6.8.2024
By Reid McCarter, Contributor
Throughout
Alan Wake 2, FBI Special Agent Saga Anderson takes time out from an increasingly surreal murder case to watch commercials. Pausing at TV sets across the fictional Washington towns of Bright Falls and Watery, Saga views a number of hokey live-action advertisements starring the twin brothers Ilmo and Jaakko Koskela. Played by Finnish actor Peter Franzén, the Koskela brothers shill a wide array of business ventures, from their coffee-centric theme park to beer to scenic nature tours.
The ads are all tongue-in-cheek—welcomingly funny sendups of no-budget local TV advertising. But they aren’t just throwaway jokes. These commercials establish the Koskelas’ personalities and their place in the community, even when they’re not shown on screen, developing two key characters whose impact on the game’s plot is both instrumental and (ultimately) heartbreaking.
The decision to feature live-action videos in
Alan Wake 2 reflects Remedy Entertainment's long-running commitment to mixed media storytelling and the resultant narrative possibilities. Remedy's second game, 2001’s
Max Payne, told major story beats via comic book-style cutscenes, and in the first
Alan Wake, Bright Falls residents had their TVs tuned to a
Twilight Zone homage called
Night Springs, complete with a Rod Serling-indebted narrator and mildly creepy theme music.
Now, Remedy loops back in on itself with the first
Alan Wake 2 expansion,
Night Springs. Out now, the expansion takes the form of three separate episodes (or in other words, a trio of distinct missions or chapters) of the fictional TV show.
The result is both inventive and expected—which isn’t as contradictory as it first appears, at least when it comes to Remedy.
Growing the cast
Kyle Rowley, Game Director at Remedy, explains that he and fellow director and co-writer Sam Lake had the basic concept for the
Night Springs expansion in mind from the start of their work on
Alan Wake 2. Rowley says that he, Lake, and the rest of the team at Remedy “were always very fascinated with how we could bring multiple playable characters into the experience.”
In
Alan Wake 2, the player’s time is split almost equally between Saga, the aforementioned FBI agent, and Alan Wake himself. Picking up where the first game left off more than a decade earlier,
Alan Wake 2 finds the eponymous character, a thriller novelist, trapped within a nightmarish version of New York City where physical reality bends and twists at the whims of his written words. Saga, on the other hand, explores a frequently fantastical version of the Pacific Northwest, working her way to the heart of a complex, world-bending murder conspiracy.
The constant perspective-switching leads to a powerful conclusion that wouldn’t have been nearly as effective otherwise. The player spends a lot of time inhabiting both Alan and Saga’s viewpoints by the end, both guiding them through the physical dangers of a horror game filled with homicidal enemies and exploring digital representations of their innermost thoughts. The pay-off for so intimately understanding both of them—for taking control of them as they struggle to piece together the clues to a mystery that could destroy their lives if left unresolved—is greater investment in how their stories come to an end, heightened by both Saga and Alan being playable in the final sequence.
From the very beginning of
Alan Wake 2, Remedy makes clear that it’s interested in the storytelling possibilities inherent to multiple viewpoints. “When you’re playing as a character, you just get closer to them, and you see their perspective,” says Rowley.
Alan Wake 2's ominous opening sees a man emerge naked from a lake, pursued through a dark forest by vicious cultists who soon bring about his demise. He’s only playable briefly, but the audience is allowed a proximity to his dread and horror that wouldn’t have been possible without personally controlling his actions.
“Originally, we wanted to have more playable characters than we actually ended up with [in
Alan Wake 2],” he continues, explaining that a decision ultimately was made instead to “focus on the core of the game” and hold onto that idea for the expansion.
“After determining we wouldn’t have the capacity to create more than three playable characters for the main game, we started spinning the idea of using
Night Springs to explore what playing with multiple characters could look like,” says Rowley. “That’s how it all started, really. We had the high-level concept of what
Night Springs was going to be from basically pre-production of the main game.”
Divided into three separate "episodes" of the fictional TV show, each chapter of
Night Springs stars a very different playable character and explores a very different scenario. In “Number One Fan,” a waitress from Bright Falls’ local diner is called into action to help her beloved Alan Wake, setting out across an unexpectedly sunny and brightly colored version of
Alan Wake 2's world.
The other two episodes contain slightly altered versions of familiar faces from Remedy's past games. In “North Star,” a woman who strongly resembles
Control’s Jesse Faden ends up entangled in the supernatural phenomena affecting
Alan Wake 2’s setting. And in “Time Breaker,” the most adventurous and experimental installment, an actor who looks a whole lot like the base game’s Tim Breaker finds himself lost in a shifting multiverse that blurs the line between acting and living within a video game, flipping between third-person shooter, side-scrolling beat ‘em up, and text adventure over the course of the episode.
Rowley calls these twists on familiar characters “reflections” or “echoes.” They’re not straightforward recreations or explorations of characters from Remedy's past, but Remedy hopes players will connect more with these versions of known characters “than if they were just some random characters that we just put in for now.”
Lead Writer Clay Murphy says the
Night Springs framing allowed Remedy to “build a much more extreme fantasy around [each] character for you to get invested in” and to explore scenarios that, if incorporated into
Alan Wake 2 proper, might have “distracted [from the experience] more than added.”
As the
Night Springs episode descriptions probably make clear, the entire expansion is filled with energy. Like all of Remedy’s best work, it comes across like its creators are bursting with ideas they’re eager to show off to players.
Laughing in the dark
Night Springs is also, more than anything else, very funny. This won’t come as much of a surprise to audiences familiar with Remedy’s past games. You might expect games about psychically tortured vigilantes and the complete disintegration of reality to strike a dour tone, but Remedy has always inflected its stories with an unforced sense of humor.
This remains the case even in
Alan Wake 2, an outright horror game that deals not just in potent scares and dread, but in heady themes of guilt and the nature of truth—and yet amid all that, there are the Koskela brothers’ TV commercials, an extended (and playable) musical sequence, and a litany of quirky characters whose sometimes nonplussed attitudes to terrifying situations allow a pinprick of light to shine through in even the darkest and most oppressive situations.
“The
Alan Wake series has always aimed to mix mature, horror-themed elements with light-hearted humor,” Rowley explains. “This contrast enhances the horror scenes’ scariness…If you only have horror without any breaks, it can get monotonous and dull.”
Night Springs is a more lighthearted exploration of
Alan Wake 2’s fiction that Rowley calls “a perfect reflection of [Remedy's] approach” to tone. Murphy says that the in-game
Night Springs episodes playing on TVs in the first
Alan Wake “set the expectation for a certain level of humor and campiness” and that Remedy “wanted to honor that with the
Night Springs expansion.”
“As self-contained episodes, they allow us to play with tone in a very fun way,” Murphy adds. “Expansions are the perfect place to experiment with the even stranger sides of the world of
Alan Wake, and to tell stories that provide context for the main game but don't necessarily continue Saga or Alan’s journeys.”
One of these ideas, for example, is a talking Big Mouth Billy Bass-style mounted fish, which Rowley says was nixed from
Alan Wake 2 proper but reintroduced for the expansion. “We didn’t really have as many constraints on what we could and couldn’t do,” he continues, noting that
Night Springs was “just fun stuff to work on.”
The first
Alan Wake was followed by a pair of post-release downloadable story chapters and a standalone expansion,
American Nightmare. Though these additions supplement the plot, providing further resolution to the first game’s conclusion and detailing events between
Alan Wake and the sequel, they aren’t essential to anyone looking to follow the series’ overall story.
This is an intentional choice. Rowley says that Remedy sees “the paid expansions as supplemental to the base game and its story.” He believes they “should enhance what is already there” but says that the team “didn’t want it to be something that players were required to play to get the ‘true’ experience.” He notes that Remedy “worked hard to build a complete story for
Alan Wake 2, so our focus with the expansions was on stories happening around it.”
Working on
Night Springs provided a welcome change of pace after years spent on the base
Alan Wake 2—an opportunity to relax from the need to write a sequel where “everything connects together and makes sense.”
Co-Lead Level Designer Nathalie Jankie describes the possibilities inherent to
Night Springs’ absurdist perspective on
Alan Wake 2. “I love how it gives us an avenue to explore different themes that we have established before, but then lean into that heavily,” she says. “The Waitress—it’s maybe a less glamorous job than an FBI profiler or a bestselling author, but it’s a power fantasy that a lot of us really relate to.” Jankie says she and the team “had the best time” discussing how to portray the Waitress’ intense fandom, “really getting into the character and the narrative, the storytelling around it, and how we could reflect that in the gameplay.”
Despite how different the
Night Springs episodes might be from the main story of
Alan Wake 2, Remedy is still careful to prevent them from feeling like they should belong to a different game entirely.
“It was important for us that any story work we do for the expansions is seamlessly integrated into the core game,” Rowley explains. “As a new player playing the base game and the expansions, it should all feel like a cohesive, complete package.” That kind of cohesion comes largely from the consistency in tone maintained across the studio’s entire catalog.
Drawing from the past
Remedy’s tone is established in part by the intrinsic fourth wall-nudging that comes from knowingly looking back on its history as a studio, a choice that acknowledges a body of work that extends outside of
Alan Wake itself.
Control began to draw clear lines connecting the characters and events of past Remedy games, and
Alan Wake 2 took it even further, with
Control's supernatural researchers showing up to investigate the strange events in Bright Falls.
When asked how the team decides which aspects of its history to draw from, Murphy says that “sometimes the story makes the decision to look backward for us.”
“In
Control, for example, the idea of a government agency investigating bizarre phenomena made it obvious that someone like Alan Wake would be on their radar,” Murphy says. “In
Alan Wake 2, a story heavily featuring echoes and different versions of reality, it felt natural to look at bringing in elements from Remedy’s past to help tell that story.”
In the hands of another studio, these kinds of character crossovers might feel cynical—like a cheap appeal to fan recognition or brand-expanding universe building. But even within an expansion like
Night Springs, which takes a more relaxed and dreamlike approach to character cameos, the choices feel fully considered and better-earned.
Murphy calls the decision to reference the studio’s past work “a balance,” saying that a story still has to “look forward, to tread new ground, or else it will lose its own identity.” “Remedy has a long line of amazing characters waiting in the wings, but deciding to bring one back is all about understanding how they fit into the story’s goals, what they would bring to the table, what gap they would fill in the cast,” Murphy says, adding, “But we are sentimental, so sometimes it’s as simple as picking a character we’re all excited about and telling their story come hell or high water.”
This blend is apparent in
Night Springs. There are characters whose appearance in the expansion seems to have stemmed from their ability to serve as catalyst for an interesting concept, and others where the opposite seems true.
Alan Wake 2 is partially a game about the creative process, and how an audience’s reaction to art can shape that artist’s understanding of themselves. Not only does this manifest in Alan’s writing literally changing the world around him, but in some of the game’s darkest moments, which highlight the toll that the self-absorption of a lone writer can take on those closest to them.
Night Springs’ “Number One Fan” episode further explores this theme, but with a far lighter approach. In its focus on the character of the Waitress, based on
Alan Wake’s Rose Marigold, it takes a heightened, comedic look at the archetype of the overly devoted fan, determined to defend her favorite writer and his books from any and all detractors.
When asked if this episode continues
Alan Wake 2’s look at how art influences others, for good or ill, Rowley says Remedy’s focus “was more on brainstorming ways to bring intriguing connections to characters, worlds, and events in the Remedy Connected Universe but with a fun twist.” But, he goes on to ask Murphy if “the narrative team had some amazing master plan about this.” To this, Murphy says it wasn’t a “master plan” exactly, but that “Yeah, we have plans.”
“The episode with the Waitress,” Murphy explains, “is definitely an exploration of the artist/audience relationship. Audiences react so extremely to creators and media these days—the haters just as much as the fans. So, we dove into that dynamic, filtered it through the Waitress’s pink saccharine perspective, and cranked it all up to 11.”
“It might be my favorite thing I’ve ever helped make,” he adds.
This makes sense, given the sheer energy the Waitress’s
Night Springs episode holds. Like so much of Remedy’s work, it's highly imaginative, and (along with the format-bending sequences in the “Time Breaker” episode mentioned above) more than willing to push at the boundaries of genre—and the medium of video games as a whole.
Playing with form
In this,
Night Springs also continues a tradition that runs back through Remedy's history.
At several different points in 2001’s
Max Payne, the game’s protagonist finds himself lost in a nightmare world. During one of these sequences, he traverses a great black void, with nothing but blood trails and the chilling cries of his recently deceased baby guiding him through an inky expanse. In another, the halls of his family home—the site of the gruesome double murder that saw his wife and child killed—warp drunkenly, distending and tilting as he moves toward the horrific scene of the crime.
Describe
Max Payne from the top down—tell a potential player what the game is about—and the above sequence doesn’t seem like it ought to work. In a self-aware sendup of noir novel poetics and Hong Kong action cinema, in a story about a hardboiled ex-cop shooting his way to the core of a criminal conspiracy, it doesn’t seem like these abstract horror segments would fit in. Likewise, a sci-fi game like 2016’s
Quantum Break doesn’t seem like it needs a network drama inserted into its runtime, or
Alan Wake 2 a series of local business commercials or an interactive musical number.
But trying to imagine any of Remedy’s games without these instances of playful mixed media seems impossible. The practice is a cornerstone of the studio’s style, and
Night Springs continues this exploration with its use of live-action TV show introductions and in the array of game genres explored in “Time Breaker.”
Murphy says that the team at Remedy “[loves] experimenting with bringing other media into our games, so looking at how to adapt a TV show like
Night Springs into a playable experience felt like a cool next step in that direction.” That kind of experimentation also helps the studio further refine its approach to game design. “When we try out these sorts of things, we end up learning a lot about how to better blend the mediums,” Murphy says. “These learnings allow us to improve and be more ambitious in pushing those boundaries in future games.”
For his part, Rowley says that Remedy sees “the expansion content we work on as a means to have fun exploring ideas that we might not have had enough time to fully dive into for the main game.”
“We always encourage the team to enjoy working on expansions,” Rowley says. “The team has just finished working on the base game, where some team members spent around five years. With a shorter development period for expansion content and the opportunity to build onto what we already have more quickly, it gives us greater flexibility and, in a way, more creative freedom.”
Considering how varied Remedy’s work can be, it’s admirable how well the studio maintains such a consistent (albeit multifaceted) tone. When asked how Remedy holds onto its unique identity, Rowley notes that creating
Night Springs was “quite tough on a few departments, specifically because we have so many different tones and stylizations with each [episode] requiring different visual design, different audio design, different music—and that’s been in a condensed development time period.”
“It was more challenging than it may have been if we’d just done one episode with one tone,” says Rowley, but continually making sure that “everybody understood what the tone was and was developing content specifically for that tone” led to consistency.
“We’ve been making games now for 30 years,” he adds, “and, I think internally, inside Remedy, there’s just a good understanding between all the different teams about how we can execute on a vision and a tone.” He chalks that up to regular work-in-progress reviews, good communication, and ultimately “having super creative people who are just very good at their job” and who have been “building experiences together for such a long time.”
Jankie agrees, adding that “it’s also a process, and you collaborate and find it together.” The tone, she says, sometimes comes from “a really good gut feeling because you know Remedy games—you’ve played them, you’ve worked on them—and then it’s also just checking in with each other.”
“If you do that enough, you get an understanding of what is expected and what would make sense in the [game] world,” Jankie says. “I think we always have a very lovely balance of this cinematic quality, the gameplay and the storytelling, and as long as all get their chance to shine, I think we have a nice, well-balanced Remedy experience.”
“The identity that I’m always striving for is being different, being experimental,” Murphy says when discussing how the writing team contributes to Remedy’s tone. “Not different for different’s sake, but just, you know, what aren’t people doing? And how can we push that and use that?”
Continuing to experiment
Video games are, by nature, an amalgamation of media. They’re sound and visuals, a twist on film and a digitization of theater, and with—depending on the game in question—literary inspirations and ambitions, too. Remedy seems to understand this better than many game makers, with work like
Alan Wake 2 and its
Night Springs expansion showing that part of the medium’s potential lies in its ability to play within so many different formats.
This also extends to the digital format of games, particularly in their capacity to be updated and altered after an audience has first encountered the "finished" version of a project. Revisions can continue to be made and new material added in ways that were previously impossible for the pre-digital distribution of books, films, and music. Looked at in this way, aspects of video games that we usually think of as purely technical or commercial—patches, downloadable add-ons, and expansions—can be considered less as software and more as an artistic exploration of the medium’s structure.
Alan Wake 2 made its New Game Plus mode into part of its narrative, entitled "The Final Draft." Typically, this kind of mode simply brings over items and character upgrades gained during an initial playthrough of a game, allowing players to revisit the experience with more powerful weapons or a tougher character.
In "The Final Draft," Saga and Alan have near-immediate access to, say, shotguns they would have picked up deeper into the game—but more importantly, bits of the
Alan Wake 2 story are slightly altered or changed outright to further dramatize the story’s portrayal of characters trapped within strange versions of reality where they must repeatedly endure permutations of the same events over and over again.
“Adding additional narrative content into our version of New Game Plus was something that we had as a goal very early on.
..Alan Wake 2’s structure and core themes lent [themselves] very well to the idea of playing through the game again, so we wanted to utilize that to make New Game Plus rewarding on a narrative level for fans who invested the time to play it again," says Rowley.
This willingness to bend video game convention to the whims of a given story—or to at least fully consider how the possibilities and limitations of the medium can work to tell stories—makes Remedy a consistently fascinating studio. If a game is going to explore topics like alternate dimensions and the psychological terrain of characters stuck within cyclical worlds, then it’s only natural to explore the characters’ mindsets using whatever tools the medium allows, New Game Plus or otherwise.
During
Alan Wake 2’s conclusion, Alan sees the loop he’s been stuck within expanding out into a spiral with no definite ending. With
Night Springs, the increasing complexity of both the world of
Alan Wake and the interconnected universe of Remedy’s games likewise feels as if it can continue stretching outward, twisting and turning in all kinds of unexpected ways.
You can pick up
Alan Wake 2 and the new Night Springs expansion now on the Epic Games Store.
