Every game has to have boundaries. As sprawling as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto 6's Vice City will end up being, there will still be an end to the map. In a game that big, you can explore for hundreds of hours without hitting an invisible wall, but the walls are still there. In a linear game, the boundaries are just narrower and you hit them more frequently.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alan Wake 2's boundaries are a little nebulous. If you try to stray too far from Watery's downtown while exploring as Saga, you'll hear something along the lines of, "This definitely isn't the right way," and she'll turn around. That's par for the course for video games. But, if you're playing as Alan in the Dark Place, the shepherd's hook pulling you back to safety is more interesting. Instead of hitting an invisible wall, the world around Alan will go dark and you’ll have to scramble back toward the light. In voice-over, Alan remarks, “the City was not real, I was limited to the confines of the dream.” That line still sticks with me.
I'm fairly early into Alan Wake 2 — I've played about eight hours — but I've been impressed by how deeply interested the game is in form. Since launch, Alan Wake 2 has often been referred to as “meta,” and that applies in obvious ways like when game director Sam Lake, the actor who plays Alex Casey, shows up in game as Sam Lake, the actor who plays Alex Casey. But that kind of meta-ness is nothing new in a pop culture ecosystem that had She-Hulk break out of her show to confront K.E.V.I.N., a robotic stand-in for MCU mastermind Kevin Feige, or Nicolas Cage show up as the Superman he never got to bring to life in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Flash. Both of these beats require extracurricular knowledge if you want to make sense of them and, in an era where behind-the-scenes machinations have become well-known to the massive fandoms of mega-franchises, i𝕴t was a safe bet that the target audience would catch the meaning.
Though meta-ness is familiar, Alan Wake 2 is meta in more significant ways than just making references to the game’s real-world creators. It's meta in the sense that its narrative is about the structure of narratives, in all their many forms. It is interested in the ways we tell stories, and it folds many of the mediums we use for that purpose — books, movies, talk shows, music, local TV commercials — into its structure as a video game.
Alan is a writer, and to move through the Dark Place, he needs to use the elements of story. New areas are presented as scenes on a plot board, and they can be altered by pinning a story element to the wall in Alan's eerie office. Saga finds pages from Alan's manuscript that describe events that she's just lived through or which will soon happen. Moving forward in the plot may require Alan to enter a talk show or Saga to recite a poem. The beats of the story are told using the mechanics of storytelling.
Video games commenting on the nature of video games isn't new, but Alan Wake's allusion to the invisible walls fencing him into his prolonged nightmare feel different. His comment about the Dark Place — "the City was not real, I was limited to the confines of the dream" — feels like a self-conscious nod to the nature of video games. The Dark Place and Vice City and Hyrule and Faerun aren't real. Expansive as they are, they aren't endless. Though we may become immersed in them, we are ultimately limited to the confines of the dream.
It To🔯ok Me Restarting Alan Wake 2 To Finally Get It
It turns ou💞t this game is best played with a g𒁃uide after all