Until recently I thought so Alan Wake 2 would be in second place here, while Tears of the Kingdom would remain my personal game of the year. However, I recently had a chance encounter with writer Cole Kronman (who wrote this great part At Xenogears and Tetsuya Takahashi’s games for us) helped me clarify my own feelings. I realized that for me these two games are in close dialogue with each other, strange mirrors of each other’s greatness, and that together they define the best that I think the games of 2023 have to offer. I won’t give away the plot points of either game, but in order to figure out why and how that is, I have to mention a crucial line of dialogue from the end Alan Wake 2one that echoes the first game’s climax: “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean.” In case you haven’t finished yet Alan Wake 2 and want to discover this line for yourself, turn back now.
In the final moments of Alan Wake 2 (and possibly earlier, depending on how thoroughly you research and absorb Remedy’s metaphysical horror odyssey), a character says, “It’s not a loop, it’s a spiral.” Alan Wake 2 explores the difficulty and torment that many artists feel in the creative process, the feeling that sometimes it feels like you’re just banging your head against the wall and not making any progress at all because you can’t see a way out while the blank page is still there mocking you.
Read more: Alan Wake 2: The My city review
And yet at least sometimes a way out appears at some point. Sometimes, after turning around for what feels like an eternity, something in our subconscious finally breaks, a bit of light shines through and we will finally see a way forward, even though we know we had to go through all that inner turmoil, to find the way out. What felt like a pointless, exhausting, torturous loop was actually a spiral. Before we highlight this at the end by having a character speak the line, Alan Wake 2 hides this idea in plain sight, repeatedly plunging you into environments that feel like loops that you have no choice but to go through over and over again. At some point your persistence pays off, suddenly something changes and a way out appears. You thought you were moving in circles, but in reality you were moving forward the whole time; It just took a lot of energy and courage to recognize that.
I have no particular insight into the struggle I need to achieve Alan Wake 2 “made” was like for creative director Sam Lake and the rest of the people at Remedy, but it’s no secret that the studio has been hoping to make this game for a long time. I have to imagine that the setbacks and struggles were overwhelming at times and felt like defeat. And yet, it’s undeniable that Remedy could have made a sequel to 2010 Alan Wake Ten or six years ago it wouldn’t have been the game it is today. Alan Wake 2 is extraordinary not least because it is a game that took 13 years to develop, and because in its creative energy you can feel the restless struggle, the accumulation of ideas and the desperate search for a way out. Alan Wake 2 It’s about many things, but perhaps none of them are more important to his identity than the struggle to create Alan Wake 2.
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