Video games: Pushing narrative’s limits in Alan Wake II
In a great year for video games, no other release was as “wildly new” as Alan Wake II, said Gene Park in The Washington Post. Yes, the psychological horror thriller that won Best Narrative and Best Art Direction at last week’s Game Awards is a sequel, but it’s also so innovative that it “rams against the boundaries of the medium.” Its title character, Alan Wake, is a novelist who disappeared in the original 2010 game shortly after discovering that reality and his fiction were blurring. In the new installment, FBI agent Saga Anderson is investigating a series of murders in the rural Washington area where Wake vanished when she comes across a page of writing describing what she’s doing. So far, so Twin Peaks. Yet this game seeks to explore how all forms of media shape how we think and act, which means it isn’t just a video game. “It’s also episodes of a late-night talk show, a book’s rough draft, an art-house short film,” and much more.
The story mostly unfolds in two separate realities, “with both sides gradually bleeding into each other, in increasingly unpredictable ways,” said Tristan Ogilvie in
IGN. In one world, you play as Anderson. In another, you play as Wake, who’s been trapped for 13 years inside the Dark Place—a nightmarish version of New
York City full of reanimated corpses and whispering apparitions. To escape, Wake rewrites the world around him, typing up a horror story that starts to look more and more like Anderson’s reality. “It’s bloody, it’s bonkers, and for the most part, it’s utterly brilliant.” And as the meta-mystery grows more complex, it’s “like a jigsaw puzzle locked inside a Rubik’s Cube that’s covered in sudokus.”
“We still too often talk about video games as little playthings that are not as serious as their media peers,” said Todd Martens in the Los Angeles Times. But Alan Wake II is the type of game that pushes beyond the limits of the storytelling we see in other media. The meta-narrative not only shifts viewpoints but alternates between interactive and cinematic worlds, “distorting time and place as it explores mind games, free will, and how our own fears can torture us.” Crucially, how a player experiences the story is up to the player, reminding us that “a story isn’t meant to be told so much as experienced.”