Alan Wake (Part 4)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

On the road to the final confrontation. Today: Chapter 6, “Departure”, and the first DLC chapter (as they’re a significant part of the series’ plot), “The Signal”.

Into Darkness

You know the saying, "the camera adds ten
pounds?" In Alan's case, it adds an entire
extra dimension.

Another moment of Alan’s life before some otherworldly thing turned it upside-down. A rough afternoon, waking up after the umpteenth party of his book tour. The sun burning his retinas makes the hangover worse. After getting pills and a pair of sunglasses, Alan realizes how late it is, and finds a disgruntled Alice bemoaning his nightly celebrations. She recorded his interview from the night before, so we can see Ilkka Villi fully in the role again, at a talk-show where the second guest is… Sam Lake?? (For the record, Sam Lake was the performer for Max Payne in the first game of that series, and is also the writer of this game. In case this entire thing wasn’t meta enough already.) Alan, sick of the touring, decides that he needs a good couple’s vacation with Alice as soon as possible.

"You better come back as yourself, and not as
some sort of evil version!"

If only we could actually visit this place
during daytime... it looks nice.

Back to the present day: The last page is in the typewriter in the cabin, wherever it and Diver’s Isle may be. Alan is determined to finish the story, but cannot without reading said page. the Dark Presence will take any plot holes it finds and twist them for its own ends, like it did with Barbara Jagger when Thomas Zane tried to bring her back to life using the powers of the lake.

And he has to do this alone. Darn, this means we won’t get some levity from Barry’s quips. Alan exits the dam and drives off in broad daylight. However, this doesn’t last – out of nowhere, night falls again. The Presence is no longer playing; the writer has become a threat to its existence and it’s pulling all the stops.

Everything trying to kill me?
It's been a week, I'm used to it.

Our protagonist stops by a motel and finds out that Robert Nightingale has stayed there. His room is littered with beer cans and photos of the author; an obsession we knew about already. Alan continues down the road, facing Poltergeists and Taken all the way to a closed bridge, which he must cross. A tough task, as the Presence is breaking parts of it and creating enemies out of everything around. Including a crane.

Past that point, another stretch of road, and too many enemies for the few bullets we find. Thankfully, there are functional cars for that flashlight+ramming combo . As we approach Cauldron Lake, we walk through a junkyard, the perfect scene for a rather fun demolition derby against a bulldozer. Man, the Dark Presence really likes construction equipment, doesn’t it?

Uh oh, here comes the bulldozer.

As he fights through, Alan knows that his plan could very well fail; he doesn’t know if the Presence will let him enact it. He reassured his allies, but didn’t know whether it’d work. The most annoying section here is a sequence in the woods where each new encounter has one speedy Elite Taken, with the last one featuring two at once. Checkpoints are also fairly rare at this point.

I hate when these guys sneak up on me!

This chapter has a couple issues: By this point, there’s hardly anything the game can throw at us that we haven’t seen before, aside from new hard encounters. Alan once again visits multiple setpieces once again, some of which feel tacked-on for the sake of having them and lengthening the experience. And this time there really is nothing to detract us from that tediousness, since Sarah and Barry aren't tagging along. The gameplay roulette aspect feels absent here as well. Just “move forwards, kill everything, move some more, kill everything, here’s a few tools, solve this puzzle, kill some more, progress”. It's not "bad", but some of these flaws were easier to accept earlier.

"Destroy the tornado". Yeah. Just that.
Just another night in Bright Falls.

Straight to the heart!

As if out of desperation, the Presence piles on the encounters. A boat in the way? Sure. Steel beams popping out of walls? Sure. And the final “boss” of the game: A tornado with flying Poltergeists protecting its core. To beat it, Alan has to destroy a number of those animated objects before getting to an endless supply of flare gun bullets. It’s the only weapon that can shoot far enough to disperse the darkness around the weak point, but the writer has to remain careful of other flying objects. Oh, and the fight takes place over stone formations, so Alan can fall off. Imagine fighting an Eldritch horror in the form of a natural disaster and you die... by falling.

Power Words

Meanwhile, Zane in the back is all "just floating
around, don't mind me..."

After the tornado is defeated and implodes, Alan jumps into the water, clutching the clicker tightly. After the cold of the water, he comes to in bed, his wife Alice next to him, saying it was but a nightmare. She’s not freaking out, yet it’s pitch-dark. It’s blatantly off. Alan has lost the clicker, but it appears in the living room, as a darkened word floating above a table. Alan aims the flashlight’s beam at it and, shock! This makes the little item appear. The illusion breaks when he shines the light on the fake Alice, revealing the empty void of the Dark Place and Thomas Zane, still in diver’s suit circa 1970, clueing the writer on what to do next. The biggest surprise is the appearance of a second Alan, a creation of the Dark Presence, an evil version that will roam free in the real world, a being that Zane calls Mister SFRSCHHTh.

Okay, that's weird. There's static noise in my text.

Either this is a thematic choice relevant to the
plot, or the studio REALLY ran out of budget.

In the darkened Diver’s Isle that appears, floating words replace notable elements of scenery, and Alan makes these items appear by depleting the darkness around each word. With the right words, Alan opens the path, and moves onwards in spite of strange overhead voices of himself and Alice as if they were breaking up. The Presence is trying to demoralize him, and failing.

*click*

Alan makes Bird’s Leg Cabin appears and goes in, coming face-to-face with Barbara Jagger. Her voice of the legion claims that she cannot be stopped. Alan takes her in an embrace, shoves the Clicker into the hole where her heart should be, and presses the button. This vaporizes the Presence’s avatar and drowns the cabin in a blinding light that emits even beyond its walls. Alan then sits at the typewriter and finishes his story. He corrects Zane’s mistake by proposing an equivalent exchange; Alice goes free, but he stays.

Cut to Alice appearing in the depths, emerging, swimming back to the shore. With the Dark Presence eliminated (for now), Deerfest goes without a hitch, and the denizens of Bright Falls party with no worries. Well, except Rose, holding a lantern, and Nightingale, looking on from the shadows... And Alan, meanwhile, trapped within a lake of darkness…

It's not a lake; it's an ocean."

But this is not over! We’re moving on to the DLC chapters.

The Dark Half

Okay, who turned the lights off again?

On to “Special Feature 1: The Signal”. Alan finds himself in the streets of Bright Falls. It feels… off. He walks into the Diner, to the familiar scene of Rose greeting him, with Rusty, Odin, Tor and Cynthia also present, but words of their speech is garbled, and they fade in and out like static. The juke box won’t even play The Coconut Song… Thank God for that! The author heads to the bathrooms, in which the voice of Thomas Zane suddenly resonates. Alan remembers that he’s stuck in the Dark Place. Thomas shows a live-action Wake on the bathroom mirror, babbling about the situation being hopeless and inescapable. Zane asks the player character to find a better point of contact, then manifests a flashlight and a revolver through the mirror, leaving Alan to do what he does best.

Wakes goes back, to see everyone gone and replaced with TVs where the insane Alan talks about enemies attacking. As if on cue, Taken to smash into the diner. Due to the cramped space and your very limited arsenal, this battle is very tough. In fact, take the base game, crank up the difficulty, and you get a pretty decent summation of this DLC. The Insane Alan keeps setting up difficult scenarios from which the player character Alan escapes, but only barely.

I hate that guy on TV.

Now flashing at "Recharge" to summon batteries
into this mad world.

After leaving the diner, our protagonist escapes, and runs through a graveyard and into a house. In it, he finds a page of his writing, where everything is jumbled and nonsensical. Words appear around him. Words with realities that can be flashed into existence. Words that are harmful while shrouded by darkness, but useful once freed. Through this, Alan gets his cellphone back, with a functional GPS (somehow). Zane even calls him through it, saying that the writer is only going deeper into the Dark Place, before asking him to follow the GPS’s signal. Nothing else will be expressly handed to the writer; he’ll have to summon everything into this weird reality first, aiming for words like “flashlight”, “recharge”, “tools” or “flaregun”.

Jesus, how many Alans are there in this
damn place?!?

Past the Poltergeist-riddled Main Street and a Taken-infested General Store, Alan steps onto a road torn apart like a powerful earthquake just passed by. Through the street, into an alley, past a playground, Alan flashes the word “memory” and sees himself talking to Sarah Breaker before they found Barry in Chapter 5, “The Clicker”. The Dark Place is re-manifesting scenes from Alan’s memory, explaining why this chapter and the next are mostly composed of stitched-together setpieces from the main game: It's crafting teh world from his memories. When Alan gets to the church, he defeats a parade float to make the word “Key” appear, summoning a memory Sarah who unlocks the door. 

Even the church is different, with a new basement containing dozens of furnaces with the word “Blast” before them. When Taken appear, Alan can flash the word “blast” to cause furnaces to, well, blast their fire at the enemies. This is the first instance of the words themselves being a weapon against the monsters, but there will be many more – the developers at Remedy got creative and put Alan in situations where bullets won’t suffice, but Taken can be killed by alternate means made available by flashing precise words.

"The holy light of the Christ's boilers
compels you!"

Build Me Up, Break Me Down

Meet the new Barry, less fun than the old Barry.

Past the church, a page left by Zane reveals new words. Alan focuses on “friend” and... makes an imaginary Barry appear, still with headlamp and Christmas lights equipped. This one is a figment of Alan’s mind; not Barry, only what Alan thinks of Barry… annoyances included. This version tends to be more of a dick, but still brings jokes to this dire situation, on top of making the hero feel less lonely.

Side-note: Collection quests from the main game do not continue here; no thermoses, no pages. The one new collection quest involves finding alarm clocks, which can be detected through their ticking.

“Barry” suggests that Alan should head towards that sawmill in the distance. The way is paved with encounters with Taken and, most bizarrely, murders of crows that have been replaced by Alan’s “Alex Casey” books, flying at him. I didn't bring it up much, but on top of its commentary on horror and writing, the game also comments on fame. Alan is clearly sick of it, incapable of escaping his own fame, even while on vacation. Even the people around him want him to stay famous. His repeated appearances on TVs throughout the game solidified that metaphor in my mind, since none of the appearances are connected to happy moments of his life.

These books think they're birds.

So the Dark Presence likes heavy construction
machinery and demolition derbys. Noted.

We go through a field of broken street lights that periodically turn on, giving a bit of random help to kill the hordes of enemies. Ah, we’re getting the gameplay roulette back a bit. This is enforced by the next part, in which we must flip a switch to open a warehouse, but said switch is on the other side of a junkyard that becomes another demolition derby against two Poltergeist monster trucks. Taken also spawn here. This was one of the toughest segments for me, but the worst is yet to come.

Past the sawmill grounds, Alan lands in a building that houses a memory: His wife Alice, photographer, taking snapshots of her husband for the tour accompanying the release of the next adventures of Alex Casey. It’s equally creepy and genius to feature a memory version of Alan as a grey, texture-less model. The writer walks through and ends up in a shady version of his apartment.

I want to punch that grinning face.

In the living room, at last, we rejoin Thomas Zane, still in a diver’s suit. He explains that Alan is in a sort of nightmare for which the Dark Presence is not responsible; Alan is merely fighting himself. (We later find out that the player character Alan of the DLCs is actually his rational half, which attempts to find a solution even as it looks hopeless. The Insane Alan is his emotional half gone mad from not perceiving an escape and looking for one, whatever it is – including suicide, hence the attempts at killing the rational side that’s still fighting.)

Insane Alan pushes Zane out of the area before becoming the chapter’s boss: A construct of Poltergeist TVs put together. See what I was talking about? TVs, the recurring motif! The first phase is easy, but the second takes Alan to a warehouse in which awaits a much bigger construct, constantly talking about giving up.

Stop shaking, you stupid TVs!

I really fucking hate this thing...
...But I respect the challenge.

This freaking fight was the hardest for me. It provided a real challenge, one like I haven’t had in a long time. It was infuriating, but engaging! It took me over an hour to beat this thing! The boss is a number of Poltergeists put together, but it has access to debris it can turn into more Poltergeists to attack, all while summoning new Taken regularly. You have to take everything into consideration. The devs also made sure you couldn’t cheese this fight. Use a flare to deplete the darkness around multiple TVs at once? Bad idea; new Poltergeists come to life when a TV is destroyed, so you can get overwhelmed. Phase 3 of the fight is identical, just with more debris and the construct is farther.

Then there’s a FOURTH phase where the last TV, in a last-ditch effort, puts a Poltergeist boat in Alan’s way to crush him. That's easily dealt with, but the Insane Alan’s screams brings the Rational Alan to his knees. On the floor of Bird’s Leg Cabin, within the Dark Place, another Alan is writhing on the floor from this pain and insanity, letting out a scream.

Damn, this was a long one. See you in Part 5 for the grand conclusion of this story.