If Alan Wake 2 Had Better Gameplay It Would Be A Worse Game

Alan Wake is a shithead. Sometimes selfish, sometimes snide and oftentimes overbearing, all exacerbated by the fact his trashy detective novels made him a fortune. He’s an angry drunk, and he drinks a lot. He fights paparazzi. You know he’s done a lot of cocaine – and not just a fun toot here or there. As with his idol Stephen King, we’re talking too, too, too much cocaine.

What’s more, despite all the success his writing is a bit crap. His sentences veer between flat and floral, he tells rather than shows and, while his characters are full of emotions, those emotions are never subtle. Every gauge runs hot.

But Alan isn’t all bad, at least when his own emotions are under control. He is reflexively brave, willing to risk himself to save people or undo his own mistakes. Alan uses his own desperation as a sustainable source of fuel allowing him to never completely submit to the overbearing, abstract darkness that serves as his enemy but which may also largely just be him. Is he a good man? He runs towards trouble, he puts others’ safety ahead of his own, he fights paparazzi. He’s not all bad.

Alan is also earnest which, in every sense, is what gives his stories their power. As a man and a writer, he is full of big feelings and obsessed with the shadier corners of himself and of everyone else. What his words lack in elegance they make up for in sincerity, and a devotion to narrative coherence – a devotion shared by Wake’s own creator, Remedy Entertainment’s Sam Lake.

Fighting Talk

Alan Wake 2 is a critical smash. The broad consensus was that the wild story, confident pacing and series of unforgettable moments made for an amazing experience. The game looked great, sounded great, and featured David Harewood smouldering behind a talkshow desk. Beautiful.

What about the combat, though? The reception to that was much less enthusiastic.

Alan, like dual protagonist Saga Anderson, is slow and cumbersome. His aiming is sketchy. Walking, turning, jogging, moving as Alan feels kinda bad. That’s a good thing.

Alan is a brilliant character, richly drawn, and Alan Wake 2 commits to its titular protagonist utterly. This is reflected in the gameplay. From everything we know about Alan, we can infer his cardio is terrible and his core flexibility non-existent. Windmilling punches at photographers doesn’t mean anything; this guy can’t fight for shit.

How do you think it actually feels to be THIS guy?

Of course, he turns like a truck. Of course, he can’t snipe ethereal monsters like a dark-place Doc Holliday. Of course, he wheezes after jogging twenty yards.

What about that other protagonist? Saga is unlike Alan. She can control her own emotions, but she takes that much too far. Suppressed, detached, hidden: Saga has her own demons.

Moving as Saga feels different than moving as Alan. How much of that is down to tangible differences in the ones-and-zeroes programming of their characters and how much is down to the contrasts between the terrain they cover, the weapons they use, and the audiovisual aesthetics involved is a question for Remedy.

However, while moving as Saga feels different, it still doesn’t exactly flow.

Saga is in much better shape than Alan but nevertheless is a middle-aged woman running through a forest killing zombies with a crossbow. It doesn’t feel smooth or easy, because it wouldn’t be. Saga isn’t a superhero (not physically, at least).

Quality Or Suitability?

The combat in Remedy’s previous game, Control, is much different than moving and shooting in Alan Wake 2. Control’s protagonist, Jesse Faden, becomes a cosmic badass with magical powers and a gun that’s a non-toxic cousin to the Lament Configuration. Jesse kicks ass and you, dear player, kick ass as Jesse. It feels wonderful.

Strip away all the flavour and character and story from the two games and, objectively speaking, the combat in Control is much more fun than the combat in Alan Wake 2. If you played them in textureless cube-mapped levels, divorced as far as possible from their graphics and sound, you would enjoy moving and shooting the black-and-white blobs using Control’s combat more than waiting in frustration as the same blobs periodically bend over and take a breath under the mechanics of Alan Wake 2.

But that’s not what you play.

All games are a single experience created from myriad parts working together. All games are stew. Game design is creating a recipe, cooking that recipe, and serving up a final dish.

Is Alan Wake 2’s combat good? It’s more than that. It’s correct. And, because it’s correct, it’s good. Alan Wake 2 relies on Remedy’s full commitment to the game as a whole experience. The result is delicious.

If you changed the recipe and swapped in Control’s combat, you’d make the game worse. A fusion of two great dishes resulting in a plate of food that is lesser than both its inspirations.

This is not to say that correctness is necessarily a virtue.

Say One Thing, Do Another

The idea of “ludonarrative dissonance” emerged in response to games’ willingness to have narratives say one thing while gameplay implies another. It is an unpoetic term made worse by over-use – bad writing, perhaps – but it hit a conceptual bullseye. Often, games’ stories and mechanics live irreconcilable lives.

BioShock was the first game to go under the LD microscope. That criticism centred on how narratively the game is an examination of objectivist philosophy whereas mechanically it tries to present itself as such but, ultimately, this presentation is a fugazi.

The games most associated with LD are perhaps the Uncharted series, about which the criticism was much less highbrow. Protagonist Nathan Drake is a loveable rogue, an adventurer with a warm if restless heart, a classic leading-man archetype. However, the player, as Nathan Drake, is a historic mass murderer. Not so much dissonance as nonsense.

Grand Theft Auto IV veers into LD by virtue of its efforts to tell a more grounded story than its brother and sister titles in gaming’s biggest series. Niko Bellic wants to get out of this life of crime, you say? Well, let me tell you what went down on his last drive across fake NYC…

He just wants a normal life, everyone!

Everyone Made Some Choices

Ludonarrative dissonance isn’t a deal breaker. Bioshock, the Uncharteds, GTA IV – these aren’t just good but genuinely great games. Art doesn’t have to be consistent. Fun certainly doesn’t have to be.

Nor is ludonarrative consistency always met with acclaim.

Naughty Dog followed up its Uncharted series with The Last of Us, parts one and two. The gameplay across all those games has a lot in common however the younger series has a much greater sense of ludonarrative consistency. That consistency is achieved by bending the series’ narrative towards violence. The games are bleak and brutal. The people you kill are absolutely awful, are trying to kill you, or both (and could say exactly the same thing about you). Both games weave that consistency back into their narrative themes. This is true of Part 2, in particular – where the quality of the narrative is topsy-turvy at best.

Adventure game Pentiment was criticised several times for not including a fast travel system. If the player wants to get from the west end of the fictional setting of Tassing to Kiersau Abbey, overlooking the village from the north and east, the player is forced to move protagonist Andreas Maler, on foot, every single time. (As it happens, this is a criticism I disagree with profoundly. In the 16th Century, if you wanted to go anywhere, you were probably on two feet. Even a small village becomes big when walking is the only option. Pentiment creates this feeling through its mechanics – and, if fast travel were allowed, a huge piece of the game would evaporate, much like…)

Omitting fast travel is one choice, over-reliance on it is another. Starfield committed so fully to the physical realities of extraterrestrial travel that it essentially removed spaceflight as a game mechanic. (Terrible fucking decision, guys!)

Ludonarrative consistency is itself a specific example of a more general idea: the unity of any game’s design.

Scorn would perhaps have been an excellent, gross, truly moist walking simulator that allowed anyone with a penchant for Cronenberg or HR Giger to, with grimy satisfaction, pick at the scabs of their own fandom. Instead, the game bolted on some combat mechanics, and destroyed itself.

That’s not a clash between the narrative and the gameplay, but between the game’s verbs and its ultimate vision. In spirit, Scorn is a walk around a sloppy, alien, organic nightmare. When walking around and solving the occasional simple puzzle was all you were doing, it worked well. Dull combat broke its spell.

Departure, Initiation and Return

So consistency isn’t necessarily good and dissonance ain’t all bad. Why, then, does the combat in Alan Wake 2 need to feel the way it does?

Because some games rely on immersion in the events depicted, in the place and the time. Alan Wake 2 is an extreme example of that. The designers surely know this. That’s why, when it comes to immersion, Alan Wake 2 fully commits.

Mirroring the events of the story it depicts, its creators obeyed the rules of its own narrative at a granular level – including its shitty, middle-aged, coke-withdrawal moving and shooting. In doing so, the game achieves a unity that elevates its own brilliance.

Does it look like she’s having fun?

You feel shoddy, lumbering and hungover. The encounters can leave you tense, jaw clenched, teeth grinding. You are Alan Wake.

In the forests, chased by semi-corporeal monsters, you hold your breath when, as Saga, you are aiming that crossbow and, pockets empty and health low, you know this one needs to be a headshot. You hit the mark. You exhale. Fighting shadow forest monsters is damn hard. Video game is awesome.

It all feeds the experience. Imagine how this game would feel if Alan moved like Leon Kennedy, let alone Jesse Faden. A chunk of its experiential magic would be gone.

Not every game aims for unity, and not every game should. Games don’t have to make sense, but sometimes it's better when they do.

Improving Alan Wake 2’s combat would make it a worse game.