Despite being a horror game, Alan Wake II is full of over-the-top joy. It relishes being a video game. It flips between moods like an ice skater using their built up momentum to spin, then spiral, then leap, through different tones and references, especially when music is involved.
Alan Wake II is a sequel to Finnish game developer Remedy Entertainment’s 2010 game Alan Wake. You play as FBI officer Saga Anderson, and also airport novel writer Alan Wake, who both end up having to use guns and flashlights to fight the forces of darkness (in a very literal way) in a small Pacific Northwest town. The game makes deliberate and specific gestures towards the references it’s drawing from—Twin Peaks, the novels of Stephen King, hardboiled detective paperbacks—before veering off in surreal, unexpected directions. (...)
Long time collaborators Poets of the Fall, who have written music for every Remedy game since Max Payne 2, also return for Alan Wake II, and it’s there that the game turns itself on its head. In the middle of a horror game that I have to play in the middle of the afternoon, that I alone out of all my coworkers have been brave enough to face, there is a musical sequence. The song “Herald of Darkness,” performed by Poets of the Fall acting as their in-game counterparts the Old Gods of Asgard, fluidly combines the self-indulgent melodrama of musicals and metal music.
The sequence takes place in the “Dark Place” where Alan Wake is trapped, looping through a talk show that ruminates over how he made such a mess of his life. He wanders through a backstage area while characters appear on giant screens around him, belting out extremely on the nose lyrics that mostly rehash the events of Alan Wake between very long guitar solos.
Part of what makes the scene work is Alan Wake II’s love of kitsch. Kitsch is like camp, but without an arched eyebrow calling attention to itself. It’s the so-called “low culture” of comic books, hair metal, and daytime soap operas. In musicals, characters sing when their emotions grow too great for merely speaking. In this musical sequence, those over-the-top emotions aren’t just the ways the characters are feeling, but the way the game seems to feel about itself and all of the mediums it draws from. The song pivots from metal to nightclub jazz, and the actors—not motion captured, but videos of recorded actors on a set—are projected above and around you, enveloping the player as they move through a set that looks like a black box theater. Meanwhile, you control Alan as he wields a gun and flashlight against enemies. It’s as if the game’s moods are too big to be contained by just watching a musical sequence or just engaging in combat. And in the midst of guitar solos, the choreography guiding you to each new sequence of dancing and fire fights, there’s no irony or shame in the way that the game engages with kitsch, or with all the things a video game can do.
This love of kitsch extends to the rest of the game, too. As much as Remedy is obsessed with Americana, Alan Wake II also introduces players to Finnish kitsch: an over the top love of coffee, beer, and saunas. You save by drinking a cup of coffee; each chapter ends on a cliffhanger like a tv show, then transitions into a new, original song; while you fight enemies they scream about pastrami sandwiches. It’s the kind of game where there’s a coffee-themed amusement park fully operational in the middle of the night, and it’s just the right combination of hilarious and frightening.
by Gita Jackson, Aftermath | Read more:
Image: Remedy Entertainment/YouTube
[ed. Not much of a Games fan but a lot of people are. Watch this trailer in full screen - quite sophisticated. See also: Pushing Buttons: Why Fortnite is suddenly the most popular game in the world once more (Guardian); and, Seattle area’s booming but buggy video game industry tries to level up (Seattle Times):]
"Another reason is that the booming video game industry has become too big to ignore. It has become a mainstream economic and cultural force that, much like superhero comics, is no longer solely the purview of nerds, but a global pop culture phenomenon.
“There’s a gravitational pull in that it’s just so damn large,” said USC Annenberg professor of communication and video game expert Dmitri Williams. “When [nearly] half of the 8-plus billion people on the planet are doing something, it’s kind of weird at some point not to talk about it.”
Projections vary, but consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers expects the video games and esports industry will be worth more than $300 billion in 2027 globally, surpassing music, radio, podcasts and movie- and TV-streaming combined."
