“You look like you’ve been cooped up in the Writer’s Room for too many years.” It would have been easy for Alan Wake 2 to simply rehash the success of its 2010 predecessor, updating the title’s graphics and polishing the simplistic third person shooting just enough to work as a passable mid-budget title in 2023, but Remedy decided to take the road less traveled by crafting a completely new experience unlike anything else in the market. And much like the title’s bewildered protagonists, I found myself looping back to the beginning of this meta-nightmare long after I’d already finished the game – and that’s why I’d like to take this opportunity to dive into the meta-narrative of Alan Wake 2 and why I think it pushes the survival horror genre to new and exciting heights. I was constantly reminded of this iconic story as I played through Remedy Entertainment’s long-awaited Alan Wake 2, a game that chronicles the struggles of a similarly doomed character who finds himself forced to write forever in order to keep the never-ending darkness at bay (and also features music being used as a weapon against eldritch forces). Chambers’ The King in Yellow collection), but I think the tale of Erich Zann still resonates today because most readers can relate to the Sisyphean ordeal of being forced to repeatedly perform a task in order to keep their world from falling apart. It’s not the only Lovecraft story about a troubled artist (with yarns like Pickman’s Model likely borrowing from the poets and painters of Robert W. Following a college student who befriends a paranoid musician condemned to play strange melodies every night in order to ward off otherworldly horrors, The Music of Erich Zann remains my personal favorite example of a story using art to comment on the human condition. People tend to conflate Lovecraftian horror with tentacled sea-monsters and secretive fish cults, but one of the absolute best of the author’s weird tales features almost none of the aesthetic elements traditionally associated with his writing.
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