(Full spoilers for The Lake House expansion. Play the expansion for yourself before reading this review if you don't want to be spoiled!)
Earlier this year, Alan Wake 2 surprised me in almost every way and quickly became one of my favorite games of all time. The way the developer Remedy weaved an enthralling narrative through a multi-media adventure, with gameplay mechanics that always hit, was fantastic. No one makes a narrative and believes in the player to detective their way through it like Remedy.
A few months ago later, Remedy released Night Springs, the first of two expansions for the base game. Unsurprisingly, it was also fantastic. Night Springs was a Twilight Zone-esque romp through a trio of side stories by side characters that may or may not be canon. Remedy really ratcheted up the comedy in Night Springs while also providing some truly fascinating possibilities for the expanded Remedy-verse, up to and including rebranding a franchise of theirs that they don't have the rights to use.
The second and final expansion, The Lake House, was expected to be a set up for Control 2 in the same way that the final expansion for Control was a set up for Alan Wake 2 and was going to lean even more into horror. The expansion starts off extremely promising with one heck of a set-up, but then just coasts through to the end. It doesn't come close to approaching the high highs of the base game or first expansion. There's still a ton of interesting lore bits throughout that make it worth at least taking a look, but there's almost nothing of greater substance for the Remedy-verse as a whole.
In the Lake House expansion, players control Kiran Estevez, a Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) Agent investigating a triggered Altered World Event (AWE) at Cauldron Lake. The Lake House has been researching a way to control the threshold at Cauldron Lake for many years, but when she arrives she finds that something has gone horribly wrong…
As mentioned earlier, the set up for what exactly is happening in the Lake House is truly fascinating. The co-heads of research at the facility, Dr. Jules and Dr. Diana Marmont, are a married couple who have been running competing research experiments. Through the years, the Marmonts have fallen out of love and into hate, going so far as to attempt to sabotage each other's work.
Dr. Jules Marmont’s experiment is focusing on forcing a painter to create art to predict the future or influence the future. The theory is that because Alan Wake can write manuscripts that alter reality, maybe they can use painting, a different form of art, to alter reality themselves.
Dr. Diana Marmont’s experiment is attempting to create a machine that replicates Alan Wake’s writing to, again, attempt to predict or influence the future. The idea is that it isn't Alan himself who is able to influence the future, it's his style of writing that taps into the threshold. If they can replicate that style of writing, they can alter reality.
The Marmonts are racing against each other to be the first to alter reality or create a bridge between our reality and the threshold reality below the lake. This leads to resentment towards each other that then leads to the experiments going horribly wrong.
Both of these experiments bring up fascinating questions for not only the world of Alan Wake, but for our understanding of art in the real world as well. When a person is forced to create art, like the painter in the experiment, is it still art? Is a work that a painter is forced to make for a corporation still art? Or is a work only art when it comes from the artist's true desires? Can a machine create written art that can pass as being created by a human? What does that mean for art if a machine can create it?
As agent Estevez explores the 5 floors of the Lake House, she discovers the scope of the experiments and how exactly they went wrong.
The Alan writing machine, which turns out to be literally hundreds of typewriters (the Remedy version of a thousand monkeys attempting to recreate Shakespeare), works in a way! Maybe! The machine creates manuscript pages that truly resemble Alan's writing. …Or it's actually Alan's writing and just appears to be created by the machine. Unfortunately, whether the machine creates it or Alan does, the pages describe a “crack” in the Lake House that allows the Shadow, an evil entity, to come in and push the Marmonts apart, causing the events that set this calamity in motion.
The other Dr. Marmont forced the painter to create thousands of works of art over many years. The painters will to create and even to live was drained from him, so they forced him to continue via drugs and threats of torture. This led to the painter creating one final piece, made from his own blood during his suicide, which the Shadow latched onto, bringing his creations to life as slender man-like paint monsters.
These monsters are the new and unique enemy of the expansion. They are immune to bullets and on the hardest difficulty insta-kill you if they grab you. Kiran encounters them on the first floor and is forced to simply run away. The next time you encounter them, about halfway through the expansion, you’re given access to a special grenade launcher that turns them to dust. It's weird that they introduce this unkillable threat, just to nearly immediately give you the tools to kill them.
As agent Estevez continues to explore, the story doesn't really advance beyond what you already know. Over a total of only about three hours, you find interrogation cells, archives, offices, etc. that give tons of detail about the experiments and what happened at The Lake House, but that's it. Most of your time is spent fighting or running from monsters. The puzzles are barely puzzles, requiring one button press/lever pull and/or moving a box from one side of a room to the other.
The journey culminates with a face off with the Marmonts, who have also become corrupted monsters, and then agent Estevez turns out the lights on the threshold experiments once and for all. And that's that.
There's a brief encounter with a character directly from Control, but if you watched the trailer for the expansion you knew it was going to happen. Even this encounter felt like it could have been more. We get a set of quick flashes of things that will almost certainly take place in Control 2, but without any frame of reference they're all meaningless right now.
The expansion just kind of ends with a whimper. No cliffhanger, no plot twist, no big story beat, Agent Estevez just completes what she set out to do.
It's obvious that Remedy had something to say about machine-created art and forced commercial art, but I don't think they said it as well as they set it up. It's obvious this was supposed to be a teaser set up for Control 2, but I don't think it had the same impact/insight into what's coming as the Alan Wake themed expansion for Control.
I still enjoyed my time in the Lake House because I will always be excited for anything in the Remedy-verse. But in comparison to the other amazing works by Remedy, the Lake House just plain falls short.