Some Thoughts On: Night Springs

[selenicseas]

Nights Springs is the first DLC for Alan Wake II. It has three episodes, which are flavored as episodes of the in-universe TV show Night Springs written by Alan Wake himself. Each episode is around 45 minutes-1 hour long, which feels pretty appropriate for an episode of television.

Each episode focuses on a different character. These characters resemble their in-game counterparts, but are not actually the same. They aren’t even referred to by name, just by title: The Waitress (Rose Marigold), the Sibling (Jesse Faden), and the Actor (Tim Breaker). Datamining apparently revealed that there were supposed to be five episodes, with the additional two focusing on Alex Casey and Kiran Estevez. I imagine those were removed after James McCaffrey’s death.

Episodes are available through the main menu screen, but I’ve seen posts on Reddit stating that they can also be accessed in the Dark Place while playing as Alan. I have not tried this myself.



Episode 1: Number One Fan is one is a Rose Marigold power fantasy. It’s very pink. Everything has this pink tinge to it, including the sky and environment. It essentially has the same tone as Rose’s fanfiction in the base game, which suggests that Alan was aware of Rose’s fanfiction while in the Dark Place.

Episode 2: North Star is Jesse’s episode. It starts off similarly to Control, except instead of the Federal Bureau of Control, Jesse arrives at…Coffee World. This version of Coffee World resembles the Dark Place, with similar lighting, enemies, and Tim Breaker. There are plenty of triangles here, including some that resemble the black inverted triangle from Control.

The first thing I actually noticed in this episode were some oddly low-resolution poster textures. That includes the poster in the image above. Despite fiddling with my graphics settings (which were set to high/ultra from the beginning), I could not get those textures to look better.

This episode felt like it needed a bit more work, like it was a surreal episode of TV that didn’t quite hit the mark. Maybe that’s the point? It’s one of Alan’s failed attempts at leaving the Dark Place. He tried to have Jesse rescue him outright and it didn’t work, so he later “directed” her to the FBC so she could put things in motion to get him out of the Dark Place.

The third episode is Time Breaker, which is Tim’s episode. Well, the character isn’t actually Tim. It’s an actor named Shawn (Ashmore), who’s being directed by Sam (Lake), who is actually portrayed by Sam Lake, who is apparently very into acronyms.

Remedy Entertainment changed their name on social media to Poison Pill Entertainment before the DLC dropped. I assumed it had something to do with the DLC, but I didn’t realize it would be the name of the in-game studio.

This one is the most creative episode out of all three of them. It starts off in the regular game engine, changes to a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up, turns into a comic, and then ends as a choose-your-own text adventure with multiple paths. It has references to Control and Death Rally, as well as Quantum Break. I think most of the references, including the plot of the episode, are based on Quantum Break. As I haven’t played the game yet, I can’t say for sure.

I wish this episode had been longer. I would have been satisfied if an expanded version of it was the entire DLC.