So after the crowning finale Alan Wake 2you’d think developer Remedy Entertainment would take a break. But in the following Extensions For the 2023 survival horror game, the studio has further deepened the base game’s thesis and teased out even more fascinating aspects of its world. The lake housethe last DLC for Alan Wake 2does so with exceptional style and an eye for discussing one of the industry’s hottest talking points: The role of AI in art. As a farewell to one of the best AAA games in recent memory, it’s a triumph.
Those familiar with the base game may remember The lake houseKiran Estevez, the protagonist of Saga, plays the Federal Bureau of Control agent who assists Saga on her journey. Told through narrative, The lake house tells of Estevez’s investigation into the titular location, an FBC facility that no longer exists. How Night springsthe first of AW2‘s extensions, The lake house is a bite-sized experience that only takes you two to three hours to prepare. This is perfect because it allows Remedy to tell a more concise story with a clear point of view.
Although it is more closely linked to 2019 control than anything else in AW2don’t expect The lake house like playing this supernatural action game. Estevez has no special powers, just a gun and a flashlight. As in the base game, you’ll pick up a few more weapons along the way (including an entirely new armament) to combat the Lake House’s now-infected residents. As a conclusion to the AW2 experience: The lake house clearly wants to challenge you and features some tough fights against large groups of enemies, made even tougher by the seemingly abysmal amount of resources throughout the facility. If you’re not careful, you’ll be left with a blank clip and no choice but to face your inevitable death and start over with a better plan.
The title function of the extension yields The lake house an aesthetic identity of its own that is far more consistent with her control. This is an FBC building, after all, and as soon as you enter the concrete lobby, the elegant, brutalist architecture will almost make you feel like you’re back in the oldest house. The enemies you encounter in the facility, as well as the weapons you find, are largely replicas of what you saw in the base game: a group of zombie-like figures infected by the Dark Place. But there’s something else lurking in the Lake House: menacing, paint-dripping humanoid figures that jump out of screens to kill you. The Lake House itself is decorated with countless paintings and graffiti on the walls (along with lots of blood).
The physical art you’ll encounter on every corner at Lake House reflects the facility’s (and expansion’s) ongoing obsession with the artistic process. Unlike Wake himself and many other important characters in the series’ extended lore, the main players in The lake house
As you explore the levels of the Lake House, you read emails and memos about two dueling projects, both aimed at quantifying the emotion of an artistic piece in an objective way that can then be reproduced. A researcher attempts to do this by bringing in a painter and forcing him to adhere to an inhumane production schedule in order to create the right art to unleash a supernatural force like Wake’s. The opposing project believed that it could recreate the result of Wake’s writings through observation, measurement and replication.
One of the most striking environments in The lake house is a sprawling open-plan office with dozens — perhaps hundreds — of automated typewriters trained on pages written by Wake that the FBC recovered. The mechanical whirring of machines and the cacophonous clicking of keys produce countless pages of text. In a room next to it is a white board where researchers rated each resulting page according to measures such as tone, style, readability, etc. There is a constant desire to define what makes something “art.”
It’s a far from subtle abolition of artificial intelligence in technology, especially in products like ChatGPT who scrape the work of real creators to produce empty facsimiles of art that impress only the most unimaginative people. Remedy blows you away with the sheer stupidity of both the Lake House experiments and their real-life counterparts. Signs posted on the walls encourage workers not to decorate their desks and remind them that “art is for analysis.” At one point, a page written by Wake describing the Lake House projects states: “Art was not art, but merely content for the experiment.”
That is Alan Wake 2is the final message to the audience. Art is not content. It’s a word that has gained so much traction in cultural discussions in recent years, as proponents of AI urge us to view every work of art simply as a product for the viewer’s enjoyment, rather than something that informs our worldview can ask question. Games are not content. Writing is not content. Art is not content. Those who create are not cogs in a machine to be used and discarded or turned into food for an algorithm. The lake house is Remedy’s clear statement that attempting to quantify and reproduce art without emotion is nothing short of a horror story. As far as farewell goes, it’s pretty darn good.
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