This week Paste‘s games team looks back at their favorite gaming moments of 2023. Today Moises Taveras looks at Alan Wake II‘s itinerant sheriff, Tim Breaker, and how he acts as a light in the darkness.
Just countless spoilers for Alan Wake II follow.
2023 held no shortage of fantasies to occupy my time. I got to be a secret agent, a wannabe rockstar, and a Solstice Warrior among them, but I think I derived the most purpose from being a tortured writer. I already am that, after all, or at least as tortured as anyone pursuing a career in media can be. Yet Alan Wake II‘s vision of being a tortured writer only occasionally looks like being locked in a room pacing back and forth, so I’m more partial to that version over my own. Instead, Alan Wake gets to traipse around a nightmarish New York, fight shadows, and look for the light. Something about that resonates with me.
Can I talk to you about Tim Breaker for a second? He’s my favorite, and most egregiously named, character in Alan Wake II. He’s the sheriff of Bright Falls, the idyllic Pacific Northwestern town Alan disappears from in 2010, when the sequel picks up 13 years later. He’s also played by Shawn Ashmore, who, to explain the aforementioned egregious name, plays a man who can manipulate time in another Remedy game called Quantum Break. Tim Breaker, time breaker. Get it? Anyway, just as he’s about to give Alan Wake II‘s second protagonist, Saga Anderson, an important piece of information to aid in her fight, Tim’s snatched from his reality and plopped into the Dark Place, where Alan’s portions of the game take place. When you find him here, he’s almost as confused about the nature of the Dark Place as Alan, but he’s putting things together. He’s a bit of a light in the dark, figuratively and literally.
These entirely optional encounters are among my favorite bits of Alan Wake II, a game that goes so far out of its way to make every encounter a close one, its woods eerie as hell, and walking down New York City streets a menacing pastime. Amidst the overwhelming darkness of Alan Wake II—an astonishingly dark and scary time—there’s Tim, his poorly lit rooms that are sometimes full of supplies, and his stupid little hum. Music permeates this game and series and for good reason: music, like writing or artwork, is about as likely to alter the fabric of Alan Wake’s shifting world. Tim, who exists in these pseudo-saferooms across the world, can always be first clocked by his distinct hum, which happens to be the theme song of one of the series’ several in-game tv shows, Night Springs—almost as if fondly recalling this fictional take on The Twilight Zone, itself an anthology of otherworldly occurrences, will help make sense of his own predicament, or at least conjure some solution to his current episode and carry him to the credits and back to reality. In the darkest places, art is Tim Breaker’s bastion. What that hum always brings him is Alan Wake on another one of his loops of the Dark Place. He’s actually the first person to suggest that Alan’s done this trip through the Dark Place before, which gives Alan something to cling onto as he slowly but surely writes his way out of hell.
Hearing Tim’s hum, much like seeing the bright light of a safe room, or even seeing Remedy’s cosmic janitor Ahti, would immediately dissipate any tension in my muscles. Tim’s little slice of the Dark Place felt free of the stifling grip of the loop and the enigmatic Darkness. It was a foothold on my climb out of there. This especially felt true because of the white board behind Tim, which upon successive visits would grow full of clues he was piecing together to crack the mysteries of the Dark Place and his kidnapper Warlin Door, all the while connecting threads across Remedy’s connected universe. References to another version of himself—likely Jack Joyce from Quantum Break—as well as a “red-haired woman” who’s more than likely Control‘s protagonist Jesse Faden aren’t just breadcrumbs for adoring fans to pick up on. In Alan Wake II, they suggest memory can persist in the Dark Place. The mere fact that every loop prompts Alan to search a new locale where he’ll inevitably find Tim in some new safe room is a sign of progress, or at the very least momentum. Not every loop is a self-fulfilling and destructive one. You can build your way back, or more appropriately in the case of these characters, up.
At the end of Alan Wake II, Saga enters the Dark Place for herself, finds a bullet of light with the help of someone later revealed to be Alan’s thought-to-be-dead wife Alice, and lodges it in Alan’s temple in the writing room that has plagued his nightmares since 2010. It’s a different ending than the one he’s used to: finding Scratch, his doppleganger, in the writing room, and killing him before realizing he’s actually killed himself, continuing the destructive spiral he’s been caught in.
(As an aside, Alan Wake II’s a bit of a headtrip, please play it if you’re reading this with zero context. What the hell is wrong with you?)
That word, “spiral,” is a key one to the ending of this game, as Alan, being set free from the loop he’s perpetuated for himself, realizes that he hasn’t been stagnant, he’s been sinking. As Alice reveals, “The only way out of your loop is destruction or ascension. Light or dark. And we’ve covered the destruction part, many times over.” Alan, our protagonist with one too many demons, has been tearing himself down for some time now. It takes Saga investigating Bright Falls, and consequently Tim Breaker being dragged into the Dark Place, to lend Alan some semblance of direction and place. Tim, undeterred by Mr. Door’s efforts against him, models the upward spiral that countless others have been able to climb out of the Dark Place before Alan can even conceive of it. Tim’s white board filling up to a comical degree, not to mention finally completing his intended goal of giving Saga a page that grants her the clarity to navigate and ultimately escape the Dark Place, is his own ascension. By the end of the game, he hasn’t escaped for himself, but he’s a step closer to Door and, as he puts it, “waking up.”
Finding Tim is the beginning of Alan’s own ascension; we just don’t know it when we first meet him. His light is just one of countless guiding Alan back to reality, back to himself, and back to his art. And I don’t know, there’s something to be said about folks who can pull you out of that hole you’re in and set you straight. So shout out to that silly hum and that light in the dark for assuring both me and Alan that there’s a way out.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.