Category: Essay

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.

There are always two conflicting goals in any roleplaying game: The Game Master or Designer has a story they want to tell and a series of wickets they hope the player will hit in a particular order. These  checkpoints might consist of talking a series of NPCs who will deliver story through dialogue as players complete a quest, dealing a particular amount of damage to a given set of enemies, or following a set of waypoints on a map. Even the most sandboxy of open world games will almost always feature some sort of gatekeeping mechanic to ensure that the core of the story is delivered in a particular order. 

Players… generally have the goal of ruining that plan. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re playing on a computer or around the table, tactical grid combat or pure theater of the mind roleplay, players inherently have their own ideas of what a character will do and that element of player choice plus the randomness of dice rolls will twist even the most prepared DM’s plans. And that’s before we bring rocket launchers and complex 3D terrain boxes into the conversation. 

Even the most linear non-combat walking simulator has to account for the player who adores boundry breaking or puts their controller down to get a fresh bag of chips, if the designers want to ensure a story is delivered in a particular way. It’s in this sense that the ferry sequence which plays out as Alan and Alice Wake arrive in Bright Falls reminds me of the tension between the idea of “playing a role” and “playing a role playing game.” This scene is only four minutes long and contains no interactions which could not have been replaced with a cutscene, but giving players the opportunity to perform as Alan helps set the tone of the game and develops the relationship between this couple in some ways that tickle my brain. 

Let’s take a look at these four interactions which occur on the ferry as Alan, freshly awakened from his nightmarish tutorial sequence, interacts with Alice Wake, Pat Maine, Barry Wheeler, and a mysterious man who will later be revealed to be Ben Mott. Each interaction is different in tone, presentation, and gameplay, highlighting the power of inviting players to inhabit a character in a game. 

We’ve all had those moments of being unsure whether we are awake or dreaming, of trying to pull our spirits back into our bodies as the waking world closes in around us. Some mornings I just don’t feel human until I’ve wrapped myself in a blanket and sipped a couple cups of coffee while quietly forcing my mind onto the correct track. That’s exactly where Alan Wake is at the opening of the Ferry scene. Stirred from his dream, Alan wakes to the pun of Alice saying, “Alan, wake up”. His lingering frustration from the nightmare manifests in snarky responses and contrasts immediately with Alice’s cheerful tone and efforts to bring some levity to their vacation.

This portrayal of the artists as a curmudgeon is something which resonates with me. I can even think of a several times when I was on vacation or had a day off but struggled to pull myself out of the dark places where my mind strays if a project is overwhelming me, money is tight, or plans are changing too rapidly for me to keep up. As players, we don’t have any choice of Alan’s mood when he awakes, but we’re as likely to feel some empathy for him as we are to be bothered by how sharply he speaks to Alice. More importantly, we aren’t in control yet. Alan is who the writers made him here and we can’t change it any more than we can change a film or a book.

The cinematic cuts to a wide view of the ferry, then swoops forward across the deck, under a train trestle marked with the name of Bright Falls, and across the shoreline of this quaint Northwest American town. We gain control of Alan standing beside the rental car on the ferry, just as Alice asks him to go overt near the old man at the front of the ferry so she can take a photo of him on vacation. 

It’s this interaction with Alice which is the most fascinating element of the scene to me. The old man is Pat Maine, who will be important to the plot of later episodes, but it does no harm to the game’s story to ignore him now. If we do as Alice tell us, if we actively engage with her request and play the roll of a husband conceeding to this wife’s advice, the developers reward us with a conversation that explains more about both Pat and Allan as individuals. Pat is a kindly local radio personality. Allan is a celebrity from out of town, who is going to be recognized with strange frequency by the residents of Bright Falls. 

This isn’t roleplay in the traditional sense of rolling dice or assigning skillpoints, but it’s an interaction between the player and the intended storyline in a way which feels like a natural choice, requires active engagement from the player, and develops the characters. In a way, its a glimmer of moments I loved from the novel Ready Player One, when in order to advance to the next stage of the competition, Gunters had to speak the lines and perform the actions taken by the character David Lightman in the film War Games.

Alternatively, we can choose to ignore Alice’s request and the scene will continue right along. We can even walk around the ferry and blithly ignore Alice as she repeatedly tries to convince Alan to play along. And it’s Alan who she is trying to reach. There are no canned repetitive lines, even if each bit of dialoge does suggest to players that they should return to the preferred path. There is no mechnical punishment for ignoring her, and Alice never turns cruel or whines, but if we never conceded to her requests she and Alan do joke about him being a miserable bastard. 

If we play along with the script and pose for Alice’s photo, we enter into a more traditional interactive cutscene. Pat Maine introduces himself and, recognizing the famous writer, invites Alan to join him for an interview on his local radio show. We aren’t given any option of accepting the invitation, but instead witness as Alan politely declines to go on Pat’s radio show and and politely asks to be left alone while he is on vacation. The predetermined narrative has taken over. The only choice we have is whether to ignore the dialoge and wander off or place Alan and the camera in a location which frames this scene in a cinematic way, in which case the 2010-era character puppets attempt to make eye contact and gesture mildly to emphasize their words. 

Though the scene is performed in the marionette style of most video games, the brief sketches of characterization tell us something about the contrast between these characters. Alan is a young man from the city dressed in layers of tweed jacket and hoodie and sardonic disinterest. Pat Maine plays the roll of a convivial local elder, dressed in comfortable sweaters and equally happy to discuss Alan’s work or the upcoming Deerfest. The contrast between an abrasive outsider and a kindly local is a well worn trope, as is their obvious disparity in age, but these two men have a stronger connection than their brief, optional interaction in this scene might convey. They are both people who work in media, but while Alan is a man of letters who has been unable to produce a story for years, Pat is a man of live radio and music whose kindly voice vanishes into airwaves every night, appreciated by all who hear, but unedited and unpreserved as he speaks with callers and shares the music he loves.

Whether we engage with the narrative and speak with Pat or choose to reject the best efforts of Alice and the game designers to pull us into a deeper understanding of the events which are about to unfold, the third interaction in this ferry scene is inevitable, but presented in a manner which encourages us to explore, possibly triggering the final interaction. 

Alan’s cellphone rings and we get our first introduction to Barry Wheeler, his literary agent and best friend. Even over the phone, Barry is as cheerful and outgoing as Alan is introverted and moody. It’s understandable how Barry, with his New York accent and his chatty, mildly pushy manner, could be the man respomnsible for promoting Alan’s novels. They are friends, but there’s also a strong business aspect to their relationship as Barry is the first person to push Alan to try writing while he’s on vacation. We are beginning to see that Alan, a man of dark thoughts and violent stories, is at the center of a web of characters who depend on him as much as he depends on them. 

So far we have had three kinds of interaction: Alice has prompted us to roleplay Alan’s journey from meloncholy to kindly activity. Pat Maine has shown us Alan stepping into his public persona and pushed us into a moment of predefined narrative. During the phone call from Barry, the player is free to wander the whole ferry listening as Barry monologues at him. In fact, the use of a phone call is likely to encourage the player to move away from Pat and Alice, as many people do instinctually walk away from others while on the phone both to gain some measure of privacy and so they don’t disturb others. This subtle prompting of the player to move towards the back of the ferry triggers the final interaction. 

If we walk to the rear of the ferry and get close enough to a man in hunter’s clothes who leans there smoking a cigarette, he will call Alan and Alice “damn yuppies” while continueing to gaze out across the water. Linger long enough and he’ll make a vaguely threatening comment, but otherwie refuse to engage. His presence can be completely missed if the player doesn’t wander far enough while listneing to Barry talk. 

It is easy to dismiss Ben Mott as unimportant in this brief scene. With his limited lines, this hunter feels the most like an average NPC in a video game. Game developers will often drop non-interactive characters into a map merely to suggest to players that they are participating in an living world rather than piloting a hollow collection of polygons from one point in space to another. 

Including Ben on the ferry is slightly more important than that, but only because his presence serves as foreshadowing and contrast. Not only will this character turn out to be more important than he first appears when we reach episode two and three of the game, but his refusal to engage with Alan contrasts with Alice giving us interactive stage directions, Pat and Alan having a plesant but mostly non-interactive conversation, and Barry talking our ear off no matter where we walk on the ferry. He is an intentional enigma, perhaps to the point that players may not even notice him. 

The scene aboard the ferry to Bright Falls is brief, but does a lot to pull players into the mindset of playing out Alan’s role in the story. We won’t always be able to make choices that differ from the narrative which has been laid out for us. When we do have options, they will be limited and generally framed to nudge us back onto the preplanned path. Choice matters and storybeats can be skipped at the cost of learning more about the characters, but the outline of our story has already been written.

Unless we can find a way to change it. To write our own ending. To escape this narrative and write our own.

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.