Alan Wake: The Dark Presence and the Writer Who Is Writing

Alan Wake is structured as a Stephen King novel — chapters, cliffhangers, a writer as protagonist fighting the dark. What Remedy embedded in the structure is a meta-layer: Alan Wake is writing the story the player is experiencing. Every manuscript page found throughout the game describes events that have not happened yet. Alan is not discovering the story — he is authoring it in real time, and the words precede the world.

The Dark Presence that drives the game’s antagonists is not trying to destroy Alan. It wants to use him. A creative force needs a vessel with sufficient imagination to give it form, and Alan Wake is the most imaginative person in Bright Falls. Every supernatural event in the game is the Presence implementing Alan’s fear-driven narrative decisions.

The Poets of the Fall connection — a Finnish rock band whose music appears in Alan Wake under the name ‘Old Gods of Asgard’ — is the game’s most persistent easter egg. Two of their songs play as in-game performance sequences. Remedy’s relationship with the band has continued through Control and Alan Wake 2, where the Old Gods appear as fully canonical characters.

Alan Wake 2 resolves what the original left ambiguous: Alan has been in the Dark Place for thirteen years, writing versions of reality to try to escape. Every loop has produced a different version of the story. The ‘Alan Wake’ the player experienced in 2010 is one of multiple drafts.