The enemies being so damn fast and aggressive is one of my favorite bits of the game. If they just slowly stumbled towards you then it wouldn’t be tense and feel tedious instead of fun.

Yeah I loved it

Great way to describe it

another pretentious ass remedy fan

and maybe some connections in the upcoming Max Payne remakes and control 2.

Yeah once you get through that intro....🔥

@@GamesToGoo Show me the terror!

who are you talking about? casey? that's not an actor, that's remedy's creative director sam lake and he really only found himself in this position because he was incidentally the face model for max payne back in the day and alex casey is remedy's stand in for max payne to avoid copyright issues after selling the character to rockstar lol. idk if that's who you're talking about but i thought everyone was great, and with casey being so stoic, i figured it was a good guess

@@QuestionableLifeChoices Sure aren't. I was thinking about Saga. Her voice acting emotes well but I felt the facial expressions in the game were terrible. Literally no change in any of her cutscenes and I've had the impression they animate using facial captures.

@@tinfoilhatswork746 really? i disagree. the emotions on her face are usually subtle but definitely still there. most of the times we see her face are when she's focused during profiling/casework but in the few instances where she's having a relatively normal conversation and we can see her face (first convo with rose, meeting tor and odin), she's very expressive

This game is not a mastpiece

when did you last play Alan Wake 1? because it literally just tells tells tells, if Alan isn’t narrating, he’s running through 15 identical encounters to find a new person to just infodump on him, and then he explains it again in VO. Its everything you complained about with no interactive element. And I assume by “modern tropes” you mean “black woman”? Games are not going to limit themselves to only having player characters who possess dongs as pale pink as a 50 year old stick of juicy fruit just because you freak out every time you see a pair of melanated tits. Saga needs to be obviously and immediately visually distinct from Alan because of her purpose within the game’s narrative, which is far from “checking boxes”. Alan Wake II is about Alan Wake being trapped in the Dark Place, within which he is continuously writing his story, and altering reality around him, both inside the world in the lake and the world on the shore. For Alan, time is glitchy, memories are unreliable, the identities of the people he meets are impossible to fully differentiate from his own, and space itself keeps changing. Alan does not know up from down, here from there, him from them, yesterday from tomorrow. That is the horror of the dark place. Saga’s purpose within the narrative is to establish a sense of stability and reality, in contrast to the dark place, and to map out the lines of cause and effect, in order to make it clear what Alan is changing, and what the consequences of the changes are. And the entire point, the ENTIRE POINT, of this chapter in the story, is that Alan is kind of an asshole. Saga exists in service to that point. The point of the mind place isn’t to make you solve a mystery, it’s to help you keep track of what is happening in the story. The red string connects the picture and notes to create linearity and a physical, extant representation of the sequence of events. This allows you to not just be told, but FEEL the difference in the realities inhabited by Alan vs the one inhabited by everyone else. Alan’s board is covered in scenes with no connective string, with elements that can be freely shifted around, and this creates actual alterations in his world. Saga’s board has one right place for everything, and her reality remains constant regardless of what she does to her board. In other words, Saga’s experienced reality informs her mental narrative, but Alan’s mental narrative informs his experienced reality. In other words, Alan is an asshole. The horror of the game comes from the way Alan, oblivious to his own destructive potential, disconnected as he’s become from any sense of cause and effect has begun to wreak havoc on the lives of those connected to him in the real world. Alan feels like, to paraphrase Disney’s Pinnochio, he’s got no *strings*. Unfortunately for everyone else, Alan’s still got strings a-plenty, and as he erratically shifts and shuffles, people have begun to get their necks all wound up in them. He’s killing people, and he has no idea. That’s why Saga is who she is: stable, well adjusted, with a family she loves, and her special Remedy-protagonist superpower is to be supernaturally good at her job which is centered around using the cold hard facts of reality to identify and contain individuals who have previously caused grievous harm, to prevent additional harms in the future. She’s precisely the character we need as the player to comprehend, with clarity and precision, the stakes of Alan’s current predicament, beyond “oh no i have to keep playing alan wake until i beat it.” Because the payoff to the established stakes is that Alan finally becomes self-aware. The big reveal of Alan Wake II is something you and I have known all along, but Alan has concealed from himself, so well that the fact that he uncovers

it in the end is genuinely a surprise: ALAN WAKE IS A BIT OF AN ASSHOLE! of course he’s Mr. Scratch! We always knew that, deep down; He’s been his own dark doppelgänger the whole time, because that is what the DP has been doing to everyone, all this time, and many of them weren’t televised being a mean drunk entire states away from Cauldron Lake, years before ever being splashed by so much as a drop of that dark water! The entire point of Saga Anderson is that she is a stable, relatively straightforward player character who has an objectivity to her viewpoint that is bolstered by norse magicks on her mom’s side that give her a resistance buff specifically against Cauldron Lake’s horseshit, and mad science quantum powers on her dad’s that give her a massive boost to perception when timeline fuckery is afoot, and then showing us, and by extension Alan, the amount of havoc and misery he is able to inadvertently cause her, simply by continuing as he is. And the reason he needs to see that isn’t even for Saga. It’s for Alice. He has never, not once, taken true responsibility for the pain he caused her, is causing her, and without a major change, will continue to cause her. He continuously shifts the blame onto external forces, onto Barbara Jagger, the Lake, Hartman, Scratch… the Dark Place. But as Casey says, he’s not in a dark place, he IS the dark place. He wants to be reunited with her as if that will solve their problems, but the point that Alice, secretly guiding him, is making, is that if he can bring that much woe to the double-magicked granddaughter of one of the two badass old rockstar gods that are generals in the “armies of helpers” he has, then what can he do to his damn WIFE? And once we’ve had the first part of that answered the long way, having earned the emotional weight required to make the point properly, Remedy/Alice shows Alan/Us precisely what: if he doesn’t stop being an asshole, she is going to yeet her ass right off a damn cliff. She really, actually will, and it’s gonna be his fault. Doesn’t matter if he REMEMBERS doing it, doesn’t matter if he can only get writing at the bottom of a Dark Place, he’s still being an asshole, and her heart can’t take much more of it. And so, he lets the old Alan take the bullet, the light too bright to look at. It’s a religious idea, this concept of dying to the shitty old you, to be reborn and get a fresh chance. No baptism in water for Alan though, he’s been soaked for decades. He gets a magic bullet, suitable for a horror story monster. But when he comes to, resurrected into his second life, it’s to the voice of Alice, who hadn’t actually yote her ass to the sweet forever nap just yet. She’s still here, because he’s her man, and she’s his woman, and she does fucking love the hell out of him, even when he’s being a dumb asshole, and it’s her presence that gives him the revelation: it’s not a loop, it’s a spiral. He’s not damned to repeat his mistakes forever. And that revelation would not have had nearly as much weight and gravitas behind it without the distance and objectivity Saga brings to the game. Alan wouldn’t have been able to see past his own ass to realize Alice was still there. He wouldn’t have ever had the realization that he was Scratch as long as it was Alice he was menacing. Saga is separate enough from the story to set the rules of the world while still being tied into it closely enough for her stakes to be something we and Alan can comprehend, and that allows Alice’s more difficult, emotionally nuanced message of “I love you BUT you are the monster that I need you to save me from, AND you are the monster that I need to save YOU from” to be understood.

​@@chexfan2000Yeah you summed it up. Alan isn't a blank slate, he's got mental health issues pre dark place, substance abuse. On and off death wish. Then there's the fact he is still short tempered, and is very aggressive to the FBC interviewer in files.

​​@@chexfan2000Also "Alan Wake up!" From the first can be taken as hey dipshit you need to be awake and clear headed enough to see you're being a dick.

​@@liquidrufushe didnt sum it up he wrote a novel