Alan Wake 2: The Monomyth Deconstructed

I found Alan Wake 2 to be not only by far my favorite game of 2023, it stands as one of the greatest games of all time in my opinion. It is the type of game that reminds me why I play them- it makes me feel deep and significant emotions like only the best art does, and in a way only games can do. It’s a game over a decade in the making, the studio Remedy’s crowning achievement, and in my opinion, it should be the new bar for AAA games to surpass. Alan Wake 2 is able to surpass all expectations in the way it breaks convention in the way it treats narrative as a concept, and specifically Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. It masterfully deconstructs this framework to the point that it makes me reconsider its use in every other story. It does all of this with the confidence of a team that knows they’re on to something truly special.

In itself, Alan Wake 2 is a bit of an anomaly. Despite Remedy’s AA status, A $60 USD price tag signals that this is a prestige title, but it avoids the new AAA standard of $70. It’s a single player game with cutting edge graphics, no online function, no loot boxes, no Pay-to-win, and a reasonable $20 DLC season pass with content that doesn’t feel cut from the main game. It’s long for a survival horror title, at an impressive 25 hours if you don’t rush the main story according to Howlongtobeat.com. This is already an extremely consumer-friendly product to say nothing of the artistry.

A synopsis of the story of the franchise: Alan Wake 1 is a decent third person action-adventure game releasing in 2010. Alan is a struggling Stephen King-esque author on a vacation to Bright Falls with his wife Alice in an attempt to get over his writer’s block. On their first night, Alice is dragged into Cauldron Lake by ghostly figures called the Taken. For the rest of the game, Alan battles against the Taken to try to get his wife back from the bottom of the lake. He learns they are weak to light, so he employs a flashlight and search flares as weapons against them. Alice is apparently trapped in “The Dark Place”, according to a manuscript for a novel that Alan finds pages of throughout his journey. The manuscript is apparently written by him, but they contain events that have not happened yet, predicting events in the game’s story, all of which come to pass in time. It is eventually revealed that Alan was possessed and forced to write the manuscript, Departure. Alan’s writings have power, so he is able to rewrite the ending of the story by entering the Dark Place, where ideas become reality. He saves Alice, but in the process he is trapped in the Dark Place, which is how the game ends.

The first Alan Wake  has the makings of a great story, but cheesy dialogue, weak combat, and not enough story keep it from being an unforgettable experience. It did leave a great cliffhanger for the second entry, however. Alan Wake 2 is a very different game from the first. It’s firmly survival horror, with emphasis placed on ammo and resource management, jump scares, and fewer, stronger enemies. It places far more emphasis on story while still following up on themes of the second game. A synopsis of Alan Wake 2 goes as follows: We start out following a new character, Saga Anderson, an FBI agent who arrives in Bright Falls with her partner Alex Casey to investigate a cult who appears to be murdering the residents of Bright Falls. The duo finds one of Alan’s manuscript pages before coming into contact with the Taken for the first time. They realize Alan’s predicament and try to rescue him. They clash with a man who shares Alan’s face, Mr. Scratch, who is apparently one of Alan’s fictional characters. Simultaneously, we play as Alan, trapped in the Dark Place. He wrote a new story about Saga saving him from the Dark Place, but he was once again possessed and it was turned into a horror story. He is occasionally able to communicate with Saga as the two of them try to figure out a way to save Alan. There are a lot of great plot points, but not all of them are worth discussing here and I implore you to experience them yourselves. These are just the broad strokes of the story to give context to some of the specifics I’d like to discuss.

Gameplay is the least interesting part of this puzzle. It’s functional, there are no obvious flaws or missteps, it’s just not reaching for anything out of the ordinary like the narrative is. It certainly sets the mood extremely well. Saga’s combat feels visceral. Ammo is limited enough that every time you miss a shot you can feel your heart sink as you realize your chances of survival just got that much lower. Enemies will stalk you from behind trees, around corners. You can usually sense their presence from their audio cues, but rarely do you see where they are coming from. On the other hand, Alan’s foes hide in plain sight. The Dark Place has these shuffling mobs of shadows, most of which you can pass through harmlessly, but others will reach out and grab you. It makes you wary of every figure you see, and the suspense is often more anxiety-provoking than the actual scare. There’s a lack of depth here that might have made it even more interesting. Options and creativity in combat feel a bit limited compared to something like The Last of Us Part 2, which is made up of similar concepts in combat but gives you far more leeway in how you utilize the tools at your disposal. There’s a lack of opportunities to improvise. Overall, the combat does achieve what it sets out to do. It’s tense, frightening, and gets you into the headspace of the characters.

Remedy as a studio firing on all cylinders when it comes to the game’s style. It is truly their magnum opus, as it brings together all of their best habits and is a celebration of their other games as well. They have always treated games as a medium differently, starting with Max Payne back in 2001, which was probably Doom of 3rd person shooters in terms of influence and innovation. That game had comic book strips in place of cutscenes. This was an early attempt at mixing mediums together for greater effect, something they would continuously revise. Max’s face is based on the game’s director Sam Lake, and these comic strips are made up of edited photos of Lake dressed up like the character he created. However, Payne is voiced by James McCaffery. Another Remedy game, Control, has a segment in which protagonist Jesse navigates a maze by listening to an original heavy metal song, the only section of this style in the game. Alan Wake 2 takes this non-traditional storytelling much further. It has many cutscenes filmed in live action with movie cameras, with real actors on a film set. The game is heavily film inspired thematically. Alan’s chapters take place in rainy New York City, or at least the version conjured in The Dark Place are deeply Noir, in their characters, locations, and visual design. Saga’s feel closer to Twin Peaks, owing to the Northwestern forests and small towns. The game can go from extremely self referential and silly, such as Alan’s fourth chapter, “We Sing”, which is a full blown theater musical, and Saga’s journey through an amusement park called Coffee World, to absolutely horrifying imagery. Ritual sacrifices, visceral body horror, and live-action faces popping up on screen to scare you. However, none of this feels tonally inconsistent because of how earnest and weird the game is. And it only gets weirder, in large part thanks to Sam Lake.

Alex Casey, Saga’s partner, is once again modeled off of Sam Lake and voiced by James McCaffery, although these two are completely different characters despite sharing a face. However, one of Alan’s fictional characters, a detective also named Alex Casey, is also featured prominently in The Dark Place. They have completely different personalities and have no knowledge of the other’s existence. Sam Lake wrote two characters with the same name in the same game who look identical to him, one of whom is in himself a fictional character within Sam’s fictional story. That’s not to mention that Sam Lake himself, the director of Alan Wake 2, is a character in the game, kidnapped and forced to write the end of the game’s story. The player is asked to shoot Lake, but he escapes before you can do so. This is absolutely unhinged writing, but it’s absolutely intentional. Alan Wake 2 is about the nature of fiction. A fictional story about how fictional stories can come true. During a pivotal scene in the game, Alan, who previously believed he was trapped in a time loop, comes to the realization, “It’s not a loop, it's a spiral”. He has been sinking deeper and deeper into his own fiction writing.

Storytelling as a function of this story is hugely important. Alan’s manuscript in the first game is called Departure, the first of three acts in The Hero’s Journey. James Campbell popularized the concept of the Hero’s Journey, also known as the Monomyth, explaining that it serves as a blueprint for a satisfying story. This concept was explicitly referenced in the first game, but here it is even more relevant. Alan’s chapters are titled “Initiation”, the second Act of the Monomyth. After experiencing Departure in the first game, Alan has crossed Campbell’s threshold into the magical world that he writes about, different from Alan’s old life. Saga’s chapters, titled “Return”, are about rescuing Alan from the Dark Place. Using the Hero’s Journey as a template is not what excites me, in fact that should be expected. But it’s Alan himself, forced to write what will happen next in his story and the game, who is trapping himself within this structure. It is revealed at the end of the story that whenever Alan is about to escape the Dark Place, the story loops again and again and he loses his memory, mirroring the way the Monomyth is repeated across countless stories. 

Alan Wake 2 is a story about fictional characters following the script that is given to them, just like every other story that has ever existed. This time, the futile nature of being doomed by the narrative, trapped by the words on the page, their existence erased when you roll credits is the story. The deconstruction of the Hero’s Journey makes this one of the very few, if any, that is unburdened by its circular nature. The Monomyth is a loop, in that it is repeated endlessly in the public consciousness. Every story inspired by another is part of this collective story, a giant loop made up of individual stories. But as Alan himself says, his story isn’t a loop, it’s a spiral. The difference between the two? A spiral has a beginning and an end. At the end of the game’s true ending, Alan comes to this realization. A lot of discussion has cropped up from Alan’s final lines. “And so I return. With me I bear the torch of knowledge. The light. The miracle illuminated. The master of two worlds. No, the master of many worlds.” What does Alan mean by this? We can’t know for certain, but to me the meaning is clear. Alan is the master of the Monomyth, having overcome it and made it his own. Breaking the cycle. What could be a more fitting conclusion for such a tale?