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S2 Ep106: Alan Wake
74 Plays5 years ago
FULL SPOILERS: Alan Wake
Join Dave and Jake as they become a scourge of light upon the dark and dive into a narrative appreciation of Alan Wake in this week's episode!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Join Dave and Jake as they become a scourge of light upon the dark and dive into a narrative appreciation of Alan Wake in this week's episode!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Nightmares and Alan Wake
00:00:00
Speaker
Stephen King once wrote that nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations. They're antithetical to the poetry of fear. In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why, but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn't be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and is what we'll remember in the end. My name is Alan Wake. I'm a writer.
Meet the Hosts: Jake and Dave
00:00:33
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? Overall fine. Immediately now, feeling a little bit, a little bit bloated, a little bit gassy. Right. There's a carbonated soda.
Soda, Ham, and Humor
00:00:49
Speaker
I hear carbonated soda does that.
00:00:51
Speaker
It was probably a little bit of just some flavored seltzer water and then too much ham. You ever been hamed out? I have been probably not listed to the point of like being incapacitated, but I've eaten too much ham. Ham is delicious is the problem. It can be. How do you like your ham though?
00:01:15
Speaker
Probably fried would be the word I would use. Like breakfast ham, something like that. Nice thicker chunk, caramelized, a little bit crispy on the sides.
00:01:27
Speaker
Then you take a steak knife to it, pick it up. Before you put it in your mouth, you put it in some mashed potatoes. Then you put it in your mouth. Yeah, no, it's freaking good. It's a problem, actually. We had some ham that was pre-cooked, but I still like to fry it a little bit on the skillet. A little bit of cold ham, that's fair. Yeah, yeah.
00:01:52
Speaker
And I remember there was a day I just kept going back. I think I was like working from home or something. Across the morning, I like went back for just a couple different slices. Just fry another piece up, fry another piece up. I'm like, I'm gonna like get grout or something. I don't even know.
00:02:09
Speaker
gout the outcome is gout. There you go. Groot. I think I am. I am gout. It's the embodiment of poor diet and your body shutting down. I don't even know what the physiological process is that causes gout. I've just heard of it.
00:02:29
Speaker
I don't want to, nor do I wish to discuss it really, being honest. Big shrug for me. Haven't looked into it. Excellent.
Exotic Beverages and Spicy Tastes
00:02:38
Speaker
That's what I was hoping you'd say. I also heard word on the street that you've got some exotic beverage flavors coming in.
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, I order things on Amazon to give Grubhub a break, you know? Right. Support locally, but also support globally. It's my thought. I'm giving a lot of local businesses a break right now. I usually go for like
00:03:05
Speaker
three or four days cooking at home and then maybe like Friday as like the pent up stress of the week I might order in. But from Amazon, I'm ordering some, you know, rain, the energy drink, similar to Bang and the other ones where it's, hey, there you go. Holds up can to camera that listeners can't see.
00:03:26
Speaker
I was just hoping people with that thought I had like a fun interjection, like, Hey, that wasn't towards me. Someone just walked in while David was recording. How you doing? Yeah. Anyway, sorry, Jake. He's like making a pizza or something. Throwing the dough at me. Hey, Tony, turn off the oven this time. Yeah. You do live in an Italian frat house. So it's good to get that out there.
00:03:52
Speaker
That's just a fun thought experiment for later. Um, but to answer your question, finally, there is a strawberry jalapeno version of that, which sounds good. Hmm.
00:04:04
Speaker
I think that's the appropriate response too because like jalapeno, you can put those maybe in some exotic things that people do. People do. It's a drink seems like a lot to drink. Yeah. Like because it is in a liquid, they do mild it down.
00:04:23
Speaker
Cause you sip on it and you're like that had a nice flavor to it. And then there's the aftertaste where it's just. Coat in your mouth. And again, it's not overly spicy by any means. It just sits kind of weird. Like some jalapeno beers have done the same jalapeno beer.
00:04:38
Speaker
Well, it's not solely jalapeno, it's like mango, habanero or something like that. Okay. Stuff to like cool it off a little bit, make it more edible. There's a, I do know that you eat spicier food than I do on average. I wouldn't consider myself lowest level novice, but like definitely not even journeyman, let alone master expert. You have asked if things were going to be spicy.
00:05:08
Speaker
Like you you eat spectral pepper on foods and on beverages and ice cream. So it's it's been a little bit. I can definitely handle the heat as far as mouth stuff. There are certain things to kick my ass, but I can still do it a little bit. But I find more as I.
00:05:27
Speaker
as I get older, that certain things don't sit as well in my stomach later. So I can have a great meal and then two hours later it's like pay the toll. I'm like, ah, is it time? Yeah, that's pretty much where I've been at. I think I talked about Firebird's wings. I ordered them again because they're still basically the best wings around here I think now. Best wings in town. Best wings in town.
00:05:53
Speaker
And it's hilarious to watch the remote delivery of walking distance. It's basically across the highway. So you know how sometimes you order online DoorDash or something and it gives you the visual indicator of how far the restaurant from your delivery location is. Yeah.
00:06:16
Speaker
And it zooms to scale for that. And it's like maximum zoom because it's just like walk outside your front door. You can read the guy's license plate. Yeah. But I think part of that's, it's manageable because they're not like drowning in sauce, which is something I realized was kind of a crutch for wings up to this point. Like everyone else around here tends to drown things in sauce. There's like, you know what I'm talking about? Like there's the half inch of,
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah. And that's the shitty way to do it. Because one, regardless of how you cook your wing, it's going to be imbalanced sauce because one side is going to be like sitting in and the other one's not. And the other thing is if you have a more breaded wing, which I normally don't advise, it's just going to soak up with sauce and not be crispy. Mm-hmm.
00:07:06
Speaker
Like you're going to have to re-bake it anyway. Just cook the wings in the sauce and then the extra sauce have on the side. They have these like little sauce containers that everybody fucking has and it can be used to great use.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think usually I get that with some like blue cheese, something like that, you know, standard wing offering, but like not having the layer of sauce on the bottom has reduced the spice price for me, as it turns out, like not just marinating them in.
00:07:37
Speaker
Frank's Red Hot Sauce for the duration of the drive apparently helps. But I'm sure there's some advanced techniques to cheat the spice price for some, I assume, greater cosmic cost.
00:07:53
Speaker
They may just not feel shitty later.
From Food to Video Games: Enter Alan Wake
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah. I like a pill you could take, medicine. I think there was a Simpson episode where Homer drank a candle. That was a good one.
00:08:07
Speaker
From my experience, I just always feel shitty. So it's neither a positive or negative. Speaking of always feeling like crap though, we sometimes talk about video games.
00:08:25
Speaker
Oh, is that this podcast? Sorry, I'm getting my days mixed up. Matt, it would be funny if we just like win. I think we could have been approaching a record for the pregame in quotes talk. What I love is like whatever, so like you're editing this week, right? So whatever you choose for the intro for this unmentioned game, then it's gonna be like, how's it going tonight, Dave? You're like, I ate too much ham.
00:08:54
Speaker
I love that transition. I love spicy food. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like the game is, there is no segue. It's Alan Wake. Alan Wake is the game. This week. Alan Wake.
00:09:12
Speaker
This is my all-in week. Giving it my all. Yeah, that's not true. Not for you. I meant that in relation to myself. I would never accuse you of not providing full effort for the podcast. I would just suggest it. No, just kidding. I just like doubling back on jokes.
00:09:34
Speaker
And then you rescind it and you're like, no, I'm being nice now. And then you just double back. Yeah, I like the little passive aggressive slip in because you continue to talk. I don't have a chance to rebut. You just go on and that adds an extra layer of humor. I like it. It's kind of like you're like a roundabout of like offensiveness and there's like.
00:09:53
Speaker
there's the exit often to like being a jerk and you just you're like you pass it and everybody is listening just like okay cool they're not gonna take that exit for a piece of shit what but then you see them like not take any of the other exits like it on the roundabout and they come back to that one and they're like I think maybe and then they pass it again you're like all right now I don't know what's going on
00:10:18
Speaker
Alan Wake, though, I guess so. Alan Wake is a I wouldn't call it a horror game. It's a third person thriller action shooter ish. I'd say thriller adventure type.
00:10:38
Speaker
Buy me time while I look up steam tags. So it's definitely a linear story as far as it is a story game. There's kind of only one way to play. There's not a whole lot of exploration outside of like some main paths.
00:10:53
Speaker
But the focus of the game is pretty much around the events of the game and then some mechanics for gameplay itself. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I'd say some emphasis on like the voice acting and character models for the time. Big and big quotes for the time. Right. There's definitely, I got some Final Fantasy X vibes.
Game Mechanics and Narrative Style
00:11:20
Speaker
If you know what I mean. Yeah, no, I gotcha. Oh, the tags were action, horror, adventure, third person, and thriller. So we were actually pretty close. Nobody else has a good idea of how to classify this game, and so I take away from that. But yeah, it's aged a bit. There were still some cool effects. But this is a game from the age where good graphics were like, oh, they did that one effect really cool.
00:11:48
Speaker
Same way Bioshock was like, water looks really cool. And this one, it's like, oh, those shadows, the way they kind of like warp and distort. And there's this occlusion on these enemies. That's really cool. But then the rest of the game just like doesn't look that good in my comparison. Then you look at like a person's face and it was still pretty decent. But there were times where your wife, they just kind of like took the texture map, put on her bow and then just like stretched it wherever they felt they needed to.
00:12:16
Speaker
It's like when everyone in your game is wearing a skin suit. Like if you squint, you get flashbacks to like the original Spider-Man game on PlayStation. You're like, ah. Yeah. Just little bits, little bits of that. It's somewhere between like Tomb Raider, original Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy 7 remake. That's where this game is, between those two. Oh, yeah, between the first game, quote unquote, and then the most recent game.
00:12:46
Speaker
But yeah, you mentioned it's a narrative game. And that's basically the way I describe it to people, too. You're largely playing it for the plot and to figure out what's going on. There are some mechanics in there and various difficulties. So I actually played this not when it came out, but only a few years after that. It came out in 2010.
00:13:17
Speaker
Um, you played it more recently, but I think I still had some of my save data. So when you started the game, did it give you the option of nightmare difficulties? Do you remember? Or was it just easy, normal, hard? I think it was easy, normal, hard. I don't remember if it had nightmare. Yeah. I thought it unlocked once you beat the game on any difficulty. So that locks it in. Cause when I went to play, it's like, Hey, nightmare difficulty is an option. I'm like, no. Um, but.
00:13:46
Speaker
Uh, one of the main things building out the story in the game is you collect pages of the manuscript and some of those are locked in nightmare. So you can only get them in the hardest difficulty. Interesting.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah. Which is weird for a narrative game. Real quick, Lewis Plot is you kind of start off in a dream and you have throughout like the intro and pretty much all the game, you have Alan's voice kind of narrating the events of what's happening, what he's thinking about. And a lot of parallels are drawn to other horror or thriller authors, such as Stephen King, obviously.
00:14:31
Speaker
They're probably some other ones, but my mind's blanking at the moment. I haven't read that many thrillers, to be honest. Probably zero, actually. But the character Alan Wake is a novelist, essentially in his bad dream that is happening at the beginning of this game.
00:14:50
Speaker
One of his characters of like a lone hitchhiker with an axe with the intent to kill is essentially chasing him through his dream. And it's a very dark shadowy figure and he only really finds respite in very well lit areas.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah. Like lamp posts and things like that. Just the post itself. Yeah. I'm trying to think exactly what kind of light they are trying to recall that because I don't think it's really that much of a naturally occurring light lamp style. Right. It's the one that buzzes. Maybe it's like a halogen lamp.
00:15:32
Speaker
Yeah, but the conical sort of descending the classic, the classic, the interrogation light is basically what the street lamps. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, this is the the nightmares, the tutorial rate.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, it kind of teaches you, hey, here's how you can quote unquote dodge things. Yeah. Now, from a mechanic standpoint, this game is third person and a little bit loosey goosey. The controls are not the tightest by any means. I would say looking back now, it adds to a degree of helplessness because you're not you're not a badass. You're just kind of a guy who writes books.
00:16:15
Speaker
That's definitely true. But you do get the opportunity to kind of dodge out of things cinematically if you do shift and a direction away from the person who has a weapon at the right time. Yeah. And then you can't really damage the shadowy figures until their shield's broken, which you do by kind of pointing at them with a flashlight.
00:16:39
Speaker
which actually really enjoyed as a mechanic because you kind of had to space away from it's rare you have just one enemy at a time. It's like, hey, here are five dudes. Later, fucko. So you have to like shine the light in their face. And by default, just having a flashlight on doesn't cost you any battery and it will eventually dwindle their shields to where they can be damaged by a gun.
00:17:06
Speaker
Oh, or you can kind of supercharge it and really turn it on blast, which drains your battery, but breaks your shield quicker. Yeah. And this is like, this is a video game flashlight where the, the, the focus drain drains it in like four or five seconds or whatever it drains real fast. But then the battery also recharges on its own over time with no solar mechanism. He's just, he's just quietly shaking it.
00:17:36
Speaker
She's got his Travis touchdown animation in the middle there. Side question, how are those, you know, the copper wiring and the, wow, showing my electrical knowledge here. The batteries they had for like 20 bucks, but essentially a copper coil with either a magnet or the battery inside and you would generate some degree of electricity to charge the flashlight. Oh yeah. Um,
00:18:06
Speaker
I seem to have such good utility, but I only knew my one uncle had one and they were never talked about again, literally ever. I'm sure they don't have crazy outage. Is it a crank battery charger or a crank battery provider? Is it itself the battery? You shaking it provides a charge because you're sliding
00:18:29
Speaker
whatever back and forth between this copper coil inside the battery, inside the flashlight. Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, we had one of those as an emergency. I hope nobody who knows anything about science or electricity listens to this section. They don't. Yeah. Where I am a fool. We have a maximum IQ for listeners.
00:18:47
Speaker
That's how I insult literally everyone listening. If you want to guess those numbers, please post on Facebook. 400, believe it or not. Yeah, that's pretty high up there. Yeah, we had a roadside kit. It was like that. You charge up the battery and then it had a couple different modes.
00:19:06
Speaker
similar to that but it happens passively in Alan Wake. It's also worth noting that at the beginning of this nightmare Alan hits the hitchhiker with his car and that's kind of foreshadowing for how the enemies are created later in the story.
00:19:29
Speaker
But yeah, this is just the opening segment for you to learn the mechanics, learn how to dodge, focus lights. You get a pistol and a light guides you through a lot of this, which is kind of interesting from a plot perspective later. But this light keeps coming up in the game.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah, that was just kind of random and confusing. It's like, hey, I'm here to tell you these shadowy figures can be damaged by light. I'm like, thanks, giant ball of light. Of course, you have a biased opinion on the matter. Are you literally God? But then when you do Awake from the Nightmare, your wife is there. You're married. Surprise. You finally made it. Yeah. Congratulations. Congratulations.
00:20:18
Speaker
She's like, were you having nightmares again? Implying that you've had these nightmares before. And there's some interaction with her dialogue wise perverts, but you find out that she is great in the car while she drives.
00:20:36
Speaker
But you find out that she's afraid of the dark because there's like a power outage in your apartment building. So you go over to the breaker box and she's like, oh, hey, like, sorry, I keep freaking out. Just it really unsettles me. Yeah. And that is the only time that is mentioned in the whole game. I think we just said opposite things. The the power outage or the fact she's afraid of the dark comes up like a couple of times.
00:21:04
Speaker
Yeah. There's recurring elements of these shadowy figures that keep coming up. Yeah. Well, let's at least get into some of the intro plot. Sure. That's a good stage setter, if you will. Yeah. So Alan Wake, as you said, is a writer, and this is his vacation. They're going to Bright Falls, which is somewhere in the Northwest, Oregon, Washington, something like that.
00:21:30
Speaker
as a vacation because he needs a vacation. He's super stressed out. He's obviously been having these nightmares and he can't write. He's suffering from a tremendous bout of writer's block. And so he thinks he's here to take a break, chill, experience nature, and
00:21:50
Speaker
the universe has conspired against him in this aspect. Yeah. He gets a call from his manager slash friend Barry, who is great.
The Vacation Gone Wrong
00:22:02
Speaker
The best character in the game. He's solid. He's like the George Costanza. He is, yeah. But essentially,
00:22:13
Speaker
You're just looking for keys to this local cabin that you're renting out. As you go into this diner, meet some of the local fare. That's a fairly small town, so a lot of people all know each other. Then you're looking for the
00:22:28
Speaker
the owner of this cabin. Mr. Stucky. Yeah, Mr. Stucky. And Ro is the girl at the counter for the diner, offers you some coffee, and says, oh, I think Mr. Stucky's in the bathroom. Yeah. And so you kind of walk over to go find Ria's. You can get the keys and start your fucking vacation, finally. Yeah. You just have to go on like a ferry to get over here. You're just like, let's get the shit out of the way. And there's
00:22:55
Speaker
Kind of like a dark hallway over the bathroom like one of the lights went out and there's this Obviously a little bit senile older lady who was like has a lamp. She's kind of looking down the hallway She's like be careful young man. It's dark and you're like oh
00:23:10
Speaker
All right, you old hoot. But then as you go in the hallway, you're kind of banging on the door saying, Mr. Stucky. And then this lady who wasn't there before in the very dark funeral clothing in the shadow says, like, Mr. Stucky's not feeling well, or he has taken ill. But like, here are the keys. Like, I'll be sure to come by and see how you guys are settling in later. And he's just like,
00:23:40
Speaker
Okay, thanks. Alan Wake is just like, I want to get away from people in general. So he's sure I'll accept these keys. He's not invested in the community. He's just, like I said, looking to start his vacation. So they eventually get over to the cabin. It's on this lake. It's really scenic. Yeah, it's very old and kind of like.
00:24:07
Speaker
If you imagine someone like, oh, I have a cabin, that means they don't check up on it a whole lot. They just rent it out and people make do. But you get the generator started because, again, it's a very old building. Yeah. And that's a recurring mechanic in the game, too. There's several points where it's like time to generate the press, the mouse button presses to start the generator.
00:24:30
Speaker
There even there was so many times even though I did it so often there were so many times where I would go and Click e to start the generator and press e again. I'm like what's happening right? Yeah, but it's e and then left click to start pulling on the cord
00:24:45
Speaker
our millennial brains can't handle multiple button presses for activate at once. Um, but yeah, the, uh, the cabin's all very, uh, so the sun's starting to go down and Alice, or you have to get the lights on for Alice basically is your goal here with the generator getting power. You go in, she's just like, Hey, I got a present for you upstairs. And you're just like, well, I'm streaming the game. So I hope this is PG. And you like walk up the stairs and she's like, I'm not the president silly. And you're like,
00:25:16
Speaker
Okay. And she's like, go check this out. She's saying like her underwear and a t-shirt. Like, she's settling down for the evening, that's why. Uh-huh. But it's a typewriter. And this is the moment of conflict because she's like, hey, with all this isolation, with all this stuff going on, you can sit down, no pressure, get through this writer's block. Also, there's like a clinic that helps artists and people get through all these issues. And Alan Wake's like, what? I was here for a vacation.
00:25:47
Speaker
storms out because he's an adult and doesn't face his problems with a flashlight. And then the lights all go out once he's a little ways away from the house and Alice starts screaming. Well, I do want to point out one thing. Yeah. As he kind of storms off from the house, it takes the flashlight with him. The reason he took the flashlight
00:26:14
Speaker
is because she's in the house and lit, but he knew that she wasn't going to follow him out into the dark and he could have like a moment away from his wife to be like, I can't believe she'd try and pressure me with this. I can't believe you've done this. Yeah. But then after he hears that scream, he runs back to the house.
00:26:34
Speaker
You know how he is. Alice? Yeah, Jason. And there's, I guess, a whole ripped in the house where because there's a two story house, I think, and there's a whole ripped in the second story. First story. I can't remember exactly. It was the first story. There's a little balcony out back.
00:27:00
Speaker
And then because it is on a lake, it goes down to a dock. But like right at the balcony of the house, like right outside that door, it was just you could see the beams were broken. So he like runs out and he looks down into the water and he thinks he sees her. Yeah. So he like jumps in after. What a hero.
00:27:22
Speaker
And there. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. I'm just ranting in story mode now. No, it's fair. Yeah. Well, we'll get a little bit less descriptive as the plot as we go on. But the important it's important to lay out what happens at the beginning. He jumps in the water and starts to either hallucinate or something's going on. And at this point, the narrative structure of the game changes and that you're no longer operating in the present.
00:27:53
Speaker
He then wakes up post car crash. This is the next scene. He has a car crash. So he passes out in the water, whatever, wakes up driving a car, has a car crash. And long story short, it's two weeks later. So there's a bit of a gap. Yeah. And that gap is most of the content of the game for like what's been going on.
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah. So essentially, as you are now playing from this two weeks later point, you start to go through and piece some of these pieces back of the puzzle of what the fuck happened? Where's my wife? So it starts off, you kind of are just exploring from where your car crashed. You're like, oh, there's a gas station nearby. I can see it through the woods. Yeah. And so you go over to that slowly. And you will find the manuscript pages around this point. That's where they come in.
00:28:52
Speaker
But as you start to pick up these manuscript pages, you start to realize that this is something that is kind of detailing the events of things that you are doing. Yeah. Or it might kind of foresee events that are about to happen in the game, which is kind of cool. Yeah, they're actually out of order, too.
00:29:12
Speaker
Like most of the time, they're roughly related to what you're about to experience. Sometimes they're about backstory for other characters. And sometimes it's about some things that might have happened a little bit before all of this. But for the most part, the ones that really apply to you are literally spoilers for the game that you're playing.
00:29:31
Speaker
Yeah, which I had not seen in a game before. I think it might ruin certain games, Bioshock. Or it's like, there's a big reveal later type thing. But also the shadowy figures you saw from your nightmare, you now start seeing. And as far as you know, is real life.
00:29:52
Speaker
So you then use your flashlight gun mechanics to fight them off. And then when you get to the gas station, you also do find Mr. Stuckey, but it is Shadow, Mr. Stuckey. Mr. Stuckey, the ultimate life form. Yeah. He uses guns.
00:30:13
Speaker
Actually, so I played through the beginning of this game as a side note with developer commentary on because I did play through the game. It screws up the flow a lot, but there were some interesting notes here. And they specifically didn't give the enemies guns. Some of them have like throwing weapons. They'll throw like... A lot of them like have axes. But if you're out of distance, one might be like, I can just throw the shit at them. Yeah.
00:30:37
Speaker
But they apparently, early in development or while they were developing it, had the idea to give enemies guns and then were just like, ah, it's much better from a gameplay perspective if we just let people hard dodge some of this stuff and it bounced around it. I think it was a bit cool. Yeah, I couldn't imagine guns on top of everything else.
00:30:56
Speaker
Yeah. Because like you mentioned, you're always surrounded in combat and awareness of what the enemies, how they're shadow dashing up to you and all this other stuff's going on and like throwing crap at you. That's one of the key skills on like the harder difficulties.
00:31:12
Speaker
But yeah, Mr. Stucky dies at some point. And I think most of the time when main characters die or named characters die, you can find a manuscript page that depicts how it happened, even if you don't see it firsthand, which is cool. Kind of like flesh out the story a bit and build some theming.
00:31:35
Speaker
But basically, in my notes here on the side, I abbreviate it as TDP, but the dark presence is this darkness that's creating these shadow figures and killing people and filling them with darkness in this weird kind of Kingdom Hearts way.
Unveiling the Dark Presence
00:31:56
Speaker
And then sticking them on you. But it's really cool.
00:32:04
Speaker
All right, you've already tagged this with spoilers. So I have a question for you. Oh, yeah. As you played the game probably twice, at least now. Why? Why are the dark figures being sent after you? Because essentially,
00:32:21
Speaker
overall plot of the game is the Dark Presence has lured you into the house to write this manuscript. Because essentially, that area has magic properties. If somebody writes something, it can become true, which is why you're essentially playing through the events of this manuscript that you've already written.
00:32:43
Speaker
and your two week blackout, right? But the Dark Presence's whole goal is to be freed. So I'm not sure why. Because the Dark Presence is allowed to interfere with you. And I always thought the assumption was to get you back into the house to finish the manuscript where it says like,
00:33:04
Speaker
the dark presence is for you to fuck everybody up, long live Satan, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. But it constantly keeps sending you these things to attack you. And it's never implied like they knock you out and bring you back to the house. It's always like your guide, respond from the same point, right?
00:33:26
Speaker
I think there's a couple elements to answer that question. That's a great question because I think the correct interpretation is that the Dark Presence isn't trying to kill you until the last 15 minutes of the game.
00:33:44
Speaker
I agree with the assessment that sending things that can incapacitate you, take you out, introduces a failure state. You're like, oh, why are they killing me if they're just trying to push me toward the end? I mean, my rationalizing brain
00:34:05
Speaker
has two points. One, it's a video game, so you need a failure state in order to force people to move on. But the other one is you could also conceptualize being taken out by the Dark Presence. The taken is actually what they're called to steal the term from Destiny.
00:34:23
Speaker
You could take if you die to those or if you're incapacitated, you could say your failure state is actually Alan Wake doesn't make it to the end. He is captured and returned to the cabin. That would be off screen, obviously, because that's a reveal later on. Yeah, exactly. It would have been spoilers at that point. That's the way you could conceptualize it if you're like a super fan and you don't need to have it all explained. But the game doesn't do that. No. But yeah, it's.
00:34:52
Speaker
There are a lot of interesting implications. One of the things I appreciate about the storytelling in this game is that it's not. They reference things that happened in the past and justify them in some interesting ways, and it has that thriller narrative. There are questions that remain unanswered right up to the end, which is really fun.
00:35:16
Speaker
It's not always just A, B, C, D, E, F, G. What would be an example of one of those questions that never gets answered? Because I'm trying to rack my brain for one. So the game actually answers most of the questions by the very, very end. But I'm trying to think of certain things that they call back to.
00:35:39
Speaker
We're about to jump around a little bit in narrative structure. But TLDR leading up to this, the main plot of the game is trying to free your wife from being captured in The Dark Place, which unfortunately has the same acronym as The Dark Presence. But they're both originating in this cabin on Cauldron Lake.
00:36:05
Speaker
Um, pretty early in the story. Uh, there's a flashback to Alan Wake and his wife and their apartment.
00:36:13
Speaker
that you mentioned, like making the coffee, her greeting, and the lights go out. And he gives her the clicker, which is this little old style, like, I don't even know if it's really a light switch. I guess it probably is. You know those old lamps where you had to go, you just had to like press the button on it to turn it on versus plugging in or off or having the twist switch?
00:36:38
Speaker
Yeah, but this is the MacGuffin for the story. It's the magical item. To reference back to our previous episode on Super Land, it's the MacGuffin. So when you arrive at the cabin on the lake,
00:37:00
Speaker
Uh, at this point, Alan has already given her the clicker. He doesn't have it in his possession, but at the very end of the game, you also find the clicker and the well-lit room, which is like another proper down. Um, which doesn't make any sense because there's two of them then cause she has one, but then Alan also finds one in this room.
00:37:25
Speaker
I can answer that. Yeah, there's an answer. Okay, so we've already established for all intents and purposes that the writing done on Cauldron Lake has magical properties, and these events will come true. So essentially, Alan Wake wrote it in to the story. Namely, it was
00:37:53
Speaker
kind of co-written by Thomas at this point in time. Yeah. Thomas Zane was the guy 30 years prior. That was the predecessor to everything happening down. Like really similar story. He somehow happened once before 30 years ago. And then our presence is like, all right, we need another writer to get fixed this shit. Um, so the events start to transpire again. But essentially I think that,
00:38:20
Speaker
The clicker gets written in as one of the last pages of the manuscript as kind of an out What's it what's interesting? Here is this actual McGuffin?
00:38:32
Speaker
I didn't remember this whole scene again, this playthrough, but the first chronological mention of the clicker is in Thomas in the well-lit room, there's a box and it has the clicker and it has one manuscript page. And the manuscript page is the only remaining manuscript page from the previous protagonist in quotes, Thomas Zane.
00:38:51
Speaker
because he wrote himself out of existence, along with the dark presence and the cabin and his girlfriend who now is possessed by the dark presence. Except, he specifically said, or wrote in his manuscript, all of it will cease to exist except what I put in this box. And he leaves one page in there. And the page details the early years of Alan Wake's life
00:39:20
Speaker
and his experiences with the clicker. And so Thomas Zane, actually, this is the thing that like blew my mind in this playthrough, actually sets in motion the clicker's place as the MacGuffin. And Alan wakes life before Alan writes the clicker into existence in his story. Oh, damn. Yeah.
00:39:48
Speaker
So did he just pick a kid at random? He names him. OK. Well, I mean, did he look up somebody randomly? Because the character Alan Wake is probably mid-30s. So it's something that happened 30 years ago. I feel like Thomas Zain would have had to look up a directory of people and be like, this guy. Given this guy, I'm a guffin.
00:40:13
Speaker
It's actually undefined because this is one manuscript page out of Thomas Sain's original story. Thomas Sain was like a poet, but he also did this writing. So you could theoretically say he actually wrote in other pages like Alan Wake's Birth and like other events and things like this. And this is just the one page that he really needed Alan to see. So he left it in the box. But it's like.
00:40:37
Speaker
I'm doing the mind explosion thing with my hands. So that is like one of the strong points about the game is the fact that Jake and I can kind of have fun theory crafting a little bit because the story is engaging and it's broken up in these episodes.
Narrative Devices and Plot Progression
00:40:53
Speaker
Yeah. So at the end of episode one, I mean, I didn't know it was the end of episode one, but they had like a cliffhanger and then they bring up like the title screen and say like Alan Wake episode one. Then they have like some outro music for the episode.
00:41:07
Speaker
Oh, nice. I like that. It's a legitimate song since Wolf Among Us. Yeah. Telltale does that. Yeah. And I kind of like that because it allows me to jump in for whatever the playtime is going to be, one to two hours of a chapter. And I can be like, okay, cool. Like this is what's going on.
00:41:27
Speaker
And then let's say you're a shitty person and you're like, I'm not going to play the game for a week. When you play the next chapter, we'll say previously on Alan Wake. Yeah. So you get to that, that nice TV storytelling feel. It's pretty hilarious if you are just playing the game in like two settings, cause you're just like.
00:41:42
Speaker
Should I watch the recap for the thing I just did? But you have the option not to branch too much onto the Witcher 3, but the Witcher 3 does a similar thing. When you load up the game, it gives you your story recap of important events that have recently transpired. I do love that because I will not play that game for a year at a time.
00:42:05
Speaker
If I could get that in Final Fantasy, that would allow me to actually possibly finish a Final Fantasy game. But yeah, I'm a fan of the story recap. There are also other meta elements in here. There's a mystery kind of Twilight Zone inspired show called Night Springs.
00:42:27
Speaker
which literally they have like low res video clips of like whatever this skit scene, whatever it is. It's always like, you know, five minutes or less per episode, but they'll just show up on TVs throughout the game and you could just sit there and watch them.
00:42:45
Speaker
I think I watched one episode. Yeah. Did you watch the first one? The Quantum Suicide? Or did you watch? I watched some guy got impregnated by like bugs or something. You're like this one. This is where I was going. I'm just like, I've been skipping these. Let me see part of this, I guess.
00:43:05
Speaker
Yeah, it is a little unfortunate. I have mixed feelings on that. One, awesome content, great like setting world building. Alan Wake was actually canonically one of the writers for that show. So it's still like ties together an episode at least. Yeah. But also from a negative standpoint, I'm not a huge fan of putting something in the game where it's like sit here to experience it. Yeah.
00:43:33
Speaker
And a lot of times they'll throw it into a spot where you're not in immediate danger, but you're like trying to accomplish something in the game. So it doesn't make narrative sense for Alan to just stand there and watch TV for five minutes. Turns on TV. Hold up. Oh my gosh. This is Fallout 4 all over again. Just escape the vault. I need to find Sean. I must find Sean. Spins 100 hours not finding Sean.
00:44:03
Speaker
This guy's not glow oriented at all. Another thing I like that is more meta and they justify in game is as you're going through the game, because it's a game, we've already described you need flashlights and guns. You find a lot of them throughout. You find some flashbang grenades, some flares, a flare gun, et cetera.
00:44:25
Speaker
and he remarks many times because sometimes you'll even have like stationary like utility lamps you can turn on like for like overnight construction and he's like why are these things here like he's literally just finding them littered about fucking everywhere yeah uh it kind of blows his mind um so later on you come across that lady with the lamp again the old lady from the diner essentially
00:44:53
Speaker
Yeah, she was following the stuff between Thomas and his girlfriend. And then she cared for Thomas and Thomas went fucking got yeeted out of existence. Yeah, he yeeted himself out. She got clued into some of the goings on and the darkness and how it doesn't like light. So she's like, this is my fucking mission. So for 30 years, she's stockpiling weapons, flashlights, batteries, designs the well lit room,
00:45:21
Speaker
and has all of these things just littered about everywhere. And she goes around to buildings frequently to say like, hey, are your lights working? And she tests light switches. Yeah. And everyone writes her off as like, that old crazy hoots OCD. Yeah. You know, that's one of the things where people like I neurotically have to flip the light switch three times or I'll die. Right. Naturally. I mean, that one's true. But yeah, go on.
00:45:45
Speaker
But they wrote her in so seamlessly as like, yeah, you could easily overlook her. But you see her multiple times throughout the game to try to be like, what's her actual role in this? You mentioned she's in the diner. And one of her lines there is she says some numbers. She's like, I'm going to need to replace 13 and 18 or something. And you're like, this person's just crazy.
00:46:08
Speaker
And it's not until you make it to the well lit room that it's literally the numbers on the light bulbs going around the room. Yeah. She was keeping track of the light bulb. She was going to need to replace to keep it completely lit. Yeah. It's just it's just a little stuff like that was really cool. And there are other I can't detail all the characters in the game, but a lot of things you kind of write off as
00:46:35
Speaker
And they do have some good tropes and some good subversion of tropes, I think in the storyline as well. Like at a point you wake up and you're in a mental facility, the one that your wife had mentioned. And he's like, hey, you're just not coping with your wife's death and you've had many episodes and you've been my patient for like a really long time.
00:47:02
Speaker
And then you as the gamer are going like bullshit. Yeah. Alan's also like bullshit. Yeah. He's like, I'll go along with it until I have an out. Yeah. Which is again, putting you in the same mind space as the gamer.
00:47:22
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of good things with it because enough spooky or weird shit has been introduced where you consider the possibility like, oh, is this actually a story reveal where it's saying, hey, you've just been crazy for a bit. Yeah. And I like that.
00:47:38
Speaker
You mentioned the randomly placed or the conveniently placed consumables, ammo, batteries. The batteries are also. Consumables? Yeah. Video game term consumables. He doesn't eat the batteries nor the ammo. But they're specifically energizer batteries, too. Definitely a partnership. But as you're going through the game the first time, you can be like,
00:48:07
Speaker
dumb, right? Like this is just arbitrary game power ups placed in unrealistic situations. Why would there be a light post here? Why would there be emergency supply boxes here? And as you go through the game, you get to the point where you realize Alan wrote himself into this manuscript and he's making it possible for himself to survive. Okay. Yeah. That's a counter through to what I just said.
00:48:38
Speaker
What do you mean? So do you think that Cynthia Weaver placed all of those things there, or do you think that was done of the actions of Thomas Wake? There was, oh, Thomas Zane, right? Sorry, Thomas Zane, Alan Wake, Cynthia Weaver. Right. So there's two parts.
00:49:00
Speaker
And some of this is like recursive and weird. But Cynthia Weaver uses light sensitive ink to show where the caches of supplies are throughout the game. And specifically, she says that light sensitive ink is only visible to people who have been touched by the dark presence.
00:49:22
Speaker
Also, that's the reason she retained her memories of Zane when he wrote himself out of existence, because people touched by the Dark Presence are irrevocably changed and sensitive to it. But at this point, when Alan Wakey is going through the game, he's playing out his own manuscript. So it's not super clear whether
00:49:53
Speaker
Thomas Zane ever really gave. He probably gave her the box. That's a future revision proof. But then the rest of it, it's not clear how much Alan did because he's literally the narrator. He's writing the story. There's two God figures basically that can like control reality. And so it's not super clear where one stops and the other starts.
00:50:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting, but it's fun to kind of look back in the theory graph because it is a little bit open-ended.
00:50:30
Speaker
It's actually even more ambiguous because the reason that this is the end of the game spoiler, I guess, we've already got there, so welcome. But Alan Wake, after he dove in the water, was basically broken by the Dark Presence, said like, you've gotten your wife killed, she's drowned.
00:50:56
Speaker
There's like, how could you do this? But you could save her. You could write her back, start writing. And it just acted as his editor and started becoming more powerful, saying like, hey, write about me, basically, right? Make me more powerful. Make me do terrible things. He's kind of under this dark influence. Yeah.
00:51:16
Speaker
And they didn't really have any memories of that until later. Yeah, he gets real drunk and restores all his memories, which is usually the opposite from what I hear. Moonshine is apparently real real good in this universe for memory restoration. Well, actually, moonshine is made partially with water from Cauldron Lake. True, actually. Yeah. Also, it's all connected. It's all connected.
00:51:44
Speaker
The whole farm thing is probably one of the better parts of the game for me. It's hilarious. That whole segment is amazing. Yeah. Not to go again into too much detail. Well, we might as well go into as much detail as you want. So there's some old guys at the diner and they're also at the mental facility.
Standout Moments and Comic Relief
00:52:04
Speaker
But essentially they were old rockers called the old gods of Asgard. Great. No Norse mythology. We did a God of War episode. Go check that.
00:52:16
Speaker
Again, everybody thinks you're like kind of just crazy and bullshit, but they direct you to go to the farm for some plot reasons.
00:52:25
Speaker
But when you're there with Barry, you get attacked by a giant heap, a whole hoard, a whole slew of shadow figures taken. But Barry is essentially working the stage lights and effects, just like hitting random buttons for bonus stuff. So you are defending the stage grounds and it felt like some classic Left 4 Dead.
00:52:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's exactly what I was getting to. It was just really fun. There's the turning point for Barry.
00:53:04
Speaker
He's being attacked by a Taken, and Alan's like, use the flare. So he uses the flare. You hear the sound of a Taken dying. And then Barry has this personality transition, and Alan even calls him out on it. He's like, Barry's gone Rambo. But Barry spends the rest of the game saving and preserving a cardboard cutout of Alan Wake that he has saved, because he's this famous author, right?
00:53:31
Speaker
And he's just like, don't worry, I've got the cut out. And Alan's like, what are you talking about? It's so good. Barry's the best character.
00:53:38
Speaker
There's a point where it's like you, Barry, and the Sheriff running around in a pretty much empty town, because I feel like everyone's been turned to shadow figures at this point. Yeah. Or seemingly endless shadow figures. There has to be no towns people at this point. And you run into Barry again, and he has a flare gun, a flashlight, a headlamp, and Christmas lights wrapped around his body. A bandolier of Christmas lights. Yes, a bandolier of Christmas lights. Yeah. The guy's a legend. Such a good guy.
00:54:08
Speaker
The characters in this game are believable enough. Nobody is, like Barry's definitely one of the more hammy people entirely, but he's like a normal guy in a situation, right?
00:54:24
Speaker
I want to mention another character who I think is really cool here. We haven't talked about. There's an FBI agent. Long story short, he's trying to catch Alan Wake or kill him. Not really clear. He's drunk pretty much all the time and endangers everyone around him. But he really wants to catch Alan Wake. And he always calls him a different name of a different thriller author. Yeah. Calls you Stephen King. He calls the other stuff.
00:54:50
Speaker
Um, but he was just like, what is this guy's deal? And, uh, his curse basically is that in the manuscript, he knows something is wrong and that his actions aren't natural. And he's one of the few people, one of the few NPCs, quote unquote, that is aware that they are being written. So when he actually gets ahold of pages, it like.
00:55:18
Speaker
makes him crazy. It makes him want to get drunk all the time. It makes him want to kill Alan Wake because he's like, you're going to kill me because this is becoming reality. And that's an awesome character idea. I just really love that. Yeah, he just kind of stumbles on to something he didn't need to know about. Yeah.
00:55:41
Speaker
He's kind of the glimpse, the old gods sort of person in the story a little bit where he's like seen beyond the fourth wall. And because of that, he can't really be useful. There's, I don't know, there's some great characters. I was going to say is like a final thought on the Alan Zane relationship to make sure that there's no clarity provided whatsoever.
00:56:05
Speaker
When Alan was trapped down doing the initial writing, the way he got freed was his subconscious and slight resistance to the Dark Presence started writing in a way for him to escape, and his way was to have Zane free him.
00:56:27
Speaker
And that's how he escaped the first time was Zane in his diving suit. It's like an old timey diving suit, like flooded with light, comes down, bathes Alan awaken light, which allows him to come to his senses. And then Alan escapes while Zane holds off the dark presence and justifies the like everything else that happens. It's, it's really cool. He literally.
00:56:57
Speaker
Going back to Mega Man is our analogy, right? It's like if Mega Man got toward the end of the game and then he wrote in Zero's role. It's like, oh, this is going to be because Zero's a protagonist, right? Or is he an antagonist? He's a protagonist throughout all the games. Yeah.
00:57:14
Speaker
So he writes in Zeros role when Zeros is literally stronger than him. He's like, okay, help me out here and here because I'm just an author. As it turns out, Mega Man is just an author. Freaking good game though. The takeaway from the story, everything else is great, but the characters and the story is what really wanted me to get that in the list.
00:57:36
Speaker
Yeah, it was something that I slept on because I never really heard about it. I think you asked if I had played it once or twice over the years. I was like, nah, that was kind of the end of the discussion. But honestly, it's a good play. Yeah, it's not crazy. Oh, my God, you have to play it. Yeah. If you have it and send your library, check it out. It's got a look. It's entertaining.
00:58:04
Speaker
There's a lot of additional content I've literally never touched other than to make sure that it didn't really progress the main story beyond the ending. And it doesn't really, just some side stuff. There's also collectible coffee thermoses, which I don't know how many I collected. I'm not a fan of that in games as it turns out. I think it was just for shirts and giggles. Maybe I got something I forgot all 100, but.
00:58:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's an achievement or something. But I would literally stop what I was doing if I saw one in the distance or like a possible side path. I'm like, god damn it. And I would just go walk over to it. Yeah, one of them's a little obnoxious because there's one next to the gas station. But it's down the opposite road in the tunnel. It's like, oh, if you go down there, you're going to be attacked by a lot of enemies. You're like, I don't really want to be attacked by a lot of enemies. Also, Alan Wake cannot. He's an author, I guess, and he doesn't have the best physique.
00:58:57
Speaker
But your sprint option gives you like six seconds of sprint before he's just out heavy breathing. There's a little GIF on the Steam fan page. Yeah. Now post shit there for like memes. But it was of the one teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off where he's like running through the halls. Then as he comes into a classroom window, he starts like walking casually again and then starts going full sprint.
00:59:27
Speaker
It's pretty funny. Yeah, no, it's all game though. We've gone through probably 15% of the notes taken, but I think we hit the most important stuff, so it's fun. It's weird to talk about games like this, because it's like,
00:59:51
Speaker
Games where a lot of the play pay off is discovering the story twists and things like that. Like, how do you tell people to play that game? You're like, play this game. It has a good twist. The gameplay and Alan Wake is good, but like not necessarily better than good. Right. It's not like play it because you love some things with that flashlight mechanics, but it's not. It didn't feel bad when the mechanics came up again.
01:00:22
Speaker
I don't know, it fit the game. I think is the best way to put it. It's the adhesive piece between the story and the characters.
01:00:35
Speaker
Without the gun play, the game would be much shorter. But yeah, I mean, sometimes we just like to talk about games that have cool resolutions and conspiracy theories and things like that. And you'll just have to forgive us that, you know, it's or not. I don't want your forgiveness. I don't want. I just want your coupons for Krispy Kreme. Now be gone.
01:01:01
Speaker
I do want the coupons and the pity forgiveness. Yeah, you can pass on that one too as always you guys could send your forgiveness in to soapstone podcast at gmail.com or Join the group therapy session. That is our Facebook page at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast and as always We'll see you in the next one The game also has demon birds
01:01:50
Speaker
Scratch in air, rake your claws, and ash your crooked teeth You take in slaves like ocean waves, now feel the ocean sea Father Thor, bless this world between the dark and light In the sun, sweat their arms, bring to solutions now Memory and thought
01:02:55
Speaker
right up on the top.