Alan Wake is a game which operates on surrealism and dream logic, which is appropriate seeing as it is influenced by the surreal world of David Lynch’s early 1990s TV drama Twin Peaks as much as anything from the mind of Stephen King, whose words open the game. The combat and puzzles are awkward and vaccilate between painfully experimental and frustratingly repetitive, but the narrative is grounded in a deeply personal story that continually presents players with plot twists which pay homage to the genres which came together to form it. Being a game from Remedy Entertainment, Alan Wake also features layers of multimedia storytelling which work with the narrative and gameplay to call the very nature of reality into question. It’s a story about the ways we harm ourselves and one another when we sink too deep into a dark place. It explores the power of unintended consequences, and the lengths to which we may go to save ourselves and those we love from our own mistakes.
After all, “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations. They’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.”
That quote comes from an article that King wrote for Entertainment Weekly called Why Hollywood Can’t Do Horror, the primary point of which is basically that no amount of big money or big special effects can replicate the personal dread instilled by low budget horror movies which may look bad or have otherwise medeocre filmmaking, but ultimately connect with the audience because their approach to emotion of horror is minimally filtered. The blood may be ketchup and the film cut together from a few quationably acted takes, but at least the script hasn’t been workshopped to death. King argues that there’s something… personal in a low budget horror movie that gets lost as soon as the money people insist on over-explaining the story to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Perhaps it’s ironic then that I’m going to be spending the next several hours explaining the video game which borrowed this quote for its opening cinematic, but there’s something deeply personal in the story of Alan Wake which makes me love the game a little more each time I play it.
It’s a story about a writer and the darkness which consumes him, seeping out from the pages of his fiction to corrupt everything he is and everyone he loves. It’s a story about the power of fiction to shape the real world, and the strange ways in which life and imagination can become intertwined.
As the game begins, out titual antihero narrates as we find Alan Wake aware that he is asleep, his dream following the familiar pattern of previous nightmares. As with many dreams, it begins mid-story as Alan drives his car rapidly down a winding mountain road and speeds past a city limits sign for Night Springs. Large, shadowy jaws close around the name of the town. The jaws are actually the shadows of the trees whipping in the night air, but this is the sort of dream logic, the interaction of visual and textual metaphors, that we’re going to be seeing throughout the game. In addition to being a creepy visual, the town of Night Springs is the fictional setting of a television show that Alan Wake wrote for years ago. Though the town is fictional in the fiction of the game’s story, it will come to be as important to this story as any novel he has written… or one which he failed to write.
Alan drives through a dark tunnel and, emerging on the far side, he runs over a hitchhiker. It’s significant that he passed through a tunnel first, because in the realm of dreams tunnels, bridges, and doorways are often as important as light and shadow. Alan has crossed a threshhold in his dream, both metaphorically in having killed a man and literally in passing through a tunnel. Indeed, if we try to escape back up the tunnel we’ll find that it is bricked over and, upon returning to the car we see that copies of Alan Wake’s last completed novel The Sudden Stop are spilling out of the trunk. As for the hitchhiker, he vanishes into dark mist as the car’s headlights flicker.
We’ve entered the nightmare and now Alan must pass through it in the same way that we as players must experience this tutorial sequence before we can escape into the waking world of the game.
From the beginning, we know that light will be important. Our first moments of controlling Alan consist of stumbling from the broken car towards a street light, then further down the road to try and reach the lighthouse that Alan has a felt a compulsion to approach since the dream began. Light will end up being our most important navigational tool for much of the game. There’s a somewhat useless radar which appears at the top left of the screen along with a circular health bar, but most of the time we will be watching the game world for a glimmer of light in the distance and heading in that general direction. By moving from one street light to the next, with the distant flash of the lighthouse to draw us further onward, Alan makes his way to a boardwalk which is both illuminated by a light and flanked by signs which indicate it is the path to Rain Cove Point Lighthouse. With the car dead and the covered bridge collapsed, Alan steps through a gateway onto the boardwalk, crossing another kind of threshhold.
And it is here that Alan Wake shows one of its more consistant weak spots, one which it shares with many video games: As we walk out onto the boardwalk, the camera is suddenly pulled away from it’s third person over the shoulder perspective and forced into a pivot, and then it is pushed back up the road towards the wrecked car, where the hitchhiker has reappeared, now armed with an axe. Then we have a cut to a perspective looking past the hitchiker’s shoulder, almost as if we’re about to take control of him. And then we have a cut back to Alan’s perspective as the hitchhiker teleports to the boardwalk entrance. Add these to the forced camera push that drew our attention to the lighthouse shortly after learning how to walk and the camera has been pulled away from our control and forced into an immersion breaking perspective shift five times in about two minutes of gameplay.
As we gain control of Alan again, we’re forced to run forward to a set of broken steps, where we must either jump about fifteen feet down or wait for the hitchhiker to smash up the boardwalk until the portion we have been pushed onto collapses. As the shadowy axeman approaches, he rants at Alan in a way which definatevely places us inside the nightmare of an author. He calls Alan out for thinking that he’s God. He says that Alan plays with people’s lives and kills off his characters just to add to the drama. As hackneyed and direct as the hitchhiker’s words are, they also fit the scene. After all, Alan was just telling us a story about killing the hitchhiker. And how many of us who write stories or play video games on a regular basis have killed dozens, if not thousands, of fictional characters who exist for no purpose other than to add drama to our story?
I’m lingering here not just because the game does, but because there’s a fundamental difference between how the game presents the hitchhiker’s initial appearance and how we can experience the full heat of his rage. Rather than compelling us to look back up at the hitchhiker after we fall, the PlayStation edition of Alan Wake gives an option to press L3 to focus, and only if we press in on that thumbstick does the camera pivot to display a shadow-wreathed man raging at us from above. You can choose to keep running and it frankly makes more sense to run away, even in a dream. As a method of allowing players a choice between engaging with the deeper layers of the story or playing the game in a manner which feels appropriate to the character and situation, this is a good compromise. If we want to engage more deeply with Alan Wake’s fears, we can press that button. “Look at your own work” the hitchhiker says. And the key here is that we are looking at Alan’s work if we pause to hear the full diatribe. We have to actively engage with Alan’s fears in order to hear the entirety of this rant and see the hitchhiker menacing us. If instead we choose to keep running, the words would fade away and the hitchhiker again vanishes into dark mist.
The chief purpose of a gameplay tutorial is to familiarize players with the core verbs of any particular game. So far, this dream sequence has told us how to walk, run, look, and focus. We can presume that fighting will be involved, since an enemy has just chased us with an axe, but there’s an important piece of sequencing to consider. The next gameplay verbs we are given are jump, as we casually vault over a baracade, and dodge. The priority of what we learn to do when is going to be important to the pacing of the game moving forward, and it highlights another weak spot of Alan Wake in that the game sometimes struggles to telegraph where we should jump and whether it is time to run, dodge, or fight. Personally, I find that the majority of the time the answer is to walk, dodge, and carefully fight onward, but I also have gotten Alan killed dozens of times in a single combat sequence. Rarely does the game so clearly hint that we should abandon all hope of making a stand and run away so clearly as it does in the tutorial, where we reach the far side of a bridge, experience another forced camera pivot, and then must run down a twisting mountainside path as the same dark wind which blew the hitchhiker away shatters each light we approach immediately before we reach it.
There’s a feature of storytelling called Chekhov’s Gun, or for film buffs who grew up in the latter quarter of the 20th century it sometimes goes by Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters. Both of these rules essentially say that if you introduce an element into the story, it should come up again. Is there a loaded gun on the fireplace mantle? Somone’s going to get shot. Have we met and learned the name of a murder victim’s partner? They’re either the killer or will be important to solving the case.
I’ve violated both of these rules and a dozen others in any given season of my ongoing open world roleplay groups and all of the eight novels I’ve self published over the years, but something about the introduction of Clay Steward irks me. Maybe it’s that he is dressed like a jock in a horror movie. Perhaps it’s that he is the one killed by the hitchhiker in this dream, rather than Alan, only a short jog away from the hitchhiker shouting, “How does it feel to die by the hands of your own creation?” Or maybe its just that Clay seems to expect that Alan will recognize him, but dies before Alan can acknowledge whatever connection they may have. It’s a small irk, but like the upcoming cabin scene it feels like a brillaint idea on paper that lands poorly due to either subtle details of its implimentation or later references to him getting cut. Clay Steward is the pseudonymous author of the tie in book The Alan Wake Files, so maybe his brief appearance was intended to be a nod to the nascent Remedyverse, but here in the game Clay exists solely to show that guns are useless against the hitchhiker and that the hitchhiker’s axe can definitely kill a human.
The average first time player of Alan Wake likely has a lot of time to think about Clay’s untimely death because the cutscene ends with Alan trapped in a cabin with only a flimsy wooden door between him and a murderous axe-weilding ghost. And to make it worse, there are four televisions scattered through this cabin, all showing a wild eye flicking back and forth as a voice chants, “Die, die, die, die!” This is a scary situation. If this was a TV show or film, the tension would be building, the music would be rising, and we as viewers would be trapped in the scene with Alan.
But how do video games make a player stop? How do they make us sit with our fear instead of rushing onward? TV and movies and books have us as a trapped audience. We are bound to the rhythm of the story that the filmmakers or authors choose. But as players, we feel like we should have agency in the story. On my first playthrough I found myself running around the cabin looking for a weapon and feeling a rising concern when I realized that Alan was trapped, but boredome struck long before panic or the scene transition.
It was only on later playthroughs that I noticed the poster on the door towards the rear of the cabin. If we choose to linger here, there is a lot to learn, but it’s difficult to get a player to stop and look and read when the whole cabin is being shaken by dark winds and we know that the hitchhiker is just outside with an axe and probably about to smash through the door. As players, we want to engage. We want to go and grab the rocking chair that is creepily shaking back and forth and use it to bloch the door or maybe pick up one of the logs that has fallen off a shelf and use it as a weapon. This is more of a matter of sequencing and timing than a lack of worthy clues to study, so let’s step away from critiquing the gameplay of this brief sequence and focus instead on the clues which are on offer if we choose to study the colorful film poster.
The film itself is called Tom the Poet, which is itself a fun connection back to the Stephen King quote about “the poetry of fear”. And that’s only the beginning of the layers in this bonanza of forshadowing. The tagline of the movie reads, “A terrifyingly strange dive into the dark depths of an artist’s mind,” which not only connects to our experience because we are playing through the creepy nightmare of an author, but also because we have already passed two notice boards on which there was a photo of an old fashioned deep-sea dive suit of the sort now shown in vibrant distorted colors on the film poster. These sorts of sideways allusions and repeated visuals will become important to the plot of Alan Wake over the course of six episodes and while they don’t always land immediately, and sometimes are framed as awkwardly as this sequence, I love how Remedy made the effort to include this kind of poetic foreshadowing throughout the whole game.
A look at the credits of the poster reveals the single most dense set of foreshadowing elements in the game. Thomas Zane stars as the diver. We haven’t heard of Thomas Zane yet, but now we know who the diver is and have encountered a name which will come up again before the end of episode one. Barbara Jagger stars as the dark presence. We have yet to hear that name or even meet a woman yet in the game, but a dark presence is shaking the cabin and aiding the hitchhiker. Cynthia Weaver stars as the Lady of the Lamp. Light has already been important to our gameplay and players who spot this name may have questions when they arrive at the Oh Deer Diner shortly after the tutorial ends. Emil Hartman stars as the assistant and while we will not meet him until episode two, his name and reputation will become key plot elements multiple times in episode one.
Before we leave the cabin behind, let’s dig just a little deeper into the cyclical elements of this Tom the Poet filom poster, because besides the foreshadowing of names, this poster foreshadows some of the deepest secrets of the story. I’ll just highlight them for now, but be warned that these are the first true spoilers for the story of Alan Wake as opposed to nerdy grumblings about gameplay and characters.
The film is written and directed by Thomas Zane. Given that it’s called Tom the Poet and Thomas Zane has already been identified as the star, this suggests we are contemplating some sort of deeply self-involved indie film, likely one which is either brilliant or painfully narcisictic. But let’s add one more layer to the metafiction: The film is based on a novel by Alan Wake. We know that Alan is a writer, but other than The Sudden Stop we don’t know for sure what he has written. This cycle of us playing a game about an author who is having a nightmare set in a tv show he wrote and featuring symbolism from a film based on his books, which stars characters we will meet later in the video game which itself is structured like a tv show is exactly the sort of complex and meaningful storytelling which draws me to Alan Wake as a game and a part of the extended family of Rewmedy stories. Neither the narrative nor the gameplay are perfect, but the intention to tell deep stories and the and thoughtful structuring of revelations are present from the very start.
Eventually, the plot proceeds with light bursting through the rear door, tearing it from its hinges, dissolving the wall around it, and a voice telling us to follow the light, to go into the light, to be healed by the light. We already knew that light was important to the themes of this story, but now we learn that on a gameplay level, light will heal Alan. This means that as players, we want to look for light sources, not merely because they give us objective markers, but because they are places of safety. We may also recall that sometimes the light is taken away from us, such as when the darkness shattered lamps before we could reach them as we ran down the mountainside.
The voice speaks to us from the light then, insisting that we cannot proceed until it explains something important, something it has broken into our dream to tell us. And that important thing? It’s a poem.
“For he did not know that beyond the lake he called home lies a deeper, darker ocean green, where waves are both wilder and more serene. To its ports I’ve been. To its ports I’ve been.”
Do you understand?
Here’s a rather unconventional verb of gameplay. We haven’t even learned to fight yet and a voice is demanding understanding. Compelling us to think about metaphors and try to extract meaning from incomplete information. Even if a player noticed the final lines on the poster, those crediting Tom the Poet the Not a Lake production company, or associates the visual of a diver sinking into a green ocean with the similar lines of this poem, whata re we to make of this reference to ports?
More importantly, why are we studying poetry instead of learning how to fight?
This is probably the most important lesson of the tutorial, and its so easy to miss. Alan Wake isn’t a game about rushing from scene to scene, fighting for our life. It’s a story about personal horror. About sinking into a place where logic and emotion and story colide in the churning waters of the surreal, forcing us to move slowly and think deeply. But just as this lesson is a bit hard to understand in this awkwardly paced dream sequence, there will be many a time when the pacing of the game or the competing formats of gameplay, film, televised serial, novels, and poetic dream logic collide to turn the intended experience into a bit of a confusing mess.
The light repairs the next section of the boardwalk, allowing Alan to proceed after listening to the poem. This is practical because it unlocks the path forward, but thinking metaphorically it also demonstrates to us that light can change the dream. It can bend reality. It can rebuild what has been broken.
Only after forcing us to study poetry and think about the maliable logic of dreams does the light give us our first weapon: A flashlight.
I genuinely love the flashlight mechanic in Alan Wake. Like many other video games, there are times when the enemies feel like bullet sponges and the dark shields sometimes take way too many batteries to burn through, but the idea of having to burn away the darkness which has consumed our enemies and confront them as people before we can actually shoot them is a beautiful inversion of how we often feel about enemies in games. On a practical level, the swarms of enemies do end up feeling dehumanized, but in concept the entire light and darkness element of the combat system goes a long way to adding moral and thematic weight to every encounter.
After teaching us how to fight, the voice hurridly departs, leaving us to finish the tutorial on our own wits. From here, the game demonstrates some of the best and worst aspects of the combat in a few brief encounters. We can knock one of the Taken off of a broken section of boardwalk, or later off of a cliff right beside a sign that warns of the risk of falling, teaching us that we can occasionally use environmental features to our benefit. We see the Taken appear from behind bushes and have to juggle multiple enemies, burning through their shields, retreating as we reload flashlight batteries or our revolover, and then shooting them before we can make it to the next light. We even get to play with the flare gun, which is in of the most delightful weapons in the game. If anything signals that Alan Wake is more of a survival horror game than action adventure, it’s that we mostly get ammunition for the revolver and occasionally get to use a rifle or shotgun. The flare gun not only looks amazing as it lights up the night, but it burns through the shields of any enemies caught in its illumination radius and then destroys them with an explosion.
Arriving at the end of the cliffside path, we see Rain Cove Point Lighthouse shining across a damaged bridge, directly opposide a billboard for The Sudden Stop, which was the final novel Alan managed to write before experiencing a debilitating bout of writers block. The dark presence emerges from the forest behind the billboard as a torrent of wind, destroying the lights and driving Alan across the damaged bridge towards the lighthouse by throwing debris and vehicles at him. We’ve reached the end of the tutorial. Alan and the player both have learned all that the light had to teach them, and now we have nothing remaining to do except run towards the light. If it feels a little hurried and uncomfortable, that’s because Alan’s creative life also came to a sudden and uncomfortable conclusion with the publication of the very novel whose billboard now threatens to destroy us.
The lighthouse should be a place of safety, but it’s important to remember that lighthouses are in many ways the embodiment of irony. A lighthouse is put in a place of danger to warn ships away from the sudden and violent end they may face if they stray too close to the rocks. A lighthouse is put in a remote location, and in both real life and in stories often populated by people who lead a hard existence, struggling to survive in bitter weather in order to keep the light burning and warn people away. So too, many an author of brilliant fiction has served as much as a warning of how not to live one’s real life as a beacon of hope with the stories the project into the world. Therefore it should come as little surprise that when Alan steps into the lighthouse and approaches the long spiral staircase, which should lead him up to the safety of the lamp, we once again have a flip of perspective. The cutscene employs the classic monster-cam perspective to leap up to the top of the spiral and then plunge downward again towards Alan’s terrified face before the game cuts to darkness.
And a woman’s voice says, “He’s here.”
This article is part of my ongoing series analyzing Alan Wake, among other games. If you enjoy this kind of article, please consider following me on YouTube, sharing this article everywhere you can, or supporting my writing on Patreon.
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