How many times in games, movies, or novels does a plot beat hinge on the main character being unable to advance because of the actions of another character? Putting players into a situation where they must wait can be awkward, as we saw when Alan was trapped in a cabin during his dream or if we don’t move to the correct interaction locations to trigger dialogue scenes on the ferry. As Alan Wake arrives in the Oh Deer Diner in the early moments of Episode one, we see how creating atmosphere and just a little bit of empty space, even a touch of boredom, can drive player engagement.
We open with Alice dropping Alan off outside the diner, saying that she’s going to get gas while he collects the key to their rented cabin from a man named Stucky. Alan enters the diner and is immediately hit with another reminder that he will not be anonymous in Bright Falls, even though he has traveled all the way across the country to escape from his troubles.
The scene leans into the small town Americana tropes, as Alan comments on how he had forgotten that places like Bright Falls and the Oh Deer Diner exist, especially in the way that everybody seems to know one another. There’s an irony here in that Alan is hoping to disappear and instead has come to a place where not only do the locals know one another, but his celebrity status is even more on display here than if he’d taken a week long staycation in New York.
And that brings us to Rose, the waitress at the Oh Deer Diner. Rose has read every one of Alan Wake’s books and keeps a cardboard cutout standee of him in the diner. Alan’s frustration is immediately apparant as Rose recognizes him and begins babbling about her love for his books. She is enthusiastic, overly friendly, and generally a bit much, but also charming as she enthusiastically welcomes Alan and informs him that Stucky has just stepped into the bathroom.
Unable to complete Alan’s quest, the player has to wait for Stucky to emerge from the bathroom (which he won’t do) or engage with the scene until they feel the same degree of impatience that Alan does. We can wander around and listen to Rose enthuse about Alan’s work and offer to show him a good time while he’s in town… if his wife isn’t with him. We can talk to Rusty or the Anderson Brothers. We can study the Deerfest banner, the small town advertisment stuck to the cork board, or the cardboard cutout of Alan standing by the door.
There’s an alignment here of the player feeling stuck and the character feeling stuck that resolves in a natural, if very specific, manner. Alan is a bit more brusque to Rose than he was to Pat back on the ferry, especially when she offers to give him a private tour of the town after work, but he still maintains a professional demeanor.
Before we get to the interactive elements available during this awkward wait, there’s one more subtle element which stands out to me. It’s brief, no more than a couple seconds, but it’s one of those choices that the designers made which foreshadows the importance of a character before they have been fully introduced. Just as Rose finishes explaining the absense of Stucky, the view cuts to the perspective of the Lamp Lady, who is standing at the rear of the diner, right near the dark hallway which leads to the bathroom.
This cut stands out to me because, as with movies, video games like Alan Wake are expensive to produce. We’re not talking about one person sitting down and tapping away at a keyboard or rambling into a microphone. We’re talking dozens of designers working on building each scene and having meetings about where to place the perspective camera during the cutscenes. Why would we draw the audience’s attention to this woman’s perspective, especially in such a brief manner? It’s a great moment of foreshadowing Cynthia Weaver’s importance, even if it’s so brief that, like the shifts of perspective in the dream sequence, it almost feels like a glitch. If the shot had been allowed to linger a moment longer or Remedy had animated the Lamp Lady to be looking back and forthe between Alan and the dark hallway and this would have been a perect moment.
We gain control of Alan again standing at the counter by Rose and Rusty the Ranger, who is enjying a cup of coffee and the local newspaper. Pages of the manuscript will later reveal that Rusty has an unrequited crush on Rose, but for now the scene mostly leans into Rusty’s presence as a man in uniform keeping an eye on the two old men in the corner booth. That, and a joke which Rose makes: Rusty isn’t human anymore. He’s nothing but black coffee under a think layer of skin.
It’s a casual statement that we wouldn’t normally think about too much. It’s even a little on the nose as far as foreshadowing goes, evoking memories of Alan’s nightmare to hint at a dark fate for Rusty. In Alan’s dream we burned away a layer of darkness to reveal the fragile, corrupted humanity of what was underneath. Now, that metaphor has been inverted to describe Rusty. The story has taken a seemingly kindly man in the uniform of a Park Ranger and, without making any direct threats against him, brought to mind the fear we so recently experienced.
As we explore the diner, still waiting for Stucky to emerge, players must walk near a booth occupied by two old men, right beside a battered old jukebox. Rusty will later explain that they are the Anderson Brothers, residents of a local psychiatric hospital at Cauldron Lake Lodge. The one with an eyepatch, who we’ll later learn is named Odin, calls out to Alan as we approach, insisting that we start up a song on the jukebox. We can ignore him, just as we could ignore Alice’s prompts on the ferry, and nothing changes about the scene except the lack of music, but if we guide Alan over to the Jukebox an interaction prompt will appear on screen telling us to hit the jukebox.
This introduces a new mechanic: Repeatedly tapping the ineraction button at a specific speed to make an effect occur. Compared to the spoonfed instructions in the dream sequence, this is a brilliant moment of combining a gameplay tutorial with characterization. It allows us to see Alan as willing to set aside his irritibility to humor the Anderson brothers by giving us the option of participating in a tutorial or skipping it. If we participate, we are rewarded with the ironically light hearted tune of The Coconut Song by Harry Nilsson… which also hints at the bad advice given by the head doctor at Cauldron Lake Lodge.
We can take as much time as we like to study the advertisements for the Coffee World ammusment park, Deerfest, imported local beer brands, and other quirky small town announcements. We can stand beside the Jukebox and listen to all of the Coconut song as Odin slaps his hands on the tabletop in time with the music and the Odin grinds his teeth and spits frustrated insults.
In contrast with clearly choreographed moments on the ferry, this scene in the Oh Deer Diner thoughfully melds player agency and character driven story. If we linger, Alan seems more patient and learns more about the town, but will eventually have to follow the narrative which has been laid out for him. If we ignore the interactive elements and press on to the next moment of story, we confirm Alan’s previous characterization as impatient and snarky. There aren’t any gamified roleplay moments, but the ability to rush or linger and feel as though both options are validated by the narrative stands out as one of the better moments in episode one of Alan Wake.
But no matter how long we wait, Stucky never emerges from the bathroom. Rose and Rusty don’t have much more to say to Alan. The jukebox keeps playing and the brothers continue bickering.
Eventually, both the player and Alan will grow frustrated waiting and choose to walk into the dark hallway at the back of the diner, where Stucky is supposedly taking an eternity in the bathroom.
As players, the only way we can advance the plot is to participate in Alan’s impatience and knock on the bathroom door. This is a more subtle form of the narrative forcing a particular path on us than when the camera was repeatedly pulled away from us during the nightmare sequence. More subtle even than the developers using “press to view” prompts for optional monologues or story-driven contextual prompts to indicate what will happed if we press the interaction key while standing beside the car on the ferry or at the jukebox.
Here in the Oh Deer Diner, even the most patient player will likely become bored and frustrated after waiting in the diner for several minutes and listening to the whole of the Coconut song. Alan and the player both choose to ignore the Lamp Lady’s warning and press into the darkness of the back hall, rather than be patient. Without even being prompted, players must put themselves into the role of Alan and participate in his impatience for the plot to advance.
That is one of the powers of video games compared to film, text, or audio. We’re not hurried into a situation by a cutscene. We haven’t merely turned a page in a novel. We have more agency than that afforded by the ever-progressing clock of the playback bar, but not enough to change the story.
When we reach the door, the only option is to “knock”. This triggers a cutscene in which Alan repeatedly knocks and calls out, but receives no response from Stucky. Instead, a voice speaks to us from the darkness. A voice that Alan doesn’t recognize, but we as players might.
It’s a voice that previously said, “He’s here” in the nightmare sequence. Entering a brief cutscene, Alan looks back down the dark hallways he just passed through to see a woman dressed in funeral garb, seemingly appearing out of thin air.
Characters mysteriously appearing is a trope in so many forms of literature, but remember that everything has been so natural since Alan woke up. We have encountered a series of quirky locals, to be sure, but everything following on very naturally, very realistically, until the appearance of the woman in black.
And then note her choice of words: “Unfortunately, Carl was taken ill.”
It’s subtle. But using the word “taken” there, instead of saying that he became sick or he’s feeling bad or he has a gone home to sleep off a stomach bug. This is a very specific dialogue choice intended to evoke what the voice from the light told us.
The specific choices continue in a sequence of breif cuts and canted, tightly framed camera angles as the woman in black holds out an old fashioned skeleton key and an envelope to us, dangling both with the fingertips of a single hand. She says that she will come by later to meet Alan’s wife at her cabin on the lake.
Her cabin. Not Carl Stucky’s.
Alan takes the key and directions without question. While this could be explained as a husband who didn’t make the vacation arrangements blithly accepting whatever the quirky locals hand to him, there’s an element of the uncanny to both his vaguely irritated expression and the woman’s creaking whispers.
When we’re given control of Alan again, the woman is there in the dimly lit hallway with us. She was not behind us before, nor was she out in the diner. The door at the end of the hall is still locked. It’s almost as if we summoned her by knocking on the bathroom door here in the darkness. Walking past her on our way back to the main room of the diner, the woman in black tells us that Cauldron Lake is a very… special place. There’s nothing evil or inherently scary in those words, but something in the cadance and tone of her delivery lingers and makes the player wonder why she doesn’t follow us into the light.
Liminial spaces have been significant since the beginning of Alan’s nightmare. Dream logic, shadows and light, passing through tunnels and doorways and over bridges have been essential to triggering events and blocking our return. Even upon waking, we found Alan on a ferry, trapped in a middle place. Here in the Oh Deer Diner, which was formerly called Bright’s Diner according to the sign outside, we walk into the shadowy rear hallway to receive a key which will take us deeper into the shadows of the story. Whether Alan might have avoided meeting the woman in black had he carried a light with him into the dark is a question left unanswered by the game, but is one which las lingered with me since I first played Alan Wake.
So far in the story, everyone has referred to Alan by his name or obliquily by “man” or “he” or “damned yuppie”. It’s only on the way out of the diner carrying the key to the woman’s cabin on Cauldron Lake that the Anderson Brothers first call Alan by… another name. It’s easy to miss, especially if you tune out two old men complaining about their hernias, but if we linger at the booth long enough to listen to their sleepy ramblings, the brothers each call Alan “Tom” before slipping into senseless mumbling.
We’ve seen that name before. Tom the Poet was the name on the movie poster in that cabin from the dream sequence. Here we have another small fracture the veil between the waking world and Alan’s nightmare. A fracture not brought about by Alan’s own actions or the voice of a woman speaking from the dark, but by the presence of these two burnt out bards. There is no opportunity to interact with this comment and thankfully it isn’t highlighted with a forced camera move, but both the misnaming of Alan and the presence of these old men will prove important in later episodes.
One other name is important before we leve the diner: As we pass the two old men, Rusty comments that they are harmless, but he’s still going to stick around until their doctor shows up to return them to Cauldron Lake Lodge. Their doctor’s name? Hartman. Even if we missed the name of Emil Hartman on the movie poster in the dream cabin, this is another moment of foreshadowing the importance of a name Alan will hear later today and does a lot of work to help us understand why he will have a strong reaction to hearing it.
Only when Alan and Alice drive away do we finally get to see Carl Stucky as he staggers out of the diner waving a different set of keys and looking exceptionally unwell. Whatever took hold of him clearly had a lingering effect and as viewers we are now certain that there is something strange, possibly even supernatural, occuring during the waking moments of Alan Wake.
As with many other story moments in Alan Wake, the entirety of the scene in the Oh Deer Diner could have been replaced with a brief cutscene, but the designers clearly had an intention in compelling us to play through the passage. The forced camera moves, dialogue triggers, and moments of optional player interaction are at times awkward, but work together to give a strong impression of who Alan is as a character and what kind of story we are participating in as players.
It’s that element of participation, that intentional tension between the predetermined narrative, the predefined chacterizations, and our own actions as a player which stand at the heart of what makes Alan Wake haunt my thoughts. We may not understand everything which is happening or even know whether we like Alan as a person, but there is a story here which is exploring some old questions about storytelling in a way that few games dare and in ways which only videogames can.
Alan will remember the name of Emil Hartman later this same day.
I’d like to draw us back to my initial complain about this scene. As much as I love the purpose, structue, and execution of the Oh Deer Diner sequence (minor quibbles about the shot which introduces Lamp Lady aside), I am a littler perturbed that sequence exists at all. The entire reason why Alan is even at the Diner is so that Alice can pickup a few groceries and get gas while Alan retrieves the key to their rental. The rental was supposed to be from Carl Stucky, who comes stumbling out of the diner, visibly ill, calling after the Wakes and holding up a more modern cabin key.
There’s nothing in this scene which feels especially out of place, until we play through the remainder of Episode 1 and eventually end up at Stucky’s Gas Station. Why and how did Alice Wake and Carl Stucky agree to meet at a diner in town, at a time subject to travel plans, when they could just as easily have stopped at Stucky’s own Gas Station and convenience store?
I won’t argue with contents of the scene itself, as it introduces seven important characters and genuinely builds up the small town hominess of Bright Falls. What bothers me is that Carl owns a gas station on the way to most of the scenic locations in the Bright Falls region. That very gas station will be our destination in the final section of gameplay in this episode of Alan Wake. Just as the diner itself can be seen to have multiple names, some of which may be legacies of Alan Wake Remastered’s extended development process and some may be references to Twin Peaks which don’t quite land right, the entire decision to have Alan meet Stucky (and thereby the other characters) at a diner feels like a bit of locational shoehorning.
And that’s fine. I’ve done it in my books and many of my favorite films feature convenient or silly collisions of characters, locations, and motives. I can even think of some meta-fictional reasons for this awkward choice to exist. We are playing a game which revels in its references to weird fiction and genre-bending television shows, so the idea of gathering all these characters together for an introduction, under the dream logic of them all being important, can be juggled about in a way which makes sense.
Still, I think it’s worth noting these awkward structural moments when we spot them, if only so my fellow writers can remember to keep an eye out for similar conveniences or mistakes in our own stories.
Next time we’ll be digging into the sequence in and around Bird Leg Cabin on Diver’s Isle. Join me as we play with audience and character expectations, unpack hidden clues to the looping nature of this story, and ask ourselves if birds are the only real problem with this game.
And if we want to advance in the game, then we must participate in Alan’s impatience and knock.
Why would we ignore the warning of the lady with the lamp?
Thinking about Alan as a character: He’s weary of being reminded about his failures as an artist. He’s irritated at his nightmares, his wife, and all of these fans who won’t let him forget himself and relax. The game’s requirement for us to guide Alan into the darkness of the Oh Deer Diner back hallway also sets up his personality as someone who would rather press into the darkness for his own reasons than wait patiently in the light.
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