after attaining the highest achievement Alan Wake 2you’d think developer Remedy Entertainment would take a break. However, later expansion For the 2023 survival horror game, the studio has further explored the themes of the base game, teasing out more fascinating aspects of its world. Lake House Hotelthe final DLC Alan Wake 2which does so with a unique style and focus on discussing one of the hottest debate topics in the industry: The role of artificial intelligence in art. As a farewell to one of the best AAA games in recent memory, it’s a triumph.
Those familiar with the base game may remember Lake House HotelThe protagonist, Kiran Estevez, plays a Federal Bureau of Control agent who helps Saga on her journey. Told through narration, Lake House Hotel It follows Estevez’s investigation of the titular location, an FBC facility that has fallen into darkness. like night springthe first AW2extension, Lake House Hotel This is a brief experience that takes only two to three hours to complete. This is perfect because it allows Remedy to tell a more concise story with a clear point of view.
Although more closely linked to 2019 control than anything else AW2don’t expect Lake House Hotel Play that supernatural action game. Estevez carries no special abilities, only a pistol and a flashlight. Like the base game, you’ll collect more weapons along the way (including brand new ones) to fight against the Lake House’s now-infected denizens. As a summary of AW2 experience, Lake House Hotel Clearly looking to challenge you, it boasts grueling battles against hordes of enemies, made even harder by the seemingly vast amount of resources throughout the facility. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself with an empty clip and no choice but to face your inevitable death and start over with a better plan.
The extension’s nominal facility gives Lake House Hotel Its own aesthetic characteristics are more in line with control. This is an FBC building, after all, and once you step inside its concrete lobby, the sleek brutalist architecture will almost make you feel like you’re back in the Oldest House. The enemies you encounter in the facility, like the weapons you find, are mostly reenactments of what you saw in the base game, a horde of zombie-like characters infected by the Dark Land. Yet something else lurks in the lake house: looming humanoid figures, dripping with paint, leaping out of the canvas to kill you. The walls of the lake house itself are decorated with numerous paintings and graffiti (and lots of blood).
The physical art you encounter in every corner of the Lake House represents the facility’s (and the expansion’s) ongoing obsession with the artistic process. Unlike Wake himself and many other important figures in the series’ extended lore, Lake House Hotel They are not artists themselves, but they focus on the production of their work. The facility’s competing co-heads, their stories Lake House Hotel Indeed, he experimented, trying to harness Wake’s ability to reshape reality through art, but that path ultimately plunged the building into chaos.
As you explore the various floors of the Lake House, you’ll read emails and memos about two dueling projects, both of which attempted to quantify the emotion of a work of art in some objective way that could then be replicated. A researcher attempts to trigger supernatural forces like Wake by dragging a painter and forcing him to adhere to an inhumane production schedule to create the right art. The opposing project argued that it could reproduce the results of Weick’s writing through observation, measurement, and replication.
one of the most striking environments Lake House Hotel It was a vast open-plan office that housed dozens (perhaps hundreds) of automatic typewriters trained on pages recovered by the FBC that Wake had written. The mechanical sound of the machine and the harsh sound of the keys produced countless pages of text. In a side room, you’ll find a whiteboard where researchers rate each results page based on metrics such as tone, style, readability, and more.
This is a not-so-subtle undermining of artificial intelligence in tech, especially a product like this Chat GPT They copy the works of real creators to produce empty copies of art that impress only the least imaginative people. The stupidity of Remedy’s Lake House experiment and the real-life experiment will blow your mind. Signs on the wall encourage employees not to decorate their desks and remind them that “art is for analysis.” At one point, a page Wake wrote describing the projects inside the lake house read, “Art is not art, just the stuff of experimentation.”
that is Alan Wake 2A final word to the audience. Art is not content. The term has become more prevalent in cultural discussions in recent years, as proponents of artificial intelligence push us to view every work of art as simply a product for viewers to enjoy, rather than something that can challenge your worldview. Games are not content. Writing is not content. Art is not content. Those who create are not cogs in a machine to be used and disposed of, nor are they food for the algorithm. Lake House Hotel Remedy makes it clear that the push to quantify and replicate art without emotion is tantamount to a horror story. As far as farewells go, it was a pretty good one.
.
