 A few years ago I made a video reviewing Control. I didn't actually title it as a Control Review, instead I tried to work in the evolution of Remedy Games and how their titles have changed over time. I've always liked Remedy's games. I even liked the very flawed Quantum Break. Now Quantum Break was Remedy Games trying to finally completely fuse the cinematic aspects of their games with a gameplay that's always been good but not great. But by trying to fully integrate live-action film with their gameplay, Remedy actually did the opposite of what they should have been working on. Right from Max Payne on, Remedy has been amongst the most interesting studios when it comes to cinematic themes and techniques in their games. While all of them have been at least solid as video games, they've very rarely been excellent, and the cinematic parts of their games have often felt awkwardly implemented. Quantum Break being the perfect encapsulation of this issue, with a slightly above average third-person shooter and an interesting premise literally bolted on to a television series. Control was, in my opinion, the best game that Remedy had made because its gameplay was still above average and the cinematic and story sections were just expansions of the formula they've been using since Alan Wake. The game uses standard cutscenes and a dialogue system to tell much of its story while having television and film projectors throughout the game for the player to interact with and get more story and lore. But while Control was Remedy's best game yet, it still felt short of being the masterpiece that the studio clearly had in it. While the live-action film parts were universally excellent, they still felt somewhat separate from the game, like an extra rather than an insoluble part of the experience. And while the gameplay was still snappy and tight, it still had all the little annoyances, balance issues, and odd design choices that have made all of Remedy's games feel just slightly off. Control, like the two Max Payne games, was a snappy shooter, but it had weird difficulty spikes, an annoying map, a frustrating checkpoint system, a very strange looting and progression system, and an overall design that often felt like it was purposefully refusing to do all the standard things that games do. Now, there's something to be said for trying to be different, but many of the conventions in video games are there for a reason. If something isn't done, it's often because it's been tried and failed. Every Remedy game has felt like it was learning and relearning all the lessons that developers have learned over the years, and while this has allowed their games to feel consistently fresh and unique, it's also meant that they've often felt needlessly sloppy. I went into Alan Wake 2 expecting basically the same thing. There wasn't any reason to assume that Remedy would finally get it and accept many of the genre conventions of survival horror, which is funny because one of the studio's greatest skills is their amazing grasp of the conventions of film. In fact, there's no better studio in the world than Remedy at making their cinematic sections feel like actual high quality film rather than boring trash that I instantly skip. So today, let's take a look at one of the best games of the year and a true masterpiece that finally combines Remedy's brilliance with cinematics and story with a conventional, carefully crafted, and designed gameplay experience. Alan Wake 2 after the logo. Pretty standard, really. Like when Alan Wake came out, it was branded as a survival horror game, but I don't think Alan Wake actually is a survival horror game at all. Like most Remedy games, it was a weird mix of genres that didn't fully commit to any one style. The game was certainly creepy, and the story was a mix of horror and thriller, but it lacked so many of the core systems in a survival horror game it's functionally a different kind of game. The first Alan Wake has no inventory management, it has no keys to find, it has no healing items, it has no puzzle aspect. If you compared a Resident Evil game to Alan Wake, the only similarities would be that there's a gun and you're fighting monsters. A good survival horror game has to have looping maps that you open up over time. It absolutely must have inventory management as a core mechanic. The combat should be deliberate and relatively slow paced. As with all of their games, Remedy deserved credit for trying something new, but just because something is new doesn't mean it's better. Alan Wake was a beautiful game for its time, Remedy has always been excellent at graphic and art design, but it was also an extremely linear game. The entire design is basically moving through areas with almost no exploration at all. Even the larger open areas were basically empty with very little reason to explore beyond finding the thermoses which are themselves very bare bones collectibles that have no impact on gameplay whatsoever. Alan Wake 2 is perhaps the first time Remedy has chosen to just make a game in a settled genre. Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror game, a standard design survival horror game and it's great. Alan Wake 2 plays and is designed almost exactly like the modern Resident Evil games. The levels are large and loop back themselves, they require items and keys to progress. All of the Alan Wake levels have a sort of puzzle required to open up other parts of the map. Inventory management is exactly like Resident Evil with healing items, different weapons to find throughout the levels, scarce ammo, beefy enemies that require careful head shots. It does all the basic survival horror mechanics and it does them well. And while it also adds some things to the formula, it does not try to reinvent the wheel. Remedy has made a triple A survival horror game and it's one of the best games ever made in the genre because instead of trying to create all new gameplay systems and game feel, they did their innovation in the things that they are great at. Story, Writing, Graphics and Structure. Gameplay design. As I said, Alan Wake 2 isn't a linear adventure game like the first title in the series. Instead, it's a brilliantly designed survival horror game that feels and plays like the third person Resident Evil games. All of Remedy's games have had good stories and most of them have had pretty good game feel, but none of them have so perfectly nailed the genre conventions they're going for. Alan Wake 2's levels are some of the best designed survival horror levels ever made. It's very rare for games to have levels that are linear and easy to navigate while also feel like rewarding places for exploration. Alan Wake 2 only has a few levels, but they're so dense and the atmosphere is so perfect that they feel much, much larger than they are. The game's a perfect example of how good video games cannot be broken down and analyzed by their constituent parts. Alan Wake's levels are fantastic. They're both beautiful and dense, but mostly linear. Exploration is extremely rewarding not because there's some special sauce, but rather because everything is perfectly balanced. Alan Wake 2 has the perfect amount of enemies. It's exactly enough so that exploring the levels fully will fill your inventory completely, but then the game will drain those resources with a few enemy encounters. I don't think I've ever played a survival horror game that's so perfectly balanced combat and exploration. It's so impressive that for a while I thought perhaps enemies were on a timer to make sure that there was a nearly even balance of combat and exploring, but I don't think that's actually true. I think the game was just played over and over and over until the enemy density was gotten perfectly right. The game's atmosphere is perfect, and this is the result of not only well balanced enemies, but also fantastic sound design, art design, and even things like player movement speed being perfectly tuned. All of it combines to make a game that keeps you consistently on edge despite having what feels like much less combat than the first Alan Wake. Because the first game had very little for you to actually find in the levels, there really wasn't much reason to explore. And because there was very little reason to explore, the only way to keep the player interested was combat. If that combat had been as good as something like Dead Space or Dead Space 2, it probably wouldn't have mattered. But the Alan Wake combat system was very repetitive. You kinda very rarely ran out of ammo, you didn't need to make headshots, in many ways the game basically aimed for you aside from the flashlight. Alan Wake 2 has excellent combat. Excellent game feel, shooting, feels and sounds great. Enemies have a good amount of health and excellent animations, and your ammo is limited so you rarely feel totally safe. Even after getting a ton of ammo, just a few encounters will drain it all. While healing items are extremely plentiful, healing itself is nearly impossible during combat, so the game, while not particularly difficult outside a few frustrating spikes, is extremely engaging. The survival horror staples of keys and items to open up areas works perfectly here as well, because there are very useful things to find. Both Saga and Alan have a whole bunch of progression items found throughout the world that increase inventory, add extra weapons, improve weapons and other skills. I'll wrap this up by saying that Alan Wake 2 doesn't do anything particularly new or innovative in its game design, instead it's just a nearly perfectly designed, classic survival horror game. Its graphics and art are fantastic. Its level design is as good as any game ever made in the genre. Its progression is probably the best in the genre, and the place where Remedy did the most tinkering. Its exploration is as good as anything else in survival horror, and its game feel is as good as the Resident Evil remakes, which makes it pretty much perfect. It's very easily the best game that Remedy has ever made from a gameplay design perspective, and even if the story was trash, it would still be a fantastic all-time classic on design and game feel alone. Luckily though, the story is not trash. They finally did it. The first Alan Wake had a very good story and a ton of absurdist details, and a few Max Payne Easter eggs. Control leads even further into those elements and vastly improved the voice acting and production values, while also starting to fully nail down the interconnected Remedy cinematic universe. It was debatable whether these touches and control were fun Easter eggs, or if Remedy was really starting to make all of their games share a universe. Alan Wake 2 fully commits. It keeps all the absurdity, all the details that make you question what's serious and what's a joke, and finally fully crosses over not only of little elements like the Norse mythology stuff that's been there since the first Max Payne, but also entire characters. Alan Wake 2 is a sequel to Alan Wake, but it is also a sequel to Control. The game is taking place at the same time as Control was, and the Federal Bureau of Control is a central feature of both games. This could have been very stupid, but instead it is pure brilliance from start to finish. Voice acting is universally fantastic, which has not been the case in many of the earlier Remedy games. In fact, if you go back and play the original Alan Wake, you'll see there's quite a lot of poor voice acting in that game actually. But here it's by far the best it's ever been in a Remedy game. That scenes and production values are off the charts, with by far the best NPC body and facial animations I have ever seen. The NPC animations are so good, it's shocking. Orders of magnitude better than almost anything else in gaming, and these graphical and production values and those NPC animations, they do make the story better. It is insanely immersive and consistently stunning. Nothing takes you out of the story. Then there's the classic live action elements. This has been something Sam Lake and Remedy have been working to ever since Alan Wake. They took this to an absurd extreme in Quantum Break, and it was a disaster. I actually thought Quantum Break was a pretty decent game, but it shows how hard it is to make good television and a good game at the same time. And it really shows why long cutscenes are so crushing to a video game, man. Despite the strange love for Kojima's walking simulator, Death Stranding the video game is absolutely crushed under the weight of hour after hour of turgid boring cutscenes in service to a terrible story. Fans have to be exceedingly careful in the balance of cutscenes to gameplay, and they have to be extremely careful when they try to mix live action sequences in. After the failure that was Quantum Break, Remedy did not do away with its live action cinema stuff. Instead, it rained it way in and made all of it optional in control. And it was fantastic. In fact, the best story moments in control were the live action stuff that you could simply walk past if you wanted to. To be in control, the live action movies weren't perfectly integrated, and the story was far more avant-garde and hard to follow than a standard genre piece. But now that animations and graphics have gotten so good, it's far less jarring to switch between rendered and live action cutscenes. And Alan Wake being a standard horror thriller genre piece means it's far more accessible as a regular piece of narrative cinema. Here's the thing man, I myself used to write fiction and I read a lot, but I really love pretentious shit. Like I don't like James Joyce, it's just pretentious bullshit. Anyone who tells you they've read Finnegan's Wake and loved it is either full of shit or is fine with wasting their own time. Anyone tells you how much they loved being challenged by, well this, is full of shit. That's apparently a reference to Thunder by the way. There's a bunch of words for thunder in different languages in there, but fuck that shit man. As far as I'm concerned, if a reasonably bright 9th grader can't understand what you're trying to say, your writing is shit. People aren't that complex. In fact, we're mostly idiots. Communication exists to communicate. Ernest Hemingway and Ray Carver are brilliant writers, but even the dumbest morons can read and understand it. The best art, in my opinion, works on multiple levels. This should be clear and concise and easily understandable to an average audience while also dealing with interesting themes and ideas that exist just outside the text. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece of cinematic game storytelling because there's the basic story that anybody can enjoy. It's complicated and twisting and it requires you to follow along a bit, but nothing is inaccessible to your average person. It isn't this. But it's also complex enough to be operating on multiple levels. Sam Lake's use of absurdity is extremely powerful and the live action sections are some of the best shit you'll ever see in a video game man. It's incredibly seamless in a way no previous Remedy games have been able to be and it expertly weaves those live action moments directly into the gameplay. Often, the live action acting will literally be layered on top of the screen as you're playing. One of the most memorable game sequences I've ever played, you run a combat gauntlet while a live action musical about Alan Wake plays on screen around you. And all of this absurdity impossibly blends with genuinely moving and powerful live action cinema. Alice Wake was barely a character in the first game, she's pretty much a MacGuffin, and her voice acting and character model was poor. In this game, Alice Wake is a living breathing woman and the live action sections that feature her are some of the most powerful and disturbing shit you'll ever see. Alan Wake 2 not only has a brilliant thriller horror story that continues on from the first game, it also starts to make serious investigations into the nature of making art. The game centers on the narcissism of being an artist, how you use people around you, how artists tend to make their relationships toxic as a way to fuel their creative process. If you've ever done art of any sort, the story will speak to you deeply on a level beyond the brilliant but simple horror story. It works on multiple levels and is, I have to say, a stunning masterpiece and one of the greatest pieces of narrative work ever to appear in a video game. It's up there with the best ever. Every piece of writing in the game is spectacular. The first game had you find manuscript pages and this one does too. They're twice as long and far more powerfully written here. The game brings back a bunch of characters but massively expands upon them. Thor and Odin were great in the first game. But again, not particularly well acted, not really fleshed out as characters. In this game, they are acted and animated to perfection. Sam Lake appears repeatedly in this game as a character. He's fantastic. His face is used for Alex Casey and he appears in person in multiple live action sections, including a full movie short that you can watch in the theater level. There's only so many ways I can say this really. Alan Wake 2 narratively is as perfect as it gets in video game form. And it combines those two, game and narrative, perhaps better than any game I've ever played. It's up there with The Last of Us and The Last of Us 2, but more ambitious. Actually, quite a bit more ambitious. It's long been obvious that Remini likes to take big risks in their games. Quantum Leap was an absurdly huge risk and in at least partially failed. Alan Lake 1 was a risk because it was a survival horror game that refused to be designed like a survival horror game. Control was a risk because it's chock full of extremely odd design choices and absurd, very weird story elements. Alan Wake 2 is also a risk, but it's far, far more conventional. Its gameplay is conventionally a survival horror game. It doesn't try to do anything weird and instead is just impeccably nearly perfectly designed as a survival horror game. Its storytelling is a simple story that has radiating layers of death to be found if you take the time. And its live action cinematic elements are like nothing else in gaming. Never before has cinema and gameplay been so perfectly melded together. It's a towering achievement, man. It makes me jealous, actually. Wrapping up. One of the interesting things about Alan Wake 2 is that I think it would work even if you didn't play the first game. But having played both Control and Alan Wake 1 makes it so much more interesting. When I first saw Ate, the janitor in the game, I kind of had a bad feeling actually. It seems like it might be stupid to meld both games together. But instead, it makes it fantastically better. I have not read any reviews yet about Alan Wake 2. I never, I try not to do that before I make a video. But it seems to me that this is very clearly one of the best games released in a year that's very likely the best year ever for video games. Remedy games are almost always pretty good and I expected basically the same here. Or I was at least hoping for a small improvement. Instead, Alan Wake 2 is very nearly a perfect video game. Its game feel is perfect. Its level design, world design, art and graphics, story, cinematics. It's all basically perfect. My one complaint was that there were several math puzzles that pissed me off. But that's a small little thing and eventually I just googled those as soon as they came up and luckily Remedy was smart enough to not make them random. So I'll give them a pass on that. Oh, and there's one combat horde section near the end of the game that was frustrating. So I turned the difficulty to easy after two tries. But easy is ridiculously, pointlessly easy. So that's a small strike too. Games need to get much more granular in their difficulty options, man. Still, considering like the DLC and Alan Wake 1 and a bunch of extremely frustrating difficulty spikes in that game, comparatively, Alan Wake 2 is basically perfect on that front. But again, other than a few middling little complaints, Alan Wake 2 is as good a video game as it's ever been made. Buy it and play it if you haven't. If you didn't play the first game or control, you can play this one first, then control, then Alan Wake. They all make sense together, but they all also stand on their own. And Alan Wake 2 is, by a huge margin, the best game Remedy's ever made. It's hard to imagine that their next game can be as good. But if this is the new standard for Remedy, man... Alright, this one's a little late because I got COVID at a punk rock festival in Gainesville a few weeks ago. I made it this far before getting COVID and it was truly miserable. I mean, I thought I got that microchip so that I wouldn't get COVID, man. But seriously, now that I've had COVID and I had the vaccine, I'm apparently immortal going forward. I think that's what I heard. Thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.