There are many reasons I love Alan Wake II (2023), but one that’s sometimes a bit underdiscussed is how much of it is a love letter to art, the creative process, and the act of storytelling. So I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me when it turned out that the final DLC from developer Remedy Entertainment and publisher Epic Games The Lake House is a simple haunted house story in which the vengeful spirit is a painting driven to insanity after being forcefully distilled down into an endlessly replicable formula for a mass audience but no artist to call it their own. In other words, The Lake House is a condemnation against the corruption of art through AI.
But let’s start with a more straightforward plot synopsis first. Agent Kiran Estevez is sent by the FBC to have a look at a lake house in Bright Falls that is used as an FBC research facility, but once she arrives, there’s nobody there to greet her. Just an elevator leading to the different underground levels of the facility. Unfortunately, in classic Control (2019) fashion, you can’t exactly rely on this elevator to actually get you where you want to go, and that’s not even mentioning its tendency to just sort of disappear the moment you step out of it if you’re unlucky. But if it makes you feel any better, the elevator is really the least of your worries.
Once you arrive at Sub-Level 1, you’re greeted with a labyrinth of paintings. It’s the same painting over and over again, with a few slight differences here and there. And you better not make the mistake of getting too close, because if you do, get ready to be grabbed by some demonic entity crawling out of the paintings. They’re tall, slender figures made out of paint that are unkillable and will run you down endlessly. It’s a nice, new enemy that didn’t exist like this in the base game, and make sure to keep you on your move. Once you’ve navigated your way through all of this, you come face to face with another painting, one that’s pulsating and writhing as if in pain. It can talk, barely enough to communicate that it seems to be very angry.
Another level down, and the connection to Alan Wake starts to slowly become apparent while also hitting you with visuals right out of Control (2019). The Lake House feels much more like Control (2019) than it does like Alan Wake II (2023), I have to say. In particular, talking about the visuals. It takes the aesthetic of Control (2019), liminal spaces, brutalist architecture, and offices merged with science labs. And it uses that to really drive home its point about the mundane grotesqueness of art created in an assembly line, as you watch row after row of automated typewriters attempting to recreate Alan Wake’s prose. That this can’t possibly end well should be obvious.
I won’t say any more about the story; I may have already said a bit too much because The Lake House is rather short at its 90-minute to two-hour runtime. But it uses every minute of that time to great effect to make its point, and the atmosphere that persists throughout it all is exactly what you want out of something like this. A deep, pulsating score accompanies the empty spaces of decaying art, as Remedy makes it perfectly clear that they value the individuality of the artist above anything else in the creative process.
I guess I should be talking about the gameplay at some point, but you know what to expect here. It’s Alan Wake II (2023); you have a flashlight to burn away the darkness, you have a gun to shoot things, and you run around dark spaces and solve some simple puzzles. Though this is probably the most de-emphasized gameplay has ever been in a Remedy game. It really is a mood piece with thematic depth first and foremost.
The Lake House is a fantastic final note to end Alan Wake II (2023) on, as well as a nice reminder and first taste of a return to Control (2019) that also packages a currently very important message about the creation of the art we love in the most Remedy way possible.
Nairon played Alan Wake II: The Lake House on PC with his own bought copy.
