but the thing is that i know i'm gonna spend a good chunk of my time with it grousing over the gameplay. it's gonna be the same issue i had with control: "wow, i love literally everything about this video game except for the part where it's a video game!" flashes of brilliant storytelling and design in between lengthy segments of obnoxiously mandatory Video Game Combat. everything i'm hearing about it that makes me salivate from a distance as someone who loves polished metafiction and big dumb spectacle seems to exist in a completely different universe from the whole survival horror resource management shooty cover game stuff that will presumably take up the bulk of any given player's time. don't get me wrong, i'm sure it's well done and enjoyable if that's the kind of thing you're into as a gamer
i guess this is just increasingly my problem with a lot of single-player AAA games these days. they aspire to a very "movie" ideal of art, and to their credit they often pull it off spectacularly. it's just that there are all these inconvenient other parts that aren't the movie, because if it was a movie we'd just cut around them. lots and lots of combat with mechanics and devices and puzzles and whatever else, sure, fine, okay, it's a video game, there's gotta be gamey parts. but what are the gamey parts for? what do they do? what are they about?
i keep returning to red dead redemption 2 in these conversations. it's marvelous how committed that game was to "realism," with its volumetric snow and lushly detailed environments and bespoke individual pickup animations for every single diegetic action and temperature-reactive horse testicles. the amount of research they did into the fashion, architecture, and lifestyles of the period is truly unbelievable
and then you get into combat and you use bullet time to kill a flood fifty guys in a second and if you take damage you can just hit the pause menu and drink a Tonic. it's like as soon as the Video Game happens, all that hard-won labor-breaking verisimilitude goes right out the window. it's the same with rdr2, and the last of us, and all the other sony studios "please buy a ps5 already" marquee titles. always behind the movie bits, there is a flood of fifty guys who will run at you screaming with murderous intent, and if you ever find yourself asking "now hold on, where do those guys live? do they have families? are they REALLY in such a hurry to be die by me?" the answer is obviously "stop being such a party pooper and have fun for once"
which is exactly my problem. modern single-player AAA games have two modes: Art and Game. Art is when you're meant to go, wow, that's so pretty, that's so wild, oh man, it really makes you think about stuff, and Game is when you are murderizing sixty billion freaks with your grandma's handmedown skill tree for a hundred hours straight. this is hardly a new problem but the contrast just gets sharper and sharper for me as time goes on. maybe i've gotten worse at video games and i'm just a hater now. but everything exciting i'm hearing about alan wake 2 seems to be the Art, which reviews focus on at length with only a comparative few paragraphs about the challenging and lengthy gauntlet of Game. the two can and often do meet, such as in control's ashtray maze, but even that is mostly Art with the Game turned down for maximum enjoyment. reviews say there are many moments in alan wake 2 like the ashtray maze, which is great and sounds very promising, so idk, maybe i'll eat my shoe. but that was my experience of control-- great vibes, setting, atmosphere, story, and the game itself is generally pretty fun... except there's just so MUCH game, they so rarely leave you to enjoy a space by yourself without spawning a new shrieking hoard of enemies. they don't trust you to manage your time with the experience, like if there isn't always a Blood Verb to enunciate with a trigger pull at any given second, somehow that's a failure of the game? ah, the freedom to choose your own experience as an empowered player, unless the experience you want is to play slightly less.
a truly Artful red dead redemption 2 would have like 12 gunfights in its whole runtime, to which the natural response from anyone with a brain is "but that'd be boring." right, exactly. art can be pretty fucking boring. that's the inherent tension of the Art/Game duality. we want Artful games but the market demands a substantial element of Game which must be fun. if you make the Game part boring or sluggish or difficult to control, that's not "a creative choice" that's "bad design." and it's a one way street, too-- the Art is always subject to interruption by the Game, but when metal gear sold 2 interrupted the Game with many blasts of Art, it was critically reviled and generally accepted as a terrible sequel and a hated perversion of mgs1's perfection for yeaaaars before kojima gained enough auteur status in the west for gamers to grumpily accept that it's okay when he does it. of course you can skip every cutscene in every video game, but if i asked for a button that let me skip the game parts to get to the cutscenes, well that's just ordering icing without the cake isn't it? if i want to turn off enemy spawns in control or reduce the damage inflicted by enemies in dark souls, well, that's perverting the intended experience, that's cheating, that's the wrong way to play, that's not fun.
these are the conversations i had when playing through control and these are the conversations i know i'll have again if/when i play through alan wake 2. and i actually find this conversation rather boring, because what it really boils down to is "the Game waters down the Art" which is just another way of saying ludonarrative dissonance, and who wants to talk about ludonarrative dissonance in 2023??? i can't help but think of the revolution that occurred in musicals in the 1920s when they figured out that musical numbers can actually meaningfully advance the plot and character arcs rather than just be sudden irrelevant intermissions of harmonic fancy. what fred astaire brought to the table was an integration of the dance number into the narrative, by having the numbers occur in the same space as the rest of the movie, by himself interacting with objects in the space to create a sense of tangible physicality (we call that bricolage baby and it's a key ingredient in good fight scenes too) that grounded the action. it still feels like we haven't quite figured out how to fully integrate the Game with the Art, how to make skill trees and item crafting and level up noises feel contiguous with the prestige emotional cinematic experience they want you to believe in.
anyway this is a rough approximation of my thought process every time a new critic buzzy single-player AAA game comes out. maybe alan wake 2 will blow my expectations out of the water on this front, but i guess that remains to be seen
