Alan Wake: "American Nightmare" For Xbox Live Arcade

"To change reality, you nudge it into the right direction. Your version of it is there, waiting; it wants to come true. All you need to do is to help it achieve its potential. The devil is in the details.

You change the details of the scene to match those on the page. If you get the details right, if you achieve that critical mass, the shift will come, and the rest of your new reality overrides the existing paradigm.

The lie -- no matter how outrageous -- is now the truth."





I recently decided to try and complete the second installation of the Alan Wake series for Xbox 360. I narrowly defeated the first game with a duty for finding the many scattered manuscripts through the game that actually foretell of events prior to them taking place. This stood out to me as a game series recommended for both those who crave non-stop action along with fairly quality storytelling in the midst of madness. Alan had to re-gather elements of a scene in which the "darkness" of his mind and what he has written seems to have birthed or re-manifests since the events of the initial game (literally called: Alan Wake). The protagonist (Alan Wake) in this game, must continue to battle the darkness spawned and woven out of the fabric of his very own creativity story-writing. This could also be symbolic of the daily struggles or pangs of writing in terms of the discovery process. Another verb-oriented style equipped with a riveting appeal towards the concept of "Devil's Advice" that we most recently learned about in and outside of class. Ironically, Mr. Wake even mentions "Devil" in the passage above. He further re-iterates this astounding idea with the notion of "re-writing history", thus, it can be assumed that he is inferring to us that one must view situations from all perspectives before re-writing them to fit the current needs of the individual or entities themselves. Slight telescoping here acts as a device for lensing/honing in on the target/premise of it all, and beginning steps towards enacting upon a solution for that. It seems also that a minute form/degree of time-warping is in effect here since the future and getting to that future is so imminent although I am still uncertain on this (I am not far enough in the game to know for certain as of yet, if the game even reveals this at all).