My Love of Remedy Games
Remedy has been a company I have followed for years. It all started with Alan Wake and has currently followed all the way to Max Payne. I am a huge fan of the series. The first time I took writing seriously in high school, my work imitated their work. Not saying copying is a good thing if you are trying to get published but when you first start out at anything, whatever inspired you will become the point of reference and Alan Wake was kind of my point of reference, something about the Light vs Dark aspect was awesome, plus it was the only game that centers you as an Author. This was back in Junior year of high school, after I won a mini competition for my poem. After that, I dove deeper into the Remedy Universe with titles like Quantum Break and Control. There is something that I love about experimentation and Remedy breaks that wall easily over other Developers. The way they combine different pieces of media like games, shows, poems, blog post is amazing. It honestly helped inspire me to always go outside the norm and understanding different ways to tell my story and to expand my universe. And so I want to go down the list of games and discuss how unique they are, plus have some honorable mentions for older games that I want to finish.
Alan Wake
This might be the longest portion of this post, but Damn do I love me some Alan Wake. This game is the pinnacle of my favorite game. I literally own this game on every console, I have it on Xbox 360, Xbox One, Steam, PC disk, and PlayStation 5, yeah this game is everything to me. Literally I have the soundtrack on Spotify, and use some of the background music on times when I need to be inside the world I am building. And I love every Remedy game but I have to declare this is close to their Magnum opus, I do not want to say this is there best because after ten years it has finally received a sequel, so it's premature to call it their magnum opus. But I am getting ahead of myself, so let me truly introduce how I got into this series.
It was on a Gameinformer magazine, yes, when magazines were still a big thing, where you could get the exclusive on upcoming games. And let me tell you, I would read the hell out of those things. It's sad how much you lose track of things after the digital age, but I digress. I remember reading a few games and when they had a big upcoming release, it would take the cover of the magazine and the middle portion of the magazine, making it a big deal. And I remember getting curious about it, still pretty early on, what psychological thriller was, what Twin peaks was or many of the references it was making to inspire such a game. But after that I also forgot about it. This portion will become cliff noted, but I won a short poem contest in High school, got into Silent hill and Donnie Darko and found the game Alan Wake on YouTube and thought this would make an awesome Christmas gift, trust me Christmas shopping for me is difficult since I am a minimalist but more on that in another Post. So I got it over Christmas break and fell in love with it.
This game was not anything I was used to. For starters, it had an episodic format to feel like an actual t.v. show which still blows my mind till this day. It had this cool concept of light vs Dark where you needed light to get through this molded shell of enemies before they would take damage. The fucking story was amazing. I give props for Sam Lake, making the main character not only an everyday guy but a writer. Let me rephrase this as a WRITER!!! You know how cool that is, even gave him a tweed jacket. This blew my sixteen-year-old mind away. Holy crap, it also gave me the confidence to continue and want to become a writer up till this point in my life. That's crazy. I am not going to give a synopsis of the story, but I will have a trailer for it above this post. But the way it goes is Alan is a full-time writer, which has killed off his most famous protagonist Alex Casey( Nod to Max Payne) and has had writer's block for two years, so with him and his wife Alice chooses a vacation at the ideal town of Bright Falls. And as soon as they get there, strange events happen around them until Alice gets kidnapped by the Darkness and Alan wakes up in his crashed car, missing a week. Yeah, this game starts off heavy and damn, it wears its psychological hat heavy. In the first half, I questioned if this was happening. Alan is a writer, so the trauma of losing his wife could trigger something in his head. But gladly he is sane, and honestly I love the idea of this dark force feeding off of creative talents. It seems like a wicked curse for creative types, for example, there is a mental institution which host a feeding ground for this entity and it makes sense, to release the tension of trauma or your mental illness making something creative and constructive can help your mind, but now you locked in this endless cycle of feeding this thing.
This game is gold. It was, amongst a few other things, that helped me collect the pen and to write; I think in a way Alan Wake not only opened me up to this amazing company Remedy, but opened me up to various possibilities of my writing and that no matter how strange the idea is, expand on it and see where it goes. It also gave me the foundation of seeing how to construct a story and make it bigger in a way. Plus, it's DLC helped expand the world and bridge us to the world Alan is engulfed in, plus I have to thank Remedy for American nightmare because it is about time Arizona gets some recognition in video games, but there is a lot to gush at over Alan wake but let us switch to the next game Quantum Break.
Quantum Break
Is it a game, a show, or a book? Don't worry, it is all of that and more. I want to call this the black sheep of Remedy because this seemed very experimental with the early trailers, before Shawn Ashmore. I only placed the finished product trailer above. It seems like they had bigger plans for it, but critics did not love this game like other titles. It is a shame because it is not perfect, but I thought they had some amazing ideas. Going to game-play to a televised show was and still is awesome. People bitched about acting, but they seemed exactly like Netflix special. It made sense with all the chaos during this time it was a mess, Alan Wake 2 wasn't coming out, and each Quantum Break trailer threw different characters plus when you are handling Time travel, everything gets messy but not trying to be a fanboy, I think Remedy did a pretty good job at going full circle with time, leaving mystery into what is at the end of time and giving a compelling villain in this whole mess. I just wished they would do more, environmental storytelling instead of cramming everything into notes, but that gripe I will explain at the end of this portion.
So in the Story, you are visiting your best friend in the middle of the night to see a new project. Paul presents him time travel and, of course, like any time travel story, everything goes wrong and it messed time up. So yes, the idea of the story seems cliche but honestly, I think it is pretty compelling with the characters. To be honest, there is not much of the story that I want to get into because I would rather read the book to get into it. Even in my second play-through, I do not feel confident that I got a grasp of the whole narrative.
What I want to gush about is the experimental aspects that are inside the game. Things like time fracturing in real time are so freaking crazy. Just walking through a broken bridge while a ship is glitching between it is a trip. Fighting enemies, while everything in the world freezes, is intense. I would love Remedy to continue with our current-gen consoles. There are little things you can do to show presence inside the show as a hero. The more major twists are when you are Paul. It's just two choices that will taint the character jack on his quest. This part I would love to see them add more too, an example in the beginning you can interact with a whiteboard to finish an equation than on the first episode you hear two co-workers discuss on how it was solved when they got there. I want more of that, something mixed with telltale the walking dead choice system to affect the show in major ways. Maybe you go guns blazing and it shows on the tv show, and now you decide to stealth it and they do not even mention you. That would be so exciting. And let me remind you, this is Remedy. I feel like they can go anywhere with this.
My only gripe is the endless amounts of notes and text you find throughout the game, this is not a Remedy issue, it was honestly probably production issues but I usually hate when games do this to explain more about the game or give you more insights of the story, Alan Wake and Control was pretty good because they were discussions of what the Bearu experimented on or found and with Alan Wake it either foretold what was to happen or what was happening around him, it felt like you were in a novel which I feel Quantum Break does not do nearly as good. And honestly, this is a wake up call to other games, to make your text a part of the game like Alan Wake or Control or since you are a video game and not a book, you could do so much environmental story telling. I feel like Quantum break has a few of these and I would honestly prefer more games to try it like that. With a book they limit you to simple text, but in a video game, you have time, you can take in the environment. That would be a perfect time to tell a story or explain past events. Left 4 dead does this with its safe room, portal does too. Don't be afraid to find different ways to tell a story.
But overall I love Quantum Break and I am hoping in the future they can claim the rights and expand on it more, because it is such an underrated game.
Control
So Control is one of those games where you can get lost in its world. I remember making my first YouTube video on the game. Here is where you see everything Remedy worked towards and strive for accumulate to this masterpiece. In the beginning Jesse, the main character references if everything you believed was a normal room with a poster, what if behind the poster there was more, more than what you could explain or understand? That line of dialogue has always stayed with me. It reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft or Junji Ito. What if there is more to this world that would break how we think or perceive the world?
This is where control comes in. You find a building named the Oldest House, a base of operations for the Bearu, which they do not understand. The building can only be found if you know about it. There is a lot of mystery inside this place, and I do not want to explain the whole narrative but Jesse goes seeking her brother who was kidnapped during an incident in their hometown of ordinary and becomes the Director and yeah it gets Remedy levels of crazy.
I want to thank them for helping me learn about the SCP Foundation through their inspiration and creations of AWE, The Board, and The Oldest House, which in itself is some sort of entity itself. Control shows me how little humanity knows about the world yet, still tries to find someway to control it. It honestly sounds like the most human thing ever to harness something even you know nothing about. If things like this existed, how screwed are we if this is in the hands of the government? Like these people are throwing darts at that bored, hoping to at least come close to hitting the center.
Control left me mesmerised by how zany and alien being inside one whole building felt. This place was huge. Me, I would be lost in a place like this, but I could understand how happy or comfortable Jesse was in finding this place. It's better to know that you are not crazy after being told it your whole life. To be brought into a world that you fit comfortably in. This game is like the spine of Remedy honestly or like how Stephen King made the Dark Tower series to connect everything together. Control feels like that, especially with having little notes and manuscripts of Alan Wake.
This game is amazing. I feel like if you like weird or odd type of things, like x-files or outer limits. You will love this. Sometimes the best stories are the ones that create more questions than answers. I love this game to death, there is so much content, and the gameplay is crazy cool. Someone made reference to being an X-Men and I would say that is a perfect description towards the combat. I have a lot of respect for Control. Once it came out, I was so infatuated with it; had to share my thoughts on the internet. I remember rewriting the script over and over. And knew I wanted to be on YouTube and something about that game helped push me to get the video out. Man, that was my first video. The script was okay, but man, the cut-scenes helped that video look professional. It is not up anymore, but this game brings up a nostalgic feeling for me.
In this part, I want to explain some of their games and other projects I have not played or read yet.
Other things for the Catalogue
So there is a backlog of other Remedy titles which I need to check out. First off, is Max Payne 1 &2. I have only played Max Payne 3. It was an amazing game, but to be honest, it felt like a Rockstar game, so I did not include it here. I bought the first two Max Payne's but have not gotten around to playing them but now hearing they are going to remake it, now makes me want to dive into it and see how different it is from Rockstar's title. Another thing which I want to dive into is This House of Dreams, a tie in blog that Remedy created, and I had no clue they created this, after Alan Wake. I've seen numerous fans of Alan Wake discuss it and they also did not know about it. I've read a few entries Remedy brings you into their story telling ways. I love the switch it up with forms of media, like with Alan Wake and the QR codes, TV shorts. SO that will be another area to tackle too. Lastly, is probably Death Ralley, I know it is not heavy with its Story but I am a Remedy Fan boy till death.
Epilogue
I appreciate you hearing me share my love of Remedy games. They might never see this blog post, but it's fine. I am not some game journalist or book critic; I am just a random person typing on this blog post about how much I cherish Remedy Games and want to thank them for opening me up to writing and helping me feel comfortable experimenting with my stories. And how there is not just one way of doing it. These guy's inspire me to go further each day, and honestly without them, I do not know if I would have had the push to put my work out there, Confidence is not high on my list but it's okay, I am not perfect and I do not aim to be, I just want to entrain and inspire just as Remedy did to me. I want thank Remedy for making the games they do today without changing their nature; I want to thank Sam Lake for creating Alan Wake, which inspires me to write, and I want to thank anybody who got this far in the post, till the next time.
