That is, after the crowning achievement Alan Wake 2you’d think developer Remedy Entertainment would take a break. However, in the next ones extensions up to the 2023 survival horror game, the studio dug and dug further into the core game’s thesis, bringing out even more fascinating aspects of its world. House by the lakefinal DLC for Alan Wake 2whether in a unique style and with a view to discussing one of the hottest topics of debate in the industry: The role of AI in art. To say goodbye to one of the best AAA games of recent years, this is a triumph.
Those who know the base game may remember House by the lakeThe heroine, Kiran Estevez, as a Federal Bureau of Control agent who helps Saga on her journey. Told through narrative, House by the lake recalls Estevez’s investigation into the titular location, an FBC facility that has fallen into darkness. Like Night Springsfirst of AW2expansions, House by the lake is a bite-sized experience that will only take you two to three hours to complete. This is perfect because it allows Remedy to tell a more concise story with a clear point of view.
Despite the closer connection with 2019 Control than anything else in AW2don’t expect House by the lake play this supernatural action game. Estevez has no special powers, only a gun and a flashlight. Just like in the base game, you’ll collect several more weapons along the way (including brand modern weapons) to fend off the infected inhabitants of the Lake House. To sum up the AW2 experience, House by the lake it clearly wants to challenge you, boasting intense fights against gigantic groups of enemies, made even more hard by the seemingly huge amount of resources throughout the facility. If you’re not careful, you’ll be left with an empty clip and have no choice but to face inevitable death and start over with a better plan.
The title makes the addition easier House by the lake its own aesthetic identity that is much more consistent with itself Control. This is the FBC building, after all, and as soon as you enter the concrete lobby, the elegant, brutalist architecture can almost make you feel like you’re in the Oldest House. The enemies you will encounter in the facility, as well as the weapons you find, are mostly repetitions of what you saw in the base game, a group of zombie-like characters that have been infected by the Dark Place. But there’s something else lurking in The Lake House: looming humanoid figures dripping with paint that leap out of canvases to kill you. The Lake House itself is decorated with countless paintings and graffiti on the walls (along with lots of blood).
The physical art found on every corner of the Lake House represents the facility’s (and expansion’s) ongoing obsession with the artistic process. Unlike Wake himself and many other vital characters in the series’ extended history, the main players in House by the lake they are not artists themselves, although they produce them. Competing co-managers of the facility whose history House by the lake really is, he conducted experiments in an attempt to harness Wake’s ability to transform reality through art, which ultimately plunged the building into chaos.
As you explore the Lake House levels, you’ll read emails and notes about two dueling projects, both of which aim to quantify the emotion of an artistic work in an objective way that can then be recreated. One researcher attempts this by enlisting a painter and forcing him to follow an inhumane production schedule in order to create art suitable to unleash a supernatural power like Wake’s. The opposing project believed it could reproduce the result of Wake’s writing through observation, measurement, and replication.
One of the most striking environments in House by the lake it’s a huge, open office filled with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of automatic typewriters trained on Wake-written pages recovered by FBC. The mechanical whir of machines and the cacophonous clicking of keys generate countless pages of text. There is a white board in a room off to the side where researchers evaluate each resulting page on metrics such as tone, style, readability, etc. There is a constant need to define what makes something “art”.
This is not at all subtle the elimination of artificial intelligence in technology, especially in products like ChatGPT that scratch away the work of real creators to create empty copies of art that only impress the most unimaginative of people. Remedy blows your mind with the sheer stupidity of both the Lake House experiments and their real-world counterparts. Plaques on the walls encourage employees not to decorate their desks and remind them that “art is for analysis.” At one point, on a page written by Wake describing the Lake House projects, one reads that “the art was not art, but the content of an experiment.”
This is Alan Wake 2final message to viewers. Art is not content. This word has become much more popular in cultural discussions in recent years, as AI advocates push us to view any work of art simply as a product intended to bring pleasure to the viewer, rather than something that might challenge your worldview. Games are not content. Writing is not content. Art is not content. Those who create are not cogs in a machine that can be exploited and thrown away or turned into food for the algorithm. House by the lake is Remedy’s clear statement that striving to quantify and replicate art without emotion is downright horror. As far as goodbyes go, they’re pretty damn good.
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