Welcome to the

besties where we talk about the latest and greatest and the dark place and how the words shift to make the stories are powerful. This is a video game club and just by listening, you're a member. Today we're going to be talking about Alan Wake 2. Can that be right? I feel like it's been 13 years since the last one of these came out. Thereabouts.

Yeah, Chris. Alan Wake, he's back. But this time he bought a friend. It's bigger. It's better. It has that sweet, sweet epic money and direct line to the Unreal Engine. So Alan Wake doing his Stephen King John Carpenter riff, but now with actual financial support. We'll talk about it more after the break.

Who else? I hope I'm

sure I know the answer to this question, but who else had to watch a story recap of Alan Wake 1 and Alan Wake's American nightmare? Okay,

so I would consider myself, I think unquestionably, the most dedicated Alan Wake fan in our quadro. What does that call it with four people? Quartet. Quartet. Quattro. Quattro. And I

100%. That's actually the nickname. Hey, are you listening to Besties? Nah, babe. It's the Quattro. That's what I call them now. More guys. It's the

Quattro. Yes, a Chick-Razer marketing term. That's great. There's so many blades in this podcast. We are open

to that promotion, if shit once it gives me

a minute. Even though I am the most dedicated fan, there is no question in my mind that I would have not remembered 80% of what happened in the first game, but it's not just the first game, as you American nightmare also, and the DLC for the first game, and control, which has like huge impactful revelations that have direct implications on this game. So yes, you need to watch a recap. You will be lost, even if you consider yourself a fan.

I watched Sam Lake recap. That's a very good one. I did a good job on that. It was a pretty good video. It was supposed to be a five-minute recap. It went 16 minutes. That tells you literally everything you need to know about Alan Wake and Remedy and Sam Lake. It is preposterous that it is not included in the game. It

is outrageous that they do not include a

plot recap of the story so far in this fucking 13 years later. The thing that I sort of was reminded playing this and watching the video is that I think it's kind of different for a lot of these things in that it does not attempt to the game, the storytelling and the plotting and all that is very dreamlike. It's not trying to map one-to-one onto a linear story that you can just write down. It's about inducing that sort of dream logic and dream state as you're playing. Watching recaps I feel like is a little hard to get back to that dream logic that Alan Wake and Poison. More so than

even Kojima, and I think later in the show we'll talk more about Kojima stuff, but Kojima, by and large, maybe less so in Death Stranding, but most of the Metal Gear Saw games, is trying to tell a linear somewhat cogent story. I think he just really, really struggles with it. This is intentionally circuitous and dreamlike is a good way to describe it such that you're right. Can't

Hanwavy. I mean, pretty Hanwavy. I feel like a lot of times, I don't think it necessarily is hiding that.

I

think it's all sort of like, I mean, there is a bit where Alan Wake's like, and that's what happened, and the police officers are there for you. And we're like, what the fuck are you even saying? Let me back up. So your scratch, but scratch is also the dark presence. You're interchangeable. You

know what's funny is I feel like what prepared me for this game better than the recap was just watching all of Twin Peaks. I mean, intervening period since the first game's release, because

it's just, it is that it's that way

more than I think I appreciated when I put the first Alan Wake before watching Twin Peaks. I want to circle back to all of the inspirations, but before we do that, we should probably give people a baseline of what the game actually is. Oh man, let me try. Go for it.

Yeah, go ahead. Alan Wake or Alan Wake 2? Alan

Wake 2, please. Okay.

Alan Wake 2 is the follow

up to the last Alan Wake game. The important thing you need to know is that Alan's is an author who is creating a reality around him that also seems to be guided by his storytelling. He's trapped in this ephemeral area called the Dark Place that's sort of like between realities. He overlaps with our reality in some places. He's trapped. He's trying to write his way out like Hamilton. Meanwhile, there is a FBI agent named Saga Anderson who's following a lead on a serial killer, but that lead is connected to Alan Wake. And in searching for him, she manages to sort of unearth him from the Dark Place and the two of them have to work together to stop Alan's evil double Mr. Scratch from messing

everything up. And

in the game... And I would say that the actual gameplay is a third person like survival horror game. You play as both characters Alan Wake and Saga Anderson. And you're kind of deciding from chapter to chapter which character you're going to play as. But the story of Saga Anderson is directly affected by the writing of Alan Wake. So in a way, he is kind of controlling both stories again. To try to describe this in a cogent way in a short period of time is next to impossible. But from a gameplay standpoint, the close stand-log that I would make would be something like the Resident Evil 2 remake or even the Resident Evil 4 games where it's a mix of like third person. Like there's some action combat stuff, but a lot of puzzles and honestly way more narrative than either of those games. I actually think this game is like 60 to 70% narrative and like 20% action and then 20% puzzle solving. Like you can't go into this expecting an action game. It's actually way less of an action game than the first Alan Wake was and way more of a narrative game.

Both characters have mind palaces, but even more important than the mind palaces, they have effectively like pin boards where you have to arrange the story. Or just like let the game know that you figured something out by pinning it to this board and the right spot. And that is like very visual novel-esque and you quite literally through key parts of the game cannot progress until you do that. I like that system. I'm a big fan of the proliferation of evidence board sort of as a like storytelling device. I feel like it's happened a lot. We just talked about it in Assassin's Creed with the sort of like investigation board thing there. I like it. It is weird that there's two different ones, one for each character and Agent Anderson's is like a proper like investigation where you're putting clues on like lingering questions. And then Alan Wake is like a sort of plot board that is completely nonsensical that you can use to change the environment around you. They feel like two

completely different. I mean they are. He's brainstorming a story. That's like the background premise of his mind palace where she's trying to solve murders. So when he's brainstorming as you would, it's like, okay, we have this scene. It's a subway station. It's the middle of the night. What's going to happen in this scene? And Alan can change depending on like things he's discovered and for what he's discovered. He can say, oh, there was a murder that happened here or oh, this is where the cult tried to perform their ritual. And by making those choices that'll unlock new paths within those environments.

I think that sound can sound like almost impossibly complicated. So clever way that they do that for Alan is there are effectively rooms that you can go into. And when you're in those rooms, you click on again, like whatever the thing is. So it's like, I want the cult version of this room. I want the missing author version of this room. And then it will change that in the rest of the environment from what I can tell, not as much changes other than kind of like the art design. So you are moving the story forward by taking that writing. This gets even more.

Different versions of the rooms will have different items in them and different ways to get out of them. Yes. It's a mechanical

version of this. And then there's another reality changing mechanic called the clicker, which is a light

that you can absorb light. Sorry to be an Alan Wake snob, but that is not the clicker. That's the lamp. Sorry, the lamp. Thank you. The clicker is right. The lamp on. Yes. Clicker is another object entirely that we won't even get into. Thank you. Thank you.

I won't even. It's so hard to talk about this game without spoiling it.

I think that gets us in a good place of like kind of the mechanics, like you're solving puzzles. You find guns, you find ammo, healing items. So I was doing the fact and Alan Wake was doing the fiction. That's a good way

of putting it.

If you see something on her board, it is true and you know it's true. With a game like this, that's actually really helpful. There's no bullshit on her board. It's just real crap that isn't about dreams or Alan Wake's dumb books.

Okay, but here's the problem. The stuff on her board is being impacted by the stuff that Alan is writing. Right,

but we can understand that to be true as much as in anything is true, the things on her board are

true. In her world, they are true. In Alan's world, they are speaking, knowing you're not true.

Speaking of someone that's a little bit further in the game, I will say a big part of what is going on on her board becomes what is true and what is false and no one is entirely sure. So it gets- I think as messy as you think it might in hearing that. I'm

going to plant the flag here and say this is where we stopped trying to. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. Fair to say. The plot of this game. I think folks get now that it is a very complicated- I'd

watch a recap.