Today, as part of Geoff Keighley’s big Summer Game Fest kickoff festivities, we got our first glimpse of Alan Wake 2’s first DLC expansion, Night Springs. Part of what made Alan Wake 2 itself such an intriguing experience was the way in which it often seemed to be operating on multiple levels of reality and meaning all at once, and, if anything, Night Springs seems poised to take this playful metatextual approach even further. I recently got a hands-off glimpse of some of what we can expect in Night Springs, and had a chat with some of the folks behind it, in advance of its arrival tomorrow.
Perhaps the first thing to note about Night Springs,if we want to have any hope of keeping our different layers of reality straight, is that while many of the characters here may look like characters we know from Alan Wake 2 proper, canonically speaking, these aren’t actually those selfsame characters. Rather, these are stories written by Alan Wake, in the vein of the in-universe, Twilight Zone-like anthology show Night Springs, during his time in the Dark Place, as he struggles to write his way out. So, for instance, while one of the three “episodes” included in the DLC stars a character who looks and sounds very much like Rose Marigold, the Oh Deer Diner waitress who’s also Wake’s self-proclaimed biggest fan, in actuality this is a character that Alan has made up who is known simply as The Waitress—likely based on Rose, but not actually, canonically her.
The other two ch.
