Knowledge trees
Ho, wayfarer!
Beware slight spoilers for Alan Wake 2 in the passages ahead.
Entering that tunnel, you find yourself sealed in at either end.
But the mural suggests a way out: it changes when you turn around, following an unspoken narrative.
It’s a gear as delicate as the graffiti elsewhere in the Dark Place is obnoxious.
Metsanpeitto refers to “the forest’s cover”.
The metsanpeitto would often also distort sounds or be void of natural sounds altogether.
But for the people searching for the missing, everything would appear normal."
The enchantment of metsanpeitto can’t be escaped.
It must be dispelled, defused.
“These include looking through the knotted roots of a tree or using specific rhymes to break the spell.
“The light shifter puzzles in the Dark Place change the environment into different versions of itself.
Saga and Wake see glimpses of one another between realities at the end of an Overlap or murder site.
These are all speaking in some way to the idea of different realities touching our own.”
The classic mistake you make, on entering a wood, is trying to travel in a straight line.
But the path is not truly straight - it meanders gently under cover of the play of verticals.
you might follow that literary lineage into video games.
I’m no coder, but I get the sense that forests arefiddly propositions for developers.
Trees are flexing and fussy organic structures, occupying an annoying hinterland between predictability and randomness.
They repeat enough to threaten monotony while remaining fundamentally dissimilar.
Leaves constitute hundreds and thousands of smaller, dispersing shapes, not quite the tree, not quite themselves.
Developers cheat, of course.
Our version tends to revolve around monsters that lurk in our local forest.
“There are a lot of birches in Watery,” says foliage and photogrammetry artist Ciara Creagh-Peschau.
“This was a really big part of visually evoking Finland and the birch forests we have here.
This area is heavy on Douglas firs, which have a reputation for weathering forest fires.
“It’s a bonus that they get a shout-out in Twin Peaks as well!”
There are vine maples, used by native American basketweavers, which have an undead aspect here.
The world is a space to be mapped, not a spell to untangle.
But there is rarely the possibility of falling under the forest’s spell.
Perhaps if more open worlds permitted their designers to wander in this fashion, they’d be more enchanting.
