If you have kids, you're already having to manage a bunch of stuff related to Keighley Day at school - they're bringing home the little Keighleys that they made, setting up the little shrines, all that shit. If you don't have kids, and you have a K-force Indicator, you know that the threshold is drawing close - the "curtain" is thinning. Shape the tines of the instrument and check a graveyard - that needle is gonna dance in its enclosure. Geoff Keighley is planning something. Something big.
I didn't get around to telling you about Alan Wake 2 because… well, I feel like everybody already told you about Alan Wake 2. They might still be! I was sad when I finished it, and I'm still sad. I'm still really, really sad.
I don't think it's possible to talk about Alan Wake 2 without talking about what Remedy is attempting to do. It's not really a spoiler to say that Control and Alan Wake are connected, perhaps so connected that they are the same thing. There's an expansion for Control called AWE that makes the whole thing explicit: because they are a Federal Bureaucracy, they have their own TLA (three-letter acronym) for the FBC (Federal Bureau of Control) and the strange reality schisms they investigate, AWEs (Altered World Events). One of these involves the events of Alan Wake, which of course they have their own framework for understanding that's a million miles away from the part shoe leather, part weird tales detective work of Saga Anderson or the intuitive, artistic process that Alan Wake himself leverages as a sense-making tool. In the braided world they've manufactured, Remedy is telling us that every one of these people is right.
Not that they're all right all the time in every instance or that elevating the interests of humanity writ-large over incomprehensible terrors will be an easy task. Just that scraping away enough muck from reality in order to see it clearly is a multidisciplinary task. It's an amazing theme, a human theme, and it's perfectly suited to the task Remedy has set out for themselves.
I genuinely don't know if anyone has tried to do what they're doing with their games. My instinct is to say no, but there might be something in a smaller scale - I think Inscryption's Daniel Mullins plows some of the same ground. But it's more than just placing them in the same world, adjacent to each other. It's that they're… enmeshed, conceptually, at the ground floor, at the highest peak, cosmically entangled. You can look at one game from the perspective of another game and it's not the same game anymore. The only problem we have now is the waiting between installments; I've never bought a Season Pass so fast in my life.
(CW)TB out.
