Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Alan Wake. We dive into the ocean that is the story and talk about the game's themes and how they layer, among other topics. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Sections played: Finished the main game!

Issues covered: not thinking through the tanning bed, the underwritten FBI agent, the effectiveness of the woods, changing pace with the town, The Well-Lit Room, connecting to Control, discovering it's Baba Yaga, enjoying the band shell, challenges in balancing the end of games, the centrality of the lake vs the open world, open world challenges for horror games, enjoying the meta, foreshadowing, wanting just the story, layering the themes, primal themes, Mr Scratch in the sequels, replayability, player personae mismatches, wanting an easier story mode, finding their way, the benefit of returning to something later, having longer and maybe too many cutscenes, camera choices, switching genres and committing to bit, bending the mechanics at the end, a studio strength, weak female characters, unlikeability, comparing heroes between the games, whether you need to play American Nightmare, stupid things we fought over, why thermoses, the week of meat, descoping, the different games that the pros play, the age of social media. 

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Silent Hill, Control, Quantum Break, Quantum Leap, Primer, Twin Peaks, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Hellboy, BioWare, Baldur's Gate III, Epic, Naughty Dog, Uncharted, The Last of Us, Gears of War, Max Payne, Maas Neotek, Adam Adamowicz, Skyrim, Fallout 3/4, Halo (series), Star Wars, Tomb Raider, Batman, Luke Theriault, 1989 (Taylor's Version), Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. 

Next time: The two DLC

Links: Adam Adamowicz (more about Adam) 

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