It's not a loop, it's a spiral: Alan Wake 2 story analysis

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A deeper look at the story of Alan Wake 2, the loops, repetitions and echoes in the story, and how they relate to the "monomyth," or hero's journey.

Spoilers for Alan Wake, Alan Wake 2, The Dark Tower (Book 7) by Stephen King, and Vellum: The Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan.

Stephen King photo via pinguino k on Flikr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pinguin...

Alan Wake is a 2010 action-adventure game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The game was released in May 2010 for the Xbox 360, with a Windows version following in February 2012 and a remastered version released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows in October 2021, as well as a Nintendo Switch version in October 2022. The story follows bestselling crime thriller novelist Alan Wake as he tries to uncover the mystery behind his wife's disappearance during a vacation in the small fictional town of Bright Falls, Washington, all while experiencing events from the plot of his latest novel, which he cannot remember writing, coming to life.

Alan Wake 2 is a 2023 survival horror game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Epic Games Publishing. A sequel to Alan Wake, the story follows best-selling horror novelist Alan Wake, who has been trapped in an alternative dimension for 13 years, as he attempts to escape by writing a horror story involving an FBI agent named Saga Anderson. The game was released for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on 27 October 2023.

The Dark Tower is a 2004 fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King. It is the seventh and final book in his Dark Tower series. The final book in King's epic The Dark Tower series, sees gunslinger Roland on a roller-coaster ride of exhilarating triumph and aching loss in his unrelenting quest to reach the dark tower.

Vellum: The Book of All Hours is a speculative fiction novel by Hal Duncan. It's 2017 and the End Days are coming, beings that were once human gathering to fight in one last great war for control of the Vellum -- the vast realm of eternity on which our world is just a scratch. But to a draft-dodging Irish angel and a trailer-trash tomboy called Phreedom, it's about to become brutally clear that there's no great divine or diabolic plan at play here, just a vicious battle between the hawks of Heaven and Hell, with humanity stuck in the middle, and where the easy rhetoric of Good and Evil, Order versus Chaos just doesn't apply. Here there are no heroes, no darlings of destiny struggling to save the day, and there are no villains, no dark lords of evil out to destroy the world. Or at least if there are, it's not quite clear which is which. Here, the most ancient gods and the most modern humans are equally fate's fools, victims of their own hubris, struggling to save their own skins, their own souls, but sometimes...just sometimes...sacrificing everything in the name of humanity.

#AlanWake #AlanWake2

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