Operation Backlog Completion 2025
Oct 302024
 

It’s finally time to talk about a game I’d been anticipating for quite a while: Alan Wake II.

I’ve waited 13 years for Alan Wake II, so I intended to play it right away. But I didn’t have a PS5 at the time and then other games got in the way (I was trying to catch up on the Yakuza series), so after playing a few hours I ended up putting it on hold until this October.

But now I finally got back into it and played the sequel I waited so long for.

Unlike its predecessor, which was more of a thriller, Alan Wake II is a survival horror game. Ironically, this makes it calmer in some respects – there are longer stretches of gameplay where you’ll go without encountering many enemies. But when you do encounter enemies, they’re a greater threat and your resources are limited, which really increases the tension.

There’s an unfortunate number of jumpscares for no reason, which feels cheap, but fortunately the other horror elements are handled well enough to make up for it. I jumped much more from realizing an enemy was right beside me than from the thousandth time an antagonist’s face flashed on the screen.

If you’ve never played the first Alan Wake, it is impossible to discuss this without spoilers for the first game, so you might want to stop reading here. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, so I definitely recommend it.

Now that we’re past that, Alan Wake II is set 13 years after the first game. Alan has been trapped in the Dark Place for all that time and is still trying to write his way out. The game is split between two protagonists, one being Alan and the other being a new character, an FBI agent named Saga whose case takes her to the Bright Falls area and begins intersecting with Alan’s manuscript.

Saga’s gameplay is fairly straightforward. Like in the first game, you fight darkness-possessed Taken, so you need to weaken them with your flashlight before attacking. There’s a much stronger emphasis on exploration than in the first game, with lots of collectibles, upgrades, and resources to find, as well as occasional backtracking to unlock new areas now that it’s survival horror.

Alan’s gameplay has all those core elements as well (with even more survival horror style exploration), but also takes into account the fact that he’s in the Dark Place attempting to write his way out.

When you’re playing as Alan, you frequently visit locations in which part of his manuscript is set. As you learn key details, you can then visit his plot board to change which scene is currently being reflected in that location. That changes the scene, letting you access new areas or interact with different things. Light and dark also play a key role as well, with Alan having a lamp that lets you take light from one source and bring it to another, which shifts the environment.

That is great and an excellent way of incorporating the Dark Place’s rules into gameplay. I love it.

Meanwhile, Saga has a case board where she pins up clues to draw conclusions. This is… kind of fun from a collecting perspective (I just like completing little sections of the board), but feels a bit pointless. Fortunately, it’s not always required; sometimes I’d solve a puzzle first and then visit the case board to see all the clues automatically fill in. Sometimes it is required, though, and that just feels a little tedious. She also can “profile” characters to pick up new clues, which comes across as very strange – intentionally so, but I wish they had hinted at that a little better.

Click for Alan Wake 2 spoilers
I was put off by it at first, because it didn’t feel like “profiling” or “intuition” at all, because Saga was using it to get information she couldn’t possibly figure out. That made it feel really weird and cheap to me.

Later on it turns out that no, she literally has clairvoyance and is getting that information from people’s thoughts, so I liked it a lot more after that once I knew it was intentional.

One thing I had worried about leading up to Alan Wake II was that its survival horror approach and seemingly darker tone would eliminate humor. The first game had a lot of really funny moments, and I didn’t want to lose that. Fortunately, the sequel still has a lot of funny stuff, as well as some truly epic moments that match the greatest moments of the first game.

Now, the DLC is actually integrated into the main game, so since I waited as long as I did, I got to play it as I went. The first DLC is a series of three alternate universe / what-if scenarios, and it really made for a nice change of pace to take a break from the regular game for a wacky little episode. The second DLC is a longer side story that ties more closely to Control (even including a Control 2 teaser). It also takes a stance against AI-generated writing, so I appreciated that.

For the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed playing Alan Wake II and would say it was a fantastic experience, but there are three things that frustrated me.

First, I encountered a handful of bugs that required me to reload the game. One time I interacted with a key item before I was supposed to, and the result was that I couldn’t collect it when I needed it. It was just floating in the air until I reloaded my save. Another time, I lost the ability to do anything except melee attacks and pausing the game. Another bug sent me sinking through the whole game world. It wasn’t often, but since each stopped me from progressing until I reloaded, it was annoying to encounter, especially in a game like this.

My other two criticisms are more subjective. For my second, I’ve come to realize lately that I don’t like when shared universes cross over too much. I’ve noticed this with Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere books, too. Little references and nods are fun, specific crossover stories are interesting, but when one starts directly interacting with the other, it bugs me. That’s how I feel about the connection between Alan Wake and Control. I didn’t mind the little connections or the second DLC, but the FBC had just enough of a role in the story for me to start wishing they didn’t.

And finally, I waited 13 years to finally get answers to my questions, and I ended the game with more questions than when I started.

Click for major Alan Wake 2 spoilers
For one thing, the ending seems to leave us where we started to some degree, but I also feel like it left things even more ambiguous.

I especially have questions about two individuals, or possibly four (or possibly three), and you might already guess who I mean.

First, Scratch. All right, so Scratch in this game is Alan possessed by the Dark Presence. However, that can’t be the explanation behind Mr. Scratch seen at the end of the first game. American Nightmare’s Mr. Scratch also has a completely different personality. I don’t buy that it’s a retcon, since they called back to the first game’s scene multiple times with the “your friends will meet him when you’re gone” line, and American Nightmare has been confirmed to be canon.

So AW2 Scratch and Mr. Scratch might be two different entities.

Then there’s Thomas Zane. In this game, Zane is a filmmaker who looks and acts completely different and tells us that the first game’s Zane was just a character of his from his movie “Tom the Poet.” But I don’t quite believe that, since Tor and Odin knew about him as a poet and they told Saga that their family is resistant to changes in the story. Jesse from Control also knows Thomas Zane as a poet.

So I think Thomas Zane the poet is the real one, and Thomas Zane the filmmaker is a separate character pretending to be the real one.

I’ve seen a theory that Thomas Zane the filmmaker is American Nightmare’s Mr. Scratch, which is… interesting. That actually would explain a lot.

It’s fun to theorize, but being left with this many questions after such a long wait for answers just has me a bit frustrated.

Despite these few complaints, I really did enjoy Alan Wake II, and it was a perfect game for October. I hope they intend to make an Alan Wake III, and I hope we don’t need to wait another 13 years to get it.

Oct 282024
 

Let’s talk about Happy Game, a short game that warns you right on its Steam page that it is not a happy game.

In terms of tone, it’s psychological horror, but as far as gameplay goes, it’s a puzzle game before anything else.

You play as a little boy having a nightmare, and I have to praise it for really capturing a surreal tone. The imagery is often disturbing, sometimes bright and colorful at the same time, and always bizarre.

The puzzles, meanwhile, are the type that seem to be complete dream logic when you first look at them, until you figure out the rules of each situation and see how to proceed. It’s simple mechanically – the main things you do are walk and click – but tricky in terms of figuring out solutions.

Now since it’s a horror game set within the context of nightmares, I’m sure there is a ton of symbolism here. It’s clear that it’s exploring childhood fears and trauma to some degree.

At the same time, everything is so surreal that it lends it ambiguity. There was a point while playing where I wondered if it simply was just a nightmare after all, and other points where I started to theorize about certain things. I feel like it’s the sort of game that lends itself to multiple interpretations.

It’s also disturbing enough in tone to be a great fit for this month. The final section in particular felt like a perfect game for Halloween.

So if you’re looking for a strange, surreal puzzle game that takes only a couple of hours to beat and is set within the context of a nightmare, Happy Game is certainly one to consider.

Oct 252024
 

Last year, I made some solid progress in Higurashi and reached Chapter 5 in October.

Unfortunately, I unintentionally took another year-long break, so it’s taken me this long to get to the next chapter.

But now I have, so it’s time to talk about Higurashi When They Cry Chapter 6: Tsumihoroboshi.

The past two chapters have had different viewpoint characters, and this one splits most of the story between Keiichi and Rena. We learn a lot more about Rena’s past and have some truly emotional, heartfelt moments, and then…

Then things really get interesting.

While reading this chapter, there was a point where I believed Higurashi had finally given me all the answers and explained everything, revealed what was really going on. But then I began to get suspicious. It was a little too neat and tidy.

What followed was the most intense build-up of paranoia since the first chapter. I went back and forth so many times on what I believed, and that made it all the more interesting to read. It’s hard to say anything much about this chapter without spoilers, but suffice it to say that I still have many, many questions.

Click for major Higurashi Chapter 6 spoilers
The parasite theory made so much sense at first, but it seems like it was just Rena’s paranoid delusion after all… but that still leaves questions. Tomitake’s death is similar to Rena’s behavior during her maggot delusions. The disaster does feel like a cover-up.

While I still have a lot of confusion there, I’m much more confident in my theory that Rika is traveling between timelines (or resetting the timeline) to try to find a branch that doesn’t lead to disaster. It was such a good moment when Keiichi remembered his actions in the first chapter, not to mention Rika realizing that he remembered.

(Rika talking to Rena at the car was incredibly creepy, though.)

Meanwhile, both Ooishi and and Takano continue to be suspicious. Both of them have nudged things toward disaster in multiple episodes. This episode paints Takano as simply an occult nut or a conspiracy theorist, but other episodes made her actions seem more sinister. Ooishi’s point-of-view chapters here feel like they should exonerate him, but at the same time, him telling Rena about Takano’s time of death really pushed her over the edge. Was that really just an innocent mistake even though he already knew how precarious her mental state was?

It might have left me with a lot of questions, but this is one of my favorite parts of Higurashi so far. The atmosphere and sense of paranoia was incredible, and it was a great choice for this time of year.

Of course, if you haven’t played Higurashi yet, you’ll want to start from the beginning. But if you’ve played up through Chapter 5 like I had, you won’t regret moving on to Higurashi When They Cry Chapter 6: Tsumihoroboshi. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.