I watched Twin Peaks for the first time when I was 17, and I haven’t been the same since. Sat in front of my home computer, I binged the show in the space of a week. The things you consume as a teenager can irreparably alter the way you see the world and your tastes, and I fear that discovering David Lynch made me a weirdo. Not in a bad way, necessarily – after all, most good artists are kind ofღ weird – but that dreamlike, unsettling, sometimes terrifying sensꦓibility stuck with me. I’ve been chasing the feeling of watching Twin Peaks for the first time ever since.
I finally found that feeling last week, as I got deeper into . I struggled a lot with the game when I first started – 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the puzzles were abstruse and the story confusing, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:restaღrting the game with a guide in f♒ront of me made things way easier, for obvious reasons. A second attempt led me much further into the game, and it was w🍃hen I finally got to the much-loved musical level that I logged into Slack (on a weekend, no less!) and messaged my colleague James Kennedy, who I knew was playing through 🌱the game at the same time. “I get it now,” I said.
Alan Wake 2 wears its influences on its sleeve. True Detective, Silence of the Lambs, David Fincher’s Seven, and Martin Scorcese&rsq🌺uo;s Taxi Driver , but none of those influences are as obvious to me as Twin Peaks is. From the moment we entered the town of Bright Falls, a Pacific Nor🌱thwest town with easy similarities to the town of Twin Peaks, I felt it. The diner, the coffee, the FBI agents, the kooky sheriffs, they all screamed Twin Peaks, the setting. But what screamed Twin Peaks, the show, were the surrealist elements – the waitress at the diner who claims to remember Saga’s daughter drowning, the ghost-like apparition of Alan Wake trying to communicate with Saga, the gigantic translucent projections of Alex Casey in The Dark Place.
It had b🔥een a while since I’d seen Twin Peaks, my last rewatch of the series being a few years ago, so I was drawing links between the game and the show but they weren’t specific. But this weekend I watched a 4K restoration of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and suddenly the comparisons were incredibly clear.
Aesthetically, the game and Lynch’s movie share the same DNA in an extraordinarily direct way. Fire Walk With Me opens on credits fading in over television static, which you stare at, entranced, until a jump scare of a woman screaming and the television being smashed make you jump. Several times, you’ll see images overlaid with each other, flickering so that it looks like reality itself is shifting. Setpieces are flooded with coloured lights that create eerie, moody, liminal environments. Unlike the show, the movie is tonally darker and more geared towards horror, with far fewer laughs. The moment the film ended, I remarked out loud, “Alan Wake 2 is so Twin Peaks-coded.”
The similarities are stunning, but not in a way that cheapens Remedy’s game or makes it look derivative. If anything, seeing how much Alan Wake 2 drew from an iconic series I love and how i🦋t reinterprets its tropes has made me appreciate both the game and the show more. Drawing from an inspiration as unique as David Lynch’s work could have gone badly if handled badly, but Remedy very skilfully repurposed what it took from other media and turned it into a cohesive, singular piece of work. Now I understand what everybody was talking about when they said Alan Wake 2 is one of the most ambitious games of the year, and I have to agree.
2023 Hasn’t Been A Gr🦂eat Year If You’re Not Into Horror
2023 has been an all-time year for video games, but horror-averse gamers💮 have come up short
