After the crowning achievement that’s Alan Wake 2, you’d assume developer Treatment Leisure would take a break. But within the subsequent expansions to the 2023 survival horror recreation, the studio has poked and prodded additional on the base recreation’s thesis, teasing out much more fascinating facets of its world. The Lake Home, the ultimate DLC for Alan Wake 2, does this poking with distinctive fashion and a watch in the direction of discussing one of many business’s hottest subjects of debate: AI’s function in artwork. As a goodbye to among the finest AAA video games in latest reminiscence, it’s a triumph.

These accustomed to the bottom recreation may keep in mind The Lake Home’s protagonist, Kiran Estevez, because the Federal Bureau of Management agent who helps Saga alongside her journey. Instructed via narration, The Lake Home recounts Estevez’s investigation into the titular location, an FBC facility that has gone darkish. Like Evening Springs, the primary of AW2’s expansions, The Lake Home is a bite-sized expertise that may take you solely two to 3 hours to finish. That’s good, because it lets Treatment inform a extra concise story with a transparent standpoint.

Regardless of being extra intently linked to 2019’s Management than the rest in AW2, don’t anticipate The Lake Home to play like that supernatural motion recreation. Estevez isn’t packing particular powers, only a pistol and a flashlight. As within the base recreation, you’ll acquire just a few extra weapons alongside the way in which (together with a completely new armament) to combat off the now-infected inhabitants of the Lake Home. As a conclusion to the AW2 expertise, The Lake Home clearly needs to problem you, boasting some robust fights towards giant teams of enemies made even harder by a seemingly abysmal quantity of sources all through the ability. For those who aren’t cautious, you’ll end up with an empty clip and no different possibility than to face your inevitable demise and restart with a greater plan.

The enlargement’s titular facility offers The Lake Home its personal aesthetic identification, one which’s much more in step with Management. That is an FBC constructing, in any case, and as quickly as you stroll inside its concrete foyer, the modern brutalist structure may nearly make you’re feeling such as you’re again within the Oldest Home. The enemies you encounter throughout the facility, just like the weapons you discover, are largely rehashes of what you noticed within the base recreation, a bunch of zombie-like figures who’ve been contaminated by the Darkish Place. There’s, nevertheless, one thing else lurking throughout the Lake Home: looming humanoid figures dripping with paint that bounce out of canvases to kill you. The Lake Home itself is embellished with numerous work and graffiti throughout its partitions (alongside a lot of blood).

The bodily artwork you encounter round each nook within the Lake Home represents the ability’s (and the enlargement’s) continued obsession with the creative course of. In contrast to Wake himself, and lots of different vital figures within the prolonged lore of the sequence, the most important gamers in The Lake Home will not be artists themselves, but they’re preoccupied with the manufacturing of it. The competing co-heads of the ability, whose story The Lake Home really is, performed experiments in an effort to harness Wake’s capability to reshape actuality via artwork, a path which in the end plunged the constructing into chaos.

As you discover the degrees of the Lake Home, you’ll learn emails and memos about two dueling tasks, each of which search to quantify the emotion of a creative piece in some goal method that may then be replicated. One researcher makes an attempt this by dragging in a painter and forcing him to stick to an inhuman manufacturing schedule to create the right artwork for triggering a supernatural energy like Wake’s. The opposing undertaking believed that it may recreate the result of Wake’s writing via remark, measurement, and replication.

One of the crucial hanging environments in The Lake Home is a sprawling open workplace full of dozens—perhaps a whole lot—of automated typewriters skilled on pages written by Wake that the FBC recovered. The mechanical whirring of machines and cacophonous clicking of keys produces numerous pages of textual content. In a room off to the facet you’ll find a white board on which researchers graded every ensuing web page on metrics like tone, fashion, readability, and many others. There’s a fixed want to outline what makes one thing “artwork.”

It’s a not-at-all delicate takedown of synthetic intelligence in tech, particularly merchandise like ChatGPT that scrape the work of actual creators with a view to produce empty facsimiles of artwork that impress solely probably the most unimaginative individuals. Treatment beats you over the pinnacle with the sheer stupidity of each the Lake Home experiments and their real-life counterparts. Indicators plastered on the partitions encourage staff to not embellish their desks and remind them that “artwork is for evaluation.” At one level, a web page written by Wake describing the tasks throughout the Lake Home reads “artwork was not artwork, simply content material for the experiment.”

That’s Alan Wake 2’s last message to audiences. Artwork isn’t content material. It’s a phrase that’s turn into a lot extra prolific throughout cultural discussions in recent times because the proponents of AI push us towards conceiving of each piece of artwork as merely a product for viewer enjoyment slightly than a factor that may problem your worldview. Video games will not be content material. Writing isn’t content material. Artwork isn’t content material. Those that create will not be cogs in a machine for use and disposed of or changed into meals for an algorithm. The Lake Home is Treatment’s clear assertion that the push to quantify and replicate artwork with out emotion is nothing wanting a horror story. So far as farewells go, it’s a reasonably fucking good one.

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