Thirteen years is a long time and I understand that Remedy likely came up with some new creative directions they hadn’t planned at the time the first game came out, but I was always impressed by their attention to detail and continuity. Even This House of Dreams, an obscure ARG blog whose plot seems like it wouldn’t be canon anymore in light of what happened to Ordinary in Jesse Faden’s backstory, gets directly referenced in Control. So I was a little disappointed by what I saw as Alan Wake II retconning lore from Alan Wake and Alan Wake’s American Nightmare that had seemed like an established part of that world for over a decade.
Thomas Zane
Let me start with the Thomas Zane poet-versus-filmmaker thing. This was introduced in Control but after Alan Wake II it just seems more unclear and convoluted. In the first game we’re told the story of Tom the Poet and his muse, Barbara Jagger, how Barbara died and Tom tried to use the art-driven power of Cauldron Lake to bring her back to life through his poetry, but what came back was some inhuman entity in her form. He was only able to defeat the Dark Presence by writing himself out of existence and memory. It gets more complicated when you factor in the information from This House of Dreams that the Zane Alan encounters in the first game isn’t the actual Zane but a “Bright Presence” inhabiting his form, the metaphysical opposite to the Dark Presence in Barbara’s, but for the most part it’s a succinct, straightforward little backstory, perfectly encapsulated in the in-game song “The Poet and the Muse.”
Control and Alan Wake II introduce the idea that the Zane from that story, a poet and deep-sea diver, was really just a fictional character played in a movie by the real Thomas Zane, a Finnish filmmaker whose real name wasn’t even “Zane,” that was just how he Americanized it after immigrating to the United States. Despite writing himself out of existence (no one outside Bright Falls remembers Tom the Poet or his poetry), Zane the filmmaker still seems known in the public memory.
All this raises a bunch of questions about whether or not this new version of Zane is telling the truth, how the story of “The Poet and the Muse” really played out, why Zane looks like Alan Wake (and can apparently switch bodies with him, or something?), whether or not This House of Dreams is still canon with regard to Zane’s ultimate fate (he’s supposed to be living in a paradise universe with Barbara, not trapped in the Dark Place), and, if Tom the Poet was never real and the real Thomas Zane was always a filmmaker, why Jesse Faden remembers him existing as a poet.
Presumably Remedy intends to feature him again in future games and address at least some of these questions, but it’s frustrating to see what was such a clean narrative in the first game obfuscated long after the fact for reasons that, after two games and four years, still aren’t apparent.
Mr. Scratch
Mr. Scratch always seemed clearly inspired by the original ending of Twin Peaks. Dale Cooper travels into an alternate dark dimension to save the woman he loves. He succeeds, but the cost is that he remains trapped there while his evil doppelgänger escapes into the real world to wreak havoc under his identity.
I’ve seen many people offer many different interpretations of what happened with Mr. Scratch in Alan Wake II. The way I see it, there are three competing options:
1. We take Alan Wake II at its word: Scratch never existed as a separate individual, he and Alan were always the same person and what Alan thought was Scratch was actually himself from future points on his own time loop/spiral.
If this is the case, then it’s pretty clear to me that this is a retcon and doesn’t reflect Remedy’s original intent for the character when they made Alan Wake and American Nightmare.
Consider this exchange between Alan and Thomas Zane in “The Writer” DLC:
At the end of Alan Wake II, Alan realizes that the “Scratch” he’s been trying to stop for the whole game was actually himself from another point in time. Alan wrote Return, Alan edited the manuscript, Alan sabotaged his own efforts to edit the manuscript, Alan was the one haunting Alice throughout this game and in Control.
Shortly thereafter, Saga observes, “Scratch was never pretending to be Wake. They’re the same person.” In context, she’s talking about the same “Scratch” who Alan had mistaken as his doppelgänger for the whole game, but are we meant to infer that there never was a distinct entity called Scratch, that even when he was introduced in the first game he was always Alan?
If so, then there’s no way American Nightmare can still be canon (apart from the “real world” plot elements like Barry managing the Andersons, which is confirmed canon in Alan Wake II). In American Nightmare, Mr. Scratch is a gloating, cackling, gleeful villain. He can travel between the Dark Place and the real world at will (whereas in Alan Wake II Alan believes that Scratch is trapped in the Dark Place with him and needs the Return manuscript in order to escape), and sends taunting messages to Alan through TV screens while he resumes Alan’s wild partying lifestyle in the real world and uses it as a cover to murder people.
In Alan Wake II, who Alan thinks is Scratch is only encountered through brief glimpses and fragments of lost memories. In reality Alan was seeing a future version of himself, maddened by grief and despair, but there’s no way the campy, Patrick Bateman-esque serial killer Scratch from American Nightmare is actually supposed to be the real Alan taunting himself.
This also raises the question of what Zane could have possibly meant when he told Alan, “Your friends will meet him when you’re gone,” which is referenced several times in Alan Wake II. If Mr. Scratch was always Alan, and Alan never left the Dark Place until the events of Alan Wake II, then no, his friends never met Scratch while he was gone. You could argue that Zane was talking about Alan unwittingly “haunting” Alice, if you change “your friends” (plural) to “your wife” (singular) and “meet him” to “have creepy visions of him at night” but that feels disingenuous.
It gets more confusing when the game starts conflating Scratch with the Dark Presence itself.
I’m not sure why Alan thinks that, because it contradicts what he said in American Nightmare, where he explicitly identified the Dark Presence and Mr. Scratch as separate and distinct entities:
Thomas Zane
Let me start with the Thomas Zane poet-versus-filmmaker thing. This was introduced in Control but after Alan Wake II it just seems more unclear and convoluted. In the first game we’re told the story of Tom the Poet and his muse, Barbara Jagger, how Barbara died and Tom tried to use the art-driven power of Cauldron Lake to bring her back to life through his poetry, but what came back was some inhuman entity in her form. He was only able to defeat the Dark Presence by writing himself out of existence and memory. It gets more complicated when you factor in the information from This House of Dreams that the Zane Alan encounters in the first game isn’t the actual Zane but a “Bright Presence” inhabiting his form, the metaphysical opposite to the Dark Presence in Barbara’s, but for the most part it’s a succinct, straightforward little backstory, perfectly encapsulated in the in-game song “The Poet and the Muse.”
Control and Alan Wake II introduce the idea that the Zane from that story, a poet and deep-sea diver, was really just a fictional character played in a movie by the real Thomas Zane, a Finnish filmmaker whose real name wasn’t even “Zane,” that was just how he Americanized it after immigrating to the United States. Despite writing himself out of existence (no one outside Bright Falls remembers Tom the Poet or his poetry), Zane the filmmaker still seems known in the public memory.
All this raises a bunch of questions about whether or not this new version of Zane is telling the truth, how the story of “The Poet and the Muse” really played out, why Zane looks like Alan Wake (and can apparently switch bodies with him, or something?), whether or not This House of Dreams is still canon with regard to Zane’s ultimate fate (he’s supposed to be living in a paradise universe with Barbara, not trapped in the Dark Place), and, if Tom the Poet was never real and the real Thomas Zane was always a filmmaker, why Jesse Faden remembers him existing as a poet.
Presumably Remedy intends to feature him again in future games and address at least some of these questions, but it’s frustrating to see what was such a clean narrative in the first game obfuscated long after the fact for reasons that, after two games and four years, still aren’t apparent.
Mr. Scratch
Mr. Scratch always seemed clearly inspired by the original ending of Twin Peaks. Dale Cooper travels into an alternate dark dimension to save the woman he loves. He succeeds, but the cost is that he remains trapped there while his evil doppelgänger escapes into the real world to wreak havoc under his identity.
I’ve seen many people offer many different interpretations of what happened with Mr. Scratch in Alan Wake II. The way I see it, there are three competing options:
1. We take Alan Wake II at its word: Scratch never existed as a separate individual, he and Alan were always the same person and what Alan thought was Scratch was actually himself from future points on his own time loop/spiral.
If this is the case, then it’s pretty clear to me that this is a retcon and doesn’t reflect Remedy’s original intent for the character when they made Alan Wake and American Nightmare.
Consider this exchange between Alan and Thomas Zane in “The Writer” DLC:
ZANE: The part of you that is in control is in the cabin, dreaming and insane.
ALAN: I don't think I like that.
ZANE: You represent the part of Alan Wake that is capable of rational thought and planning, which is why I'm talking to you. If that part can regain control, then you have a chance of making it. But a part of you wants to give in. There's comfort in the oblivion of dreams. You represent the part that isn't ready to quit and die.
ALAN: Wait, are you telling me I'm not real?
ZANE: You're as real as anything else in this place.
ALAN: So there are two of me?
ZANE: Yes.
ALAN: And the one you called Mr. Scratch, he's me as well?
ZANE: No.
ALAN: I don't think I like that.
ZANE: You represent the part of Alan Wake that is capable of rational thought and planning, which is why I'm talking to you. If that part can regain control, then you have a chance of making it. But a part of you wants to give in. There's comfort in the oblivion of dreams. You represent the part that isn't ready to quit and die.
ALAN: Wait, are you telling me I'm not real?
ZANE: You're as real as anything else in this place.
ALAN: So there are two of me?
ZANE: Yes.
ALAN: And the one you called Mr. Scratch, he's me as well?
ZANE: No.
At the end of Alan Wake II, Alan realizes that the “Scratch” he’s been trying to stop for the whole game was actually himself from another point in time. Alan wrote Return, Alan edited the manuscript, Alan sabotaged his own efforts to edit the manuscript, Alan was the one haunting Alice throughout this game and in Control.
Shortly thereafter, Saga observes, “Scratch was never pretending to be Wake. They’re the same person.” In context, she’s talking about the same “Scratch” who Alan had mistaken as his doppelgänger for the whole game, but are we meant to infer that there never was a distinct entity called Scratch, that even when he was introduced in the first game he was always Alan?
If so, then there’s no way American Nightmare can still be canon (apart from the “real world” plot elements like Barry managing the Andersons, which is confirmed canon in Alan Wake II). In American Nightmare, Mr. Scratch is a gloating, cackling, gleeful villain. He can travel between the Dark Place and the real world at will (whereas in Alan Wake II Alan believes that Scratch is trapped in the Dark Place with him and needs the Return manuscript in order to escape), and sends taunting messages to Alan through TV screens while he resumes Alan’s wild partying lifestyle in the real world and uses it as a cover to murder people.
In Alan Wake II, who Alan thinks is Scratch is only encountered through brief glimpses and fragments of lost memories. In reality Alan was seeing a future version of himself, maddened by grief and despair, but there’s no way the campy, Patrick Bateman-esque serial killer Scratch from American Nightmare is actually supposed to be the real Alan taunting himself.
This also raises the question of what Zane could have possibly meant when he told Alan, “Your friends will meet him when you’re gone,” which is referenced several times in Alan Wake II. If Mr. Scratch was always Alan, and Alan never left the Dark Place until the events of Alan Wake II, then no, his friends never met Scratch while he was gone. You could argue that Zane was talking about Alan unwittingly “haunting” Alice, if you change “your friends” (plural) to “your wife” (singular) and “meet him” to “have creepy visions of him at night” but that feels disingenuous.
It gets more confusing when the game starts conflating Scratch with the Dark Presence itself.
SAGA: For the past thirteen years, you’ve been trapped in a nightmare dimension called the Dark Place, which is like New York but is not New York, and can be reached from the bottom of Cauldron Lake but is not really under the lake. And after all this time, you have now managed to get out. But so has your evil doppelgänger, Mr. Scratch? Or is it the Dark Presence?
ALAN: Both. It’s interchangeable. He’s Scratch when he looks like me but he can change into this... other form.
ALAN: Both. It’s interchangeable. He’s Scratch when he looks like me but he can change into this... other form.
I’m not sure why Alan thinks that, because it contradicts what he said in American Nightmare, where he explicitly identified the Dark Presence and Mr. Scratch as separate and distinct entities:
It’s a disturbing development; the Dark Presence I faced two years ago was powerful, but it didn’t have much in the way of imagination. Clearly, the same cannot be said of Mr. Scratch.
It’s obvious that for all his power, Mr. Scratch is an agent of another, greater being. The Dark Place he came from is full of terrible alien intelligences, dark presences, and none of them should be let loose in our world. He serves one of them. He’ll open the way for them if I don’t stop him.
It’s obvious that for all his power, Mr. Scratch is an agent of another, greater being. The Dark Place he came from is full of terrible alien intelligences, dark presences, and none of them should be let loose in our world. He serves one of them. He’ll open the way for them if I don’t stop him.
Then, not long after Alan’s realization that who he thought was Scratch was really himself and he both wrote and edited Return, he goes back to saying that Scratch wrote the manuscript. And this is after he got out of the Dark Place and his mind allegedly cleared!
ALAN: I had seen this before. This was not Scratch. This was me. Caught in a loop. I had stopped myself trying to fix the manuscript. I was the one haunting Alice. It was always me.
Five minutes later:
ALAN: Scratch will go to Bright Falls and use the Clicker to bring about the horrific ending he wrote for Return.
This isn’t even a retcon, it’s just confusing. Then later when the Dark Presence leaves Alan and takes over Casey, they start calling him Scratch! Is Scratch now just the name for anyone taken over by the Dark Presence? There was already a term for that: Taken!
The game even seems to imply that the reason Scratch is called “Scratch” is because he (actually Alan) scratched out Alan's name on the title page of Return, so it looks like it reads “RETURN by [scratch mark].” In the first game, Mr. Scratch was metatextually a reference to “Old Scratch,” a colloquial nickname for the Devil, but within the reality of the story, he was called that because his true name was unpronounceable, so when Thomas Zane said it, it was replaced by a sound like a scratched record skipping. If Scratch was really Alan all along, why would his name be unspeakable by human tongues and incomprehensible to human ears?
Keep in mind that, narratively and thematically, what Scratch became in Alan Wake II was essentially what he already was in the previous games: the personification of Alan’s dark side, his Jungian shadow-self. For some reason a game about the power of dreams and imagination to remake reality decided that it needed to be more literal and made Alan’s antagonist his actual physical self.
2. Scratch did exist as a separate individual, but he was killed at the end of American Nightmare. Alan forgot about this, and assumed that the future versions of himself he started encountering were the same Scratch he had encountered before.
If this is Remedy’s intention, it seems a bit of a cop out. American Nightmare always seemed like a non-mandatory spin-off, the way Control is a non-mandatory crossover. They can enhance your understanding of the Alan Wake story and lore, but you should be able to get the full story by just playing the main Alan Wake games.
As it is now, Scratch is briefly introduced at the end of the first game, then the big twist in the second is that Scratch and Alan are the same person. If you were to play just those two games, you’d be led to believe that there was no Mr. Scratch, that he and Alan were always the same person, even in the first game. So if the intention is that he did exist in Alan Wake I, he died in American Nightmare, and he was replaced in Alan Wake II by Future Alan, in no way is that communicated by the progression of the primary series.
I also find this explanation, that Scratch was real but he’s now permanently dead, hard to believe because if you play all the games in sequence, the Scratch story in American Nightmare feels almost like an early draft of the story they eventually finalized in Alan Wake II. In American Nightmare, Scratch divides his time between tormenting Alan in the Dark Place and living Alan's former bohemian lifestyle in the real world. Sometimes he takes breaks from the latter to stalk Alice and allow her to catch quick glimpses of him, tricking her into thinking that she is having hallucinations of Alan and losing her mind. This sounds very similar to what we learn Alice has been experiencing in Control and Alan Wake II, terrifying visions of Alan appearing in their apartment late at night.
The difference is that one is being done by an evil entity named Mr. Scratch, and the other, as we learn toward the end of Alan Wake II, is the real Alan unwittingly projecting himself from the Dark Place. To me, it doesn't feel like natural or intentional story progression for such similar but ultimately unrelated subplots to exist back-to-back if the perpetrator of the first one is permanently gone from the series and won't be back in any future games. It makes American Nightmare seem less an intermediate chapter in Alan’s ongoing story than a glimpse into what Remedy’s plans were shortly after the original game came out, a preview of what part they might have intended Mr. Scratch to play in Alan Wake II if there hadn’t been a thirteen-year gap before they made it.
3. Scratch was a separate individual in Alan Wake and American Nightmare. He was defeated at the end of American Nightmare but he’s still out there somewhere, possibly as the Thomas Zane/Seine Alan encounters in Control and Alan Wake II.
Personally this is what I hope Remedy has in mind. If the Dark Presence is in fact permanently dead, the main antagonist of the first two games is off the table for a potential third. It would be great to see the doppelgänger tease from over thirteen years ago finally paid off in a full-length entry of the main series. If this is their intention, I wish they had set it up a little more in Alan Wake II, if only so we’d know whether to expect to see more of Mr. Scratch or to accept that’s he’s dead/never existed.
It’s unfortunate that there’s never a moment, after Alan realizes that he is the Scratch he’s been trying to stop, where Alan says “Okay, but the real Scratch is still out there, plotting his revenge!” or something similar but less stupid. Maybe his (narratively convenient) memory loss prevents him from remembering his encounters with Scratch in Alan Wake and American Nightmare with any specificity, but that feels more like an excuse for the game’s writers to write their way around having to address any retcons head-on within the story.
The Dark Presence
“I am much older than you, older than your first work of art. I will find a new face to wear, someone else to dream me free.”
I’ve always liked this line. It shows that while Alan may be the hero of this story, to an ancient, eldritch consciousness like the Dark Presence, he’s just the most recent of multiple artists who have tapped into and been manipulated by the power of Cauldron Lake over uncountable years. There was Thomas Zane and the Andersons in the 1970s, but the game implies that even Native American tribes living in the area before European settlers arrived knew of the dark entity in the lake.
But in “The Final Draft,” Alan reveals this:
The game even seems to imply that the reason Scratch is called “Scratch” is because he (actually Alan) scratched out Alan's name on the title page of Return, so it looks like it reads “RETURN by [scratch mark].” In the first game, Mr. Scratch was metatextually a reference to “Old Scratch,” a colloquial nickname for the Devil, but within the reality of the story, he was called that because his true name was unpronounceable, so when Thomas Zane said it, it was replaced by a sound like a scratched record skipping. If Scratch was really Alan all along, why would his name be unspeakable by human tongues and incomprehensible to human ears?
Keep in mind that, narratively and thematically, what Scratch became in Alan Wake II was essentially what he already was in the previous games: the personification of Alan’s dark side, his Jungian shadow-self. For some reason a game about the power of dreams and imagination to remake reality decided that it needed to be more literal and made Alan’s antagonist his actual physical self.
2. Scratch did exist as a separate individual, but he was killed at the end of American Nightmare. Alan forgot about this, and assumed that the future versions of himself he started encountering were the same Scratch he had encountered before.
If this is Remedy’s intention, it seems a bit of a cop out. American Nightmare always seemed like a non-mandatory spin-off, the way Control is a non-mandatory crossover. They can enhance your understanding of the Alan Wake story and lore, but you should be able to get the full story by just playing the main Alan Wake games.
As it is now, Scratch is briefly introduced at the end of the first game, then the big twist in the second is that Scratch and Alan are the same person. If you were to play just those two games, you’d be led to believe that there was no Mr. Scratch, that he and Alan were always the same person, even in the first game. So if the intention is that he did exist in Alan Wake I, he died in American Nightmare, and he was replaced in Alan Wake II by Future Alan, in no way is that communicated by the progression of the primary series.
I also find this explanation, that Scratch was real but he’s now permanently dead, hard to believe because if you play all the games in sequence, the Scratch story in American Nightmare feels almost like an early draft of the story they eventually finalized in Alan Wake II. In American Nightmare, Scratch divides his time between tormenting Alan in the Dark Place and living Alan's former bohemian lifestyle in the real world. Sometimes he takes breaks from the latter to stalk Alice and allow her to catch quick glimpses of him, tricking her into thinking that she is having hallucinations of Alan and losing her mind. This sounds very similar to what we learn Alice has been experiencing in Control and Alan Wake II, terrifying visions of Alan appearing in their apartment late at night.
The difference is that one is being done by an evil entity named Mr. Scratch, and the other, as we learn toward the end of Alan Wake II, is the real Alan unwittingly projecting himself from the Dark Place. To me, it doesn't feel like natural or intentional story progression for such similar but ultimately unrelated subplots to exist back-to-back if the perpetrator of the first one is permanently gone from the series and won't be back in any future games. It makes American Nightmare seem less an intermediate chapter in Alan’s ongoing story than a glimpse into what Remedy’s plans were shortly after the original game came out, a preview of what part they might have intended Mr. Scratch to play in Alan Wake II if there hadn’t been a thirteen-year gap before they made it.
3. Scratch was a separate individual in Alan Wake and American Nightmare. He was defeated at the end of American Nightmare but he’s still out there somewhere, possibly as the Thomas Zane/Seine Alan encounters in Control and Alan Wake II.
Personally this is what I hope Remedy has in mind. If the Dark Presence is in fact permanently dead, the main antagonist of the first two games is off the table for a potential third. It would be great to see the doppelgänger tease from over thirteen years ago finally paid off in a full-length entry of the main series. If this is their intention, I wish they had set it up a little more in Alan Wake II, if only so we’d know whether to expect to see more of Mr. Scratch or to accept that’s he’s dead/never existed.
It’s unfortunate that there’s never a moment, after Alan realizes that he is the Scratch he’s been trying to stop, where Alan says “Okay, but the real Scratch is still out there, plotting his revenge!” or something similar but less stupid. Maybe his (narratively convenient) memory loss prevents him from remembering his encounters with Scratch in Alan Wake and American Nightmare with any specificity, but that feels more like an excuse for the game’s writers to write their way around having to address any retcons head-on within the story.
The Dark Presence
“I am much older than you, older than your first work of art. I will find a new face to wear, someone else to dream me free.”
I’ve always liked this line. It shows that while Alan may be the hero of this story, to an ancient, eldritch consciousness like the Dark Presence, he’s just the most recent of multiple artists who have tapped into and been manipulated by the power of Cauldron Lake over uncountable years. There was Thomas Zane and the Andersons in the 1970s, but the game implies that even Native American tribes living in the area before European settlers arrived knew of the dark entity in the lake.
But in “The Final Draft,” Alan reveals this:
When the bullet of light blew the darkness out of the crater of my skull, the Dark Presence was born from the remains, feeding on the horror around it to grow. It found me writing. It tapped into me, influenced me. I was lost in my work. The link was severed when I finished Return but the Dark Presence was hungry for more. And I was missing the small part of myself that it had been born from: Alice.
So I guess the Dark Presence was born from the darkness inside Alan Wake, and since the Dark Place exists outside of time (even though Alan visibly ages while there), it was able to travel into the past in the real world and cause trouble in Bright Falls before Alan ever arrived there to create it?
But if Alan created the Dark Presence, why would it say that it’s “much older” than he is? I guess it is strictly in terms of chronological, linear time, but why would a vast inhuman intelligence measure time so mundanely?
Why did the Dark Presence need an origin at all? Is Control 2 going to show how Former and the Board were created? I just thought that these were all unknowable eldritch entities from other realms who had simply existed since the dawn of creation, if not earlier. Giving the Dark Presence a definite and knowable origin kind of ruins the whole concept of what it is and represents, in my opinion.
But maybe Remedy just got tired of the Dark Presence as a character and concept, because its portrayal in Alan Wake II is markedly different from the first game and if it would have stayed that way in future games then I won’t miss it.
When taken over by the Dark Presence, Alan and Casey behave just like any other Taken, saying random lines with the distorted voice effect. This seems to contradict the distinction between being Taken and simply being “touched” by the Dark Presence that the first game drew:
Afterward, Alan and Casey immediately return to their normal selves and seem no worse for wear, in contrast to how being Taken worked in Alan Wake:
But if Alan created the Dark Presence, why would it say that it’s “much older” than he is? I guess it is strictly in terms of chronological, linear time, but why would a vast inhuman intelligence measure time so mundanely?
Why did the Dark Presence need an origin at all? Is Control 2 going to show how Former and the Board were created? I just thought that these were all unknowable eldritch entities from other realms who had simply existed since the dawn of creation, if not earlier. Giving the Dark Presence a definite and knowable origin kind of ruins the whole concept of what it is and represents, in my opinion.
But maybe Remedy just got tired of the Dark Presence as a character and concept, because its portrayal in Alan Wake II is markedly different from the first game and if it would have stayed that way in future games then I won’t miss it.
When taken over by the Dark Presence, Alan and Casey behave just like any other Taken, saying random lines with the distorted voice effect. This seems to contradict the distinction between being Taken and simply being “touched” by the Dark Presence that the first game drew:
Some of the Taken retained echoes of their former selves, but these were just the nerve twitches of a dead thing. Nothing remained but a shell, covered and filled with darkness.
In most cases these puppets were enough for the purpose of the Dark Presence. But for anything more elaborate, as with the writer, it was different. It needed his mind. And so rather than taking him over completely, it merely touched him.
In most cases these puppets were enough for the purpose of the Dark Presence. But for anything more elaborate, as with the writer, it was different. It needed his mind. And so rather than taking him over completely, it merely touched him.
Afterward, Alan and Casey immediately return to their normal selves and seem no worse for wear, in contrast to how being Taken worked in Alan Wake:
ZANE: Now the darkness no longer protects him. But it’s still inside, controlling him. He can’t be saved. He’s still a threat, he is still your enemy.
This also isn’t at all how the Dark Presence operated in the first game. In Barbara Jagger’s form, it was completely lucid, calculating, intelligent, capable of holding a conversation and behaving like an actual human. The Dark Presence appearing as Alan in Alan Wake II is compared to how it masqueraded as Barbara before, but in practice they’re nothing alike. The Dark Presence has no dialogue as either Alan or Casey aside from their generic Taken rambling. Barbara was a creepy and memorable antagonist in Alan Wake, but in Alan Wake II the Dark Presence just doesn’t have much “presence.”
Ultimately, while I dislike retcons, I acknowledge that this is Remedy’s story and they have the right to change it as they see fit. My main frustration is Alan Wake II’s refusal to make clear whether all these changes really are retcons and we should accept that that’s just how the story is now, or if the discrepancies exist in-universe as well and we can anticipate them being addressed in future games, because this ambiguity affects the way we interact with and interpret the story.
Ultimately, while I dislike retcons, I acknowledge that this is Remedy’s story and they have the right to change it as they see fit. My main frustration is Alan Wake II’s refusal to make clear whether all these changes really are retcons and we should accept that that’s just how the story is now, or if the discrepancies exist in-universe as well and we can anticipate them being addressed in future games, because this ambiguity affects the way we interact with and interpret the story.
