himself with a gun only for someone to accidentally unplug the box just in time for his quantum suicide to go wrong. Another episode has a man who answers a classified ad only to get beaten up so that his “free will” can be extracted. An apt metaphor for capitalism and freelancing, maybe.
My favourite episode of Night Springs is the one where an old lady invites her friend over to see something in the basement, only for the two of them to get down there only to find a void in space. The writer pops up and apologizes for the inconvenience, saying he couldn’t think of what the old lady should have been so excited by. The three of them converse, and he suggests they just go have tea while he tries to keep this from becoming a plot hole. The episode ends as he wonders if maybe he should just end the episode now or if that would be too moronic.
Alan Wake feels like it owes more to prestige television than any paperback fiction. Each section of the game is given an Episode title, and comes with an ending theme. Even the plot feels like episodic television, particularly in the way that the first few episodes don’t really seem to be as tight or relevant as they probably could be. The game even starts out with a plotline that gets dropped, with a prologue where Alan, in a dream, hits a pedestrian who becomes an evil axe murderer, only to be saved by a man who seems like he’ll be important only to never show up again.
The man, Clay Stewart, is the writer of a supplementary work that was released after the game called the Alan Wake Files, which includes all kinds of useful information that never actually showed up in the game. Its probably a coincidence, but this was also around the time when shows like Heroes and LOST were airing. Shows that really encouraged viewers to go hunting through webisodes and participate in ARGs. Did I mention that Alan Wake also has a prequel series made up of short webisodes? There was also an ARG for the unreleased Alan Wake sequel called This House of Dreams, that took the form of a new home owner’s blog.
Something I came away feeling was that Alan Wake might have been better as a Netflix series than as a video game. Its also something I felt about Control, for that matter. Both games sit in a very strange space where I think that being a video game ultimately enhances their narratives, but at the same time they don’t do enough with it. I mentioned a similar feeling about Vampyr. Ultimately its a game where the gameplay is the least engaging part, but because of the threat of violence the impression of who the character is still sinks in. Violence is part of their story, and an interactive medium like a video game really makes that something tactile instead of a passive viewing experience.
But at the same time, Alan Wake feels at odds with itself. As a game, its somewhere straddling the line between action and survival horror. Resident Evil 4 had come out five years earlier, and survival horror protagonists now had to be action heroes as well, capable of shooting off shots and taking down waves of enemies. But you’re still meant to feel vulnerable and afraid, like you’ve got to count your bullets and run to the light instead of sticking around to fight when there’s no reward.
Except the game also has a hundred or so collectible pages that demand you comb every inch of the unnecessarily large level maps just to find them, especially when those pages explain things that give the actions of some characters context. Context you’ll never have if you don’t read (and find) those pages. Context Alan won’t ever acknowledge, either, for that matter.
There are tense, spooky sequences, don’t get me wrong. There are moments where you’ll be inside of a cabin and one of the shadowy Taken will walk by the window, making you tense up, even though you’ve turned the light on, keeping you on edge as you leave the cabin expecting to be jumped, the swirling distortion of the Darkness all around you. Just running through the thick Northwestern forests with that soft, pumping beat can be unsettling enough.
But then the Taken do show up. Often with a slow motion cinematic to highlight just where they’re coming from and give you a good indication of how overwhelmed you are. Except you’re not overwhelmed, because the Taken are video game enemies and they exist only to be defeated. It can get pretty difficult, and there were places even switching to Easy difficulty that I died, but those deaths often come in the interems where you’re loading in bullets or batteries, or if you end up getting caught from behind and stunlocked. Alan runs like an asthmatic grandpa, but he can shoot like a pro.
Combat doesn’t feel good, though. It ends up being tedious, especially when you do die over and over, something that always seemed to happen the most whenever I wanted to search through the area for missing manuscript pages or weapon caches. I feel like I say this every time about every game, but all too often the combat in a game exists in a sort of liminal space where it adds to the tension and gives stakes to the story, but at the same time is at odds with the pacing. Maybe I suck, but dying over and over gets old. I didn’t even die over and over in Alan Wake, though, I just got monumentally bored with having to kill shadow zombies over and over.
The game doesn’t just draw things out with long stretches of random encounters between checkpoints, either. There are stretches where all you do is drive a car during the day. There are even several empty cars Alan can hijack, just in case you bumped the one you had against the level geometry a few too many times and its letting out steam and smoke. So much of it feels like padding. It could be argued that the long stretches of driving during the day are nice breathers, where you have a moment to think and reflect, but the driving controls are not good enough to be casual and contemplative. Instead, you still have to steer along winding roads at the same two speeds every other video game car has: Accelerating and Fast.
There are so many different routes that the game could have taken besides the action shooter horror, but I guess that’s what was in vogue in 2010. But I just kept remembering that I played Silent Hill 2 with the combat set to “Easy” and I was nearly pissing myself the whole time because enemies were so scarce — and not even a threat when they did show up — and yet the tension still remained. Even Shattered Memories, the Silent Hill game that I don’t hear enough about, is practically dripping with unease despite the fact that nothing can hurt you outside of the game’s incredibly telegraphed (and incredibly unfun) chase sequences. Wake does have those moments, but when the enemies do show up it just feels like any other action game, but darker.
There are a few segments, mostly near the end or in the two DLC levels, where the combat actually becomes interesting. Most of the time these are also places where the usual combat mechanics are tweaked a bit, like when Alan is stripped of his gun, but has his flashlight and a supply of roadway flares and has to burn away the shadowy protection of the Taken while the man who allegedly kidnapped his wife actually does the fighting. A standout scene has Alan fighting a swarm of Taken trying to overtake a homemade rock and roll stage while his friend and manager Barry controls a light show and fireworks launch to the thrashing metal of Old Gods of Asgard. Control has a similar scene that calls back to this one, though it happens much later in the game and feels penultimate. (Unfortunately for Control, it also comes before the biggest slog in the game).
Throughout the DLC special episodes, instead of simply having Alan shoot at enemies, the whole thing takes place in the conceptual space of The Dark Place, and serves as a metaphor for Alan’s deteriorating mental state. This gives the game a lot of room to push into, and all through the levels are floating words that can be destroyed by light to accomplish something. “Tool” hangs in the air and gives you a bunch of ammo and other goodies, same with “Flash” and “pump” and other terms that reveal weapons like flashlights, flashbangs, flares, and pump action shotguns. Things get even more creative in places like the twisted mental reflection of the Bright Falls church crypt, which is now a maze of furnaces, each with the word “blast” hanging in front of them. If Alan accidentally sets off one of these words with his flashlight, it sends a burning jet of fire out. But it can also be used to send that burning jet of fire out at the darkness shrouded enemies.
Another section has you fending off “birds” in the form of flocks of Alan’s own Alex Casey novel flying through the air. The whole area has you tiptoeing through dangerous words like “Enemy” and “Possessed”. Words like “Boom”, for a flashbang explosion, might normally be helpful, but here setting one off will crack open a ton of those other dangerous little party balls. The mental specter of Barry jokes that these are “bad words”, chuckling at the innuendo of it. Its here that another of the best parts of Alan Wake shines: When Alan isn’t the only character.
Alan himself is a nice enough protagonist. Dour and uncertain, with that same internal monologue of Remedy’s previous character, Max Payne. But he doesn’t talk to himself nearly enough to carry the game, which is why its great when he has someone with him. Usually this is Barry Wheeler, his Jewish caricature of a best friend and manager. Having Barry around gives Alan someone to talk with, and while he’s comic relief, he’s also kind of a loveable doofus. He doesn’t even like Alice Wake, but he’s committed to his friend and wants to help him get his wife back. He’s also well written and funny.
Alan also has Sarah Breaker to accompany him for a bit, the smalltown cop who seems to know more about the supernatural than you’d expect. The game never really goes into what the code of “Night Springs” means, or why all the people of importance in the town know that it means something is happening, but a cardboard cutout in Alan’s mental landscape during the DLC episode implies that there’s a secret society in Bright Falls, and they’re somewhat familiar with the supernatural.
Some of the game even has you running along with Sheriff Breaker and Barry, who at this point is wrapped up in Christmas lights and with a running lamp strapped to his head. These sections don’t last long, but they’re much better than simply slogging through the dark with no character interactions. Barry and Al’s relationship is one of the best parts of the game, and its great to see him come back as a dream in the DLC. A Taken nightmare of Barry even becomes the final boss of the game.
These are the kind of things the game should have leaned into more. But they’re also by and large not really centered on the gameplay. Which is still the biggest problem I had. Alan Wake would have probably been better paced and much more focused if it was modern prestige television — a Netflix series, for example — instead of a video game that centered its gameplay on shooting fast zombies and running from point A to point B. It would have lost out on that almost visceral feeling that comes only from games, but it would have at least been better paced. It also might have relied less on supplementary materials like hidden manuscript pages or additional out of game material in the collector’s edition to sell its actual narrative.
I can see why people enjoyed Alan Wake, but at the same time I’m left with wanting more. More that I already know never got fulfilled. I felt the same way with Control, actually, and I really hope that they actually do get to make a sequel that tells more about Jesse’s experience and the mysteries of the Oldest House.
Series Retrospective
Honestly I really need to stop trying to get clever with titles, because it doesn’t really work half the time.
Alan Wake’s story is kind of meandering, and there are a lot of parts that feel like they go nowhere. Some of them I can see where they mean something, others I just don’t know what they add to the narrative. All this is on top of the awkward pacing that nearly all video games suffer from. And yet strangely all of the things that I most want to know more about — things that might be told in hidden manuscript pages or The Alan Wake Files — are not what other people seem confused or curious about.
Take for instance Emil Hartman and his associate Ben Mott — who never gets named in the game outside of the manuscript pages — who pretends to have kidnapped Alan’s wife Alice as a way to get the manuscript for Departure, Alan’s novel that is coming true. Emil was once an editor for Thomas Zane, the man who went through the Alan Wake Experience — or “AWE” — before Alan Wake did. Emil understands the magical nature of Cauldron Lake, and how artists there can reshape reality. He’s trapped other artists in his medical resort, like the Anderson brothers who make up the remaining Old Gods of Asgard. But what does he actually accomplish by doing so? What does he gain by having the manuscript to Departure? It doesn’t actually give him any power, as far as I’m aware. It doesn’t give him the power to manipulate reality. He doesn’t even pressure Wake into writing anything specific.
And then Emil is swallowed up by the Dark Presence and killed. Mott is, too. Neither of them seem to really add anything to the narrative, other than to serve as a human counterpart to the Dark Presence, but they’re clearly working at odds with each other. He was the one who suggested that Zane use the power of Cauldron Lake to rewrite his girlfriend back into reality, but he never does that with Wake, or any of the other patients, as far as we see. He just wants their creativity, their paintings, their writing.
The Wiki claims that he was experimenting, but we never see that.
There’s also another way that Emil is, at least tangentially, relevant to the themes, but I’ll get to that in a bit. I suppose it could be said that much like the Dark Presence he wants to use Alan’s talents for his own purpose, but again, he’s barely present in the game. Everything to do with Mott and Hartman feels like spinning the wheels.
The FBI agent, Nightingale, is another place where I want to know more, because he’s a character who is treated as being relevant and integral to the plot, but ultimately he does nothing. He threatens to shoot Alan and arrests him, and he’s an unhinged lunatic even to the point that people who don’t know what ACAB means can tell that he should in no way have a badge and gun, but what he existed for and why he was so dogged in his pursuit of Alan in the all of three scenes that he exists in go nowhere.
Again, I turned to the Wiki to learn that Nightingale’s partner was taken by the Dark Presence and he even had dreams like Clay Steward, the man Wake meets in the nightmare at the beginning of the game who seems to know him but who is completely forgotten about by the narrative, but who wrote the supplementary special edition book The Alan Wake Files. Nightingale was a straight laced agent until his partner was, for whatever reason, was Taken. He may also possibly now be possessed by the Dark Presence himself.
In This House of Dreams, the ARG blog for the unreleased Alan Wake 2, Nightingale even appears to the blogger in her dreams, asking her questions and being shrouded in some kind of darkness. When she woke up she realized that his badge didn’t say FBI, but instead AWE. A bit of a far cry from the Federal Bureau of Control and what AWE would come to mean by the time of Control, but its interesting to see how far back the pieces went.
The wiki also lists Nightingale as a “major antagonist”, but I never got that impression. He shows up as little more than an obstacle, and even then his actions really only directly hamper things mechanically once. And then he’s unceremoniously ripped off stage by shadows, the same as Hartman.
In a lot of ways — and I say this with Control and the Foundation expansion in mind — it feels like a lot of intentionally unanswered questions.
Of course, that’s sort of the thesis statement of the game itself, and maybe its the secret to why its stayed in people’s minds for ten years: Stephen King once wrote that “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking “Why?” But there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.
This is what Alan himself says right at the beginning of the game. And the game throws several unanswered questions at the audience throughout. But just because a question isn’t answered doesn’t mean that it can’t be explored. At one point, Alan finds a manuscript from Thomas Zane that references Alan’s own childhood experiences, as well as a piece of Alan’s own life in the shoebox that Zane wrote into existence as a failsafe. This brings up a great many questions, like “what the fuck???” as well as calling into question whether Zane wrote Alan into existence, or even if Alan wrote Zane into existence. The game doesn’t dwell on this question at all, though, save for a throwaway line in one of the DLC episodes where Wake gets snarky with Zane, only to be nervously rebuffed.
Its an unanswered question, but we could have still learned so much more about it. You can’t simply ask the question and move on, but that’s what Alan Wake feels like it does in a lot of places throughout the game. What did the Anderson Brothers do to fight The Darkness beyond write the song Lady of the Light? Is their confusing Alan for Thomas a hint at something more, or just them being senile and comparing the two writers?
Ironically, though, for me, these are the things I care more about, but what everyone else seems to want to know about is the ending.
Denouement
That’s the question everyone wants to know. What does the ending mean. What happens at the end of the game? Is any of it real? How much of it is just fiction?
The end of the game has Alan pushing through the Darkness at the heart of Cauldron Lake and fighting through the nonsense of a dream world until he can reach Birdleg Cabin and finish the manuscript to Departure, which will allow him to bring Alice back to the world. He hopes to do better than Thomas Zane’s mistake and write a satisfying and dramatically appropriate ending so that Alice can return without being an avatar of the Dark Presence the way that Barbara Jagger was. “Balance slays the demon” the Old Gods’ song goes. And in American Nightmare Alan talks about the importance of writing well, because the Dark Presence can take advantage of what is implied as well as what you actually say (which certainly makes all the implications and dangling threads in the actual narrative of the game feel all that much more jarring).
Its the question of what is real and whether Alan succeeded — a question more or less definitively answered with the DLC episodes and American Nightmare — that really makes Emil Hartman’s presence meaningful as a mortal counter to the Dark Presence. But at the same time, its also where he really feels like he was underused. Ironically, the implication works better than what’s stated.
When Alan wakes up (heh) in Emil’s clinic, he’s told that he’s been there for a while now, and that Alice died and Alan has been driven to grief. Emil tells him that he’s delusional, and everything we’ve experienced in the game so far is called into question.
Except that it really isn’t.
Alan has already had a nightmare that calls into question what is real — the game itself started with one — but narrative conventions tell us that nothing Emil says is true. Even the framing and the way that he acts lead the audience to be suspicious of his motives and what he’s saying, and seeing Ben Mott in a framed photo and investigating Hartman’s office very quickly confirms that he’s full of shit and trying to manipulate Wake. Here the question of “has it all just been a delusion” doesn’t even linger.
But still, what about Alan’s dreamlike trance at the end of the game, and the mysterious phrase “it’s not a lake, its an ocean” mean? What about Alice’s voice at the end of the game saying “Alan… wake up” the way that it did at the beginning of the game, in Alan’s nightmare episode? Just how much of the game was a dream?
Just how much of the game was real?
None of it.
None of it was real.
Alan Wake is a fictional character in a video game by Remedy Entertainment, released for the Xbox on May 14th, 2010.
Every layer of reality in the fiction of the story is equally unreal, and by extension equally real. Even within the fiction of the game, Alan is a character within his own story. Was he also a character written by Thomas Zane? Was Thomas Zane a character written into existence by Alan Wake? Both are equally possible, because paradoxes can exist within fiction in a way that they can’t in real life. Zane wrote The Clicker and Wake wrote Zane’s guiding light into Departure. Reality is malleable in the places like Cauldron Lake, because reality is malleable for fictional characters.
Alan Wake has achieved CHIM.
No, I will not explain what I mean.
Post-Credits
Of course, “what happened within this fiction” is also a question that becomes a little less uncertain with The Signal and The Writer, as well as American Nightmare, although they still leave questions in the air. Questions that aren’t likely to be answered by Control’s expansion.
In the two DLC episodes, Alan fights through his own mindscape, his fears and doubts being tangible things. Here the Taken are even more strongly a metaphor for depression and self-loathing, almost explicitly so. Alan is tormented by his unspecified time trapped in The Dark Place and once again the guiding light of Thomas Zane’s diving suit floating through the air leads him deeper through his own tortured existence. These DLCs were without a doubt my favourite parts of the game, with the waves of Taken now feeling far less out of place than when Alan was able to gun down the entire population of a small town without anyone seeming to notice over the week. Here they aren’t even real — or, as I said, are as real as anything else in the game.
Alan himself isn’t even real, as he finds out that he’s simply a part of his own mind, fighting through the self-destructive urges of his broken psyche as he finds a way to fight his own inner demons and get back to the cabin through an increasingly unhinged and unstable mental landscape. During the first episode you travel through familiar areas of Bright Falls, but by the time you get to The Writer, Alan is clamoring through an ideascape where he has to make floating rocks and passageways appear by illuminating the proper words of his manuscript.
This is also where floating words litter the landscape and can be used to damage enemies and give you supplies. Its not implemented as well as I’d like, with “Bang!” always being placed too far away to be useful, but there’s one great sequence where you spawn barrels that explode and destroy any Taken that gets caught in their light. Its exciting and creative. In a way its not much different from the usual exploding barrels found all over video games, but its in such a unique package.
The plot of these DLC episodes has Alan realizing that he can keep it together, and that here in the Dark Place he has power. In effect, the game has him self-actualizing to gain control over his situation. Sort of like the way that even as Hedron is killed, Jesse self-actualizes and makes Polaris real for her in Control. If one were to be so bold, they might even call this a shared theme between the games.
In fact, the Dark Presence and the Hiss are extremely similar, and going from the later game to the earlier one is kind of surreal. Even after nine years they still had all these same concepts in place, and this negative emotional resonance taking people over is a thing that isn’t new to Remedy. Its almost archeological in a way. In fact, the first thing I said when I saw the floating light that would later be revealed as Thomas Zane I said “oh, so this is Alan’s Polaris?” and that definitely still feels correct.
The Hiss and The Dark Presence both feel like they’re reflections of the main characters’ psyche. They’re essentially the same enemy, except one is black smoke and the other is angry red light. There also isn’t anything similar to the passive Hiss that hang in the air reciting the incantation, but the Taken still continue to say nonsense as they’re attacking Alan. Both of them represent internal conflict and insecurity manifested as an external force.
When Alan returns to the cabin at the end of The Writer, its both metaphorical and literal within the text. He’s trapped in darkness that wears at his sanity. That darkness is both a literal extradimensional entity as well as a metaphor for insecurity and self-doubt. Fiction can have paradoxes, and it can also have things that exist both literally and metaphorically.
But what about American Nightmare, the stand-alone psuedosequel that has Alan returning to the world to do battle with his evil doppelganger, who is casually mentioned in the end of the original game in a way that acts once again as a sequel hook like much of the questions raised and never answered in Control? (Or first again, if we pay attention to the flow of linear time, though I’m not sure why I should bother doing that).
In American Nightmare, we learn more about the rules of magic in this setting. Alan can rewrite reality by making a story that fits with the world, and in doing so he can nudge fate to make the events of the real world happen the way the story he’s written has happened.
Oh my God, I made that joke about CHIM earlier but as I’m writing this I’m realizing that it really is like Mantling in the Elder Scrolls series. The Fourth Walking Way used by Tiber Septim to become Talos Stormcrown: “walk like them until they must walk like you”. Alan really does have CHIM. He makes the real world fit the world he wrote and in doing so the world he wrote comes true.
American Nightmare is about Alan causing the world to Mantle his script for a Night Springs episode.
But at the same time, Night Springs is a fictional location. In fact, American Nightmare begins with Barry sleeping in a motel room when Night Springs the television series comes on the TV, telling the story of the game. Just how much of what happens in American Nightmare is real?
Again, none of it. The entire game is fiction.
American Nightmare even ends with Alan essentially walking into a film, where he’s greeted by Alice for the first time in two years, long after she gave up hope and thought that he was dead. Even then, this wasn’t intended to be the end of Alan’s story, though the intended sequel never manifested. I’m curious to see what finally became of him, though. With AWE it seems that he’s still been trapped for ten years within the Dark Place. Perhaps Jesse will be able to pull him back to the real world? Either way, I’m going to find out right after I hit publish. And maybe take a nap.
Also its not a lake, its an ocean because Cauldron Lake is just an entrance to a much deeper and vaster unfathomable realm of darkness, possibly bigger than the real world. I mean, come on, that’s not hard to see, right?
Hey, I actually put something out within a month, that’s pretty neat of me, I feel like I accomplished something. I wrote this one in about one day because I’m not sure I have or need to say much more than this, and also I kind of want to get to playing AWE now that I have whatever context I need. But hey, thanks for reading, assuming you made it this far.
Do all the usual social media things like giving me attention and comments and claps and feel free to join my Patreon and give me money. I’ve even started fiddling around with a Google Sites page, though other than the SCP starting guide, there isn’t really much to it.
Next up:
I don’t know how long it will take me to write about Control, especially since I’m going to completely play the game over, but that’s probably my next thing. Though I’ve also got plans for an essay about why I like critical essays and think they can really help me engage with a work and remember it long after I’ve watched or played or read it, and maybe an essay on how much stupid fun Saints Row IV is and how it gives me genderfeels by letting me do (mostly) whatever I want with my appearance and voice while also running around doing superheroics.
