Since the gimmick Twitter accountCan You Pet The Dog?blew up in 2019, game developers have been scrambling to get a little free publicity by allowing players to pet all manner of animals in their games. FromThe Last of Us Part 2toHades, toAvatar: Frontiers of PandoraandBlair Witch, devs have gone out of their way in recent years to let players pet a Noah’s ark menagerie.
So, it isn’t surprising thatAlan Wake 2includes some nods to the meme (and, as such, has beenfeatureda few timeson Can You Pet The Dog? since release). It has an actual dog you’re able to pet, though the circumstances surrounding that interaction are stranger and funnier than they are in most games that make concessions to the meme (SPOILER ALERT: Mayor Setter, who you see campaign signs for throughout the game, is actually a dog). But, the more common occurrence finds co-protagonist Saga Anderson finding deer heads mounted to various walls around Bright Falls and Watery and petting them. As she does, she’ll say something compassionate like, “Rest easy buddy,” or “I feel bad for these guys,” or “such a shame.”
This small interaction manages to encapsulate Alan Wake 2’s whole deal. On an obvious level, this game takes place in rural towns in the Pacific Northwest, and deer heads are an aesthetic match for the wood-paneling and log cabin decor.
But, it goes a bit deeper. This is a game that takes a form that players are comfortable with — it’s a cinematic triple-A narrative game; it’s survival horror in the mold ofResident Evil 4; it’s a third-person shooter — then loads that familiar structure with big ideas and off-kilter storytelling techniques. It’snot unlike Twin Peakswhich, in its original run on ABC, used the spoonful of serialized murder mystery sugar to get a broad audience to take their Lynchian medicine.
That iconic series is an obvious influence on both Alan Wake games (in so many ways it would take an entire other article to explore the connections with any depth). But, one of the beefiest pieces of connective tissue is in Alan Wake 2’s characterization of Saga. The interactions with the deer heads help paint Saga as the game’s Agent Cooper, Twin Peaks' quirky FBI agent played by Kyle MacLachlan. Both are emotionally intelligent FBI agents with access to realms beyond the physical world — in Cooper’s case, The Black Lodge; in Saga’s case, her Mind Place and the Overlaps. The connection to the deer heads speaks to Saga’s empathy, but also to a connection to something beyond this world. The deer, which retain their appearance while changing fundamentally in death, are not unlike the Taken that Alan and Saga confront across the game’s twin campaigns.
Alan Wake 2 even has a Cooper working at the Bright Falls Sheriff’s Station. James, not Dale, but still.
Remedy used the viral challenge to include something cute and cuddly as a means to further characterize their protagonist. When Saga pets a taxidermied deer, I see Remedy subverting expectations by including something that is expected in triple-A games at this point, but using that contrivance as an opportunity to Trojan horse its own meaning into its world.
