There is a concept which rings somewhat true to me of an “anxious interval” in cultural nostalgia. As described by Elizabeth Sandifer citing Momus, the interval is “the awkward period of culture which has started to look dated, but is not yet old enough to reclaim and repurpose”, somewhere around 10-20 years ago. At the longest-ago edge of that and beyond comes a contested battlefield and goldmine for what is cool to draw on. For video games with their enforced generational shifts and incentives for remakes, the interval can be particularly short. For example, the enthusiastic reception for an upcoming sequel for Alan Wake, a narrative-heavy thriller which reached the top of the UK’s individual formats chart for a week in May 2010 but was only a moderate commercial and critical success at the time.
When video games draw on other bits of culture, they’re more tied to standard timescales. Which seems like a straightforward explanation for how the first half of 2010 ended up with two different games mixing supernatural horror with visions of fictional small town America in a way that took obvious influence from 1990’s Twin Peaks. Deadly Premonition became a cult favourite (and got its own 2020 sequel) on the basis of leaning into its oddness in all elements, making its low budget compromises and uneven gameplay a virtue. Alan Wake, meticulously well-produced and benefiting from being slimmed-down from its own planned open world, has to go a different route.
What the two have in common, indeed what may have driven their Twin Peaks aspects, is being an outsider take on America: Deadly Premonition from Japan and Alan Wake from Finland. It’s something which keeps coming up, as games’s nature leads to developers needing to create a sense of place, but drawing at least as much from TV and film as from direct experience. In that context it makes sense that Alan Wake also looks back a gaming decade plus to one of the most successful outsider visions of fucked up American horror, that of Resident Evil.
For most of its gameplay, Alan Wake plays like a much more straightforward and easy version of the first few Resident Evil games. Its main character is a thriller novelist who has gone on holiday to a folksy little place called Bright Falls, and is soon under attack from people made of shadows who stagger towards him and brandish axes. They lurch out from the game’s linear routes through the forest and must be weakened by having light shone on them before being shot with a gun (this is a video game, after all).
It removes most of the things that represented a challenge in those games, mind you. There is no inventory management. Flares, ammo, and torch batteries are available at regular intervals to be picked up. Checkpoints are similarly generous, there are few complications or flourishes, and “puzzles” basically consist of finding the one thing you can interact with and doing so. It has a mini-map simplified almost to the point of absurdity, with nothing on it but a yellow dot to show you where to go next.
This straightforward gameplay is executed to a high level, primarily through how well the game handles light. It keeps everything visible enough to get by while staying atmospheric and giving Wake’s torch and streetlights a weight and certainty befitting their place in the narrative. Flare guns even get a cute little bit of Max Payne’s cinematic following camera. The gameplay is still too repetitive and basic to be the main appeal on its own, but it doesn’t need to be. It works with the narrative.
At this point it’s worth remembering back to the previous time I played a Remedy-developed game, which was when I absolutely hated the writing of Max Payne. Notably, I wrote that “the highpoint of my enjoyment was the tutorial, before I knew anything about the story. Its fights were less interesting but it had an air of panicked oddness, with payphones ringing to no-one and endless enemies filling otherwise deserted streets.” Alan Wake has the same lead writer and lots more words than Max Payne, so many more words, and yet it manages to keep the same atmosphere as that tutorial.
Wake keeps finding manuscript pages, ostensibly written by him. They detail, with an omniscient author’s eye, events which have happened or are going to happen, in no particular order. Yellow painted messages show up under his torchlight which say things like “trust no one in the darkness”. He comments on the unlikelihood of finding flare guns, flashbangs and industrial lamps at so many convenient moments. Unseen forces do battle, and they’re not all against him. He is unmoored and it feels that way.
A writer trapped in a story he wrote but can’t remember is at one level the most obvious get-out-of-jail-free card for nonsense dream logic ever. It lets Alan Wake be directed from place to place for unclear reasons, lets objects come to life and attack him, lets the unexpected happen. It never takes that too far, though. Instead, the way that the gameplay is rooted in such simple and repetitive actions keeps the narrative grounded from moment to moment. Wake may not know what is happening but he’s got his gun and his torch and he can keep using those. Press Y to replace battery. Press X repeatedly, tap tap tap, to reload each bullet.
When the game briefly flirts with the idea that Wake is wrong about any of this really happening, that it’s all in his head (as opposed to from his head), it feels wrong with a certainty that comes from having spent hours doing those motions again and again, treading the ground of each bit of Bright Falls and surrounds. It’s the same grounding I noted games being so well-placed to do when Final Fantasy VII used it to the opposite, destabilising effect. It works brilliantly for Alan Wake and its themes of the power of stories and narratives and how to react when that power runs away from you.
This was a time when Uncharted 2 were making a lot from confidence in their narrative and characters, but Alan Wake is even more focused, exploring its one thing again and again. What variety there is comes from Alan’s available kit being changed over with each development, allowing him moments of a bit more power (including various short driving segments) before taking them away again. One bit where he is chased by the police works as a really nice inversion of the rest as he suddenly has to run away from the lights they’re following him with. The kind of formalist exploration of small scale concepts it goes with has largely become a product of indie games so it’s cool to see it in a bestseller.
As well as saying something about creativity, Alan Wake has something to say about being a bestseller too. The game knowingly emphasises Alan Wake’s popularity above his ability. It makes him a well-known author with a fan in town with a room covered in his image, and his friend and agent Barry, already a jittery and wisecracking comic relief character, spends a while carrying around a cardboard cut-out ad of Alan. Barry even calls him “bestseller” as often as Al. A hostile FBI detective calls him by various authors’ names, with Dan Brown in there.
Alan Wake’s status can work as its own get-out-of-jail-free card: by the narrative and writing being cast as the product of the main character’s mind, any flaws in it can work as commentary. Bad writing is there because Alan Wake is a bad writer! There’s only so far this in-narrative excuse could work, and Alan Wake’s writing is leagues better than Max Payne’s, but the meta element still helps turn the fact it’s more functional than sparkling into as much of an asset as a weakness. The same goes for the various campy Twilight Zone-style mini-tales you can catch on various TVs, some also mentioned as having been written by Wake.
Alan Wake takes more than a setting and some specific pastiches from TV. Prestige TV was overtaking movies as a model for games to aspire to. The back of the game’s box proclaims it as “like a tightly paced thriller TV series”. It’s divided into six episodes, with a song at the end of each, although having a single “End of Episode 3” message instead of credits seems a needless departure. It lets it do things like have the camera pull away through mist into the distance at the end of the first episode with a certain finality. The pacing didn’t quite work on a practical level for me, since several times I had to stop after more than an hour at a point which later turned out to be almost the end of an episode, but that in itself points to one way it feels ahead of its time.
When it comes to TV I’m used to frequently doing things in half episodes and pressing pause these days. With its frictionless progress and length and structure so suited to bingeing or spreading out, Alan Wake feels like a product of the streaming era, something to fit in as one enjoyable diversion of many without needing too much engagement. Which is impressive considering that when it was released, Netflix had started moving to streaming but was still a year away from adding Breaking Bad, and three years away from House of Cards and its own commissions. If Alan Wake in 2023 is now out of the dark anxious interval and bathed in the light of nostalgia, it’s in part because it actually feels more of the moment now than it did in 2010.
Top of the charts for week ending 15 May 2010:
