Alan Wake 2

When a writer first sat down to work, life was in full swing outside. Manhattan was filled with spring light, pungent smells, and bustling people. Some were in a hurry to enjoy their lives, but didn't even find time to sleep, while others hid in the doorways and sought out fate in the crowds that would try to feast on their hearts.

Now the man was alone. The sun had left the empty streets, and there was nothing in the room but a table and a chalkboard covered with mysterious symbols. Darkness reigned outside, and the skyscraper windows licked the salt waters — the world was sinking. When the typewriter stumbled over a bold idea and froze, a rattle broke into the room. It inevitably grew until it became visible: “Sami Järvi, wake up”.

Before the man got a job in front of a typewriter, he had lived more than one life, and each of them had different names to match the episodes of the colorful novel. Until recently, he was known as M̶a̶x̶ ̶P̶a̶y̶n̶e̶ Alex Casey — a shrewd police detective who wanted to save his own family, plus every decent New Yorker who could be counted on the fingers of an inept butcher.

But, as befits the main character of a film noir, the detective sank. After dozens of dead, a city groaning under bad weather and unbearable fragments of hope. His split life slipped through his fingers in sharp pieces, leaving only bleeding furrows behind him. And no hint of hope or hard-won salvation.

Contrary to gloomy metaphors and the hopelessness in which M̶a̶x̶ ̶P̶a̶y̶n̶e̶ Alex Casey, at that time, he was full of energy and anger that moved the story forward. Although with the creak and the cost of the lives of both those closest to him and the coveted femme fatale, his journey ended with a stop. Bleeding and aching every time she moved, but still lurked illusory comfort.

Leaving the broken detective behind, Sami Järvi put on a new look. This time he pretended to be a famous writer who, along with his blossoming career, was fighting his own demons. Exhausted by outbursts of anger and alcohol addiction, inability to write, and the resulting depression, Alan Wake went to the provincial Bright Falls.

His wife believed that being surrounded by lush nature and minimized irritants would restore his peace and inspiration. New ideas will fill you with a fountain, and selected prose will rush to paper. But Alan Wake wrote horror films, not children's stories, so he became a hostage to a nightmare himself.

A peaceful vacation turned into a bloody struggle between light and dark. And this was not a metaphor — the writer was literally confronting the thick darkness that the sun itself would willingly swallow up. Sami Järvi made his hero go through unprecedented upheavals and imprisoned him for a terrifying 13 years at the bottom of his life l̶a̶k̶e̶ ocean Coldron. It's time to try something new.

Over the years, Sami Järvi, better known as Sam Lake, acquired a heavy handbag with stories told, each of which existed in a separate bubble. Mona Sax had no idea Thomas Zane existed, and the raging shadows didn't care about the Valkyrine and the fights between criminal gangs in New York.

Contrary to vague hints, each of the worlds lived according to its own laws, derived in accordance with a particular genre. This continued until the emergence of the Federal Bureau of Control, a secret government organization that, by chance, Sami Järvi's new alter ego fell into. At that moment, the works by a Finnish coffee fan broke.

The ideas, characters, and narrative features of distant universes have become part of a whole space. They started filling hitherto inaccessible gaps — gently blurring their boundaries and becoming part of something new. That's just that, c̶o̶n̶t̶r̶o̶l̶e̶d̶ chaotic mixing turned out to be a test of the pen — when working on “Alan Wake 2” Sami Järvi went on a pilgrimage to redefine his own work.

After 13 years in limbo with no beginning or end, Alan Wake lost touch with reality: he entered a world that defies the law. In this mysterious space, filled to the brim with suffering, there were absolutely no prohibitions. The spreading darkness started a revolution and heralded the reign of permissiveness.

If Alan Wake's past misadventures were straightforward Stephen King-style horror, this time they turned into a multi-genre cocktail. Now two stories were unfolding in parallel, which were not able to exist without each other. The first was a dark detective story, with occult murders in the vicinity of a strange backwoods.

In turn, horror remained in place, but changed its essence. If earlier he just set the tone for what was happening, in “Alan Wake 2”, the nightmare turned into a full-fledged hero, laconic and puzzling. Nevertheless, his gibberish hides understandable ideas. In this sense, the continuation of Alan Wake's story is more like paintings by David Lynch, who exposes quite ordinary experiences in a frightening and intricate way.

Although it breathes freshness from its multi-genre, it was not an end in itself, but was just an instrument in Sami Järvi's hands. He didn't just layer horror on a detective story and mix horror with deduction, but he became part of a fictional universe himself. In a sense, Alan Wake is no longer the main character of his own story, as the boundaries of his reality have completely blurred.

Thanks to this, Sami Järvi was followed by the heroes of his past stories. It finally became clear that Alex Casey and Max Payne are essentially the same person. The catch is that Alan Wake became famous for his novels about detective Alex Casey, who now — seemingly indistinguishable from Sami Jarvi himself — came to Bright Falls to help Alan Wake.

And this is only the most obvious mixture of reality and universes invented by Sami Järvi. In “Alan Wake 2”, he constantly refers to his works, deconstructs their characters and fills them with new meaning. In this world, in which nothing escapes the close attention of the Federal Bureau of Control, there are no established dogmas — everything and nothing is possible at the same time.

With such changes in his own work, bordering on deliberate deposition, Sami Järvi seems to be thinking about artistic permissiveness. Art, which seems to be full of restrictions, actually has no limits. It's like  a̶ ̶s̶h̶i̶f̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶e̶k̶ raging ocean — able to change its essence both over time and depending on who puts their hands in it.

In terms of the scope of its approach and the relationship between previously unrelated ideas, “Alan Wake 2” was about the same for video game storytelling as James Joyce's “Ulysses” was for literature. They did not destroy the usual paradigm, but they demonstrated a different path to their modernism, in which there are no bronzed idols or established laws.