max payne talks about his feelings a lot

Been replaying Alan Wake 2 a bit, having charged through it at launch probably too quickly, and forever there is a Remedy game thought percolating in my head, and today it's that Remedy characters always talk about their feelings, as in, you'll often get an inner monologue statement beginning "I felt":

"I felt like I was walking into a trap. I felt guilty, like I was about to get caught."


I can count on my fingers the games I don't think this is missing from. The Maxes Payne and Alans Wake do it, the good Prince of Persia does it (the first thing we find out about the prince in Sands of Time is that he hates killing people, but it took killing someone to find that out). I feel that most big-budget games don't have any coherent internal life to their characters. And it's not like I want every character to have voiceover examining their own mood, but usually it's like the author never even did this as an exercise. What's Joel thinking right now in The Last Of Us? Um, um, um,,,

Remedy characters have always been pretty coherent and interesting, going back to Max Payne 1, whose writing has often had its point missed in much the same way Alan Wake's gone unrecognised for being not badly written but substantially about bad writing. Both are thoughtful homages to things most of their audience took little interest in.

In the pic at the top of this post, Max discovers the thing he's been on a revenge quest about is way worse than he thought, but his reaction, pretty unusually in this type of story, is about recognising the difference between justice and revenge. Max hopes that his pursuit of revenge for its own sake can be justified after the fact, but is able to percieve that it's fucked he even thought that. This is a wildly more complex thought than you usually get from this type of thing.

The second game ruminates a lot on the nature of free will; how maybe it's all an illusion, yada yada - "If you had done something differently, it wouldn't be you." But it also turns on this idea and shows it as a flimsy justification for a planned murder:

The obvious thing to do (and I'm gonna do it) is compare to Max Payne 3, one of the most awfully written games in history. It's remarkable in how relentless its voiceover is, but it's no exaggeration to say that none of it conveys anything. You could cut it all and the plot would still work, and we'd feel more for Max just left to our own imaginings, because he never talks about his feelings, and if he does they're shallow and conflicting and don't ring true. But there's one attempt, late-game, to say anything about Max's state of mind: "It felt like I was detaching, that maybe this was revenge for something else, something buried deep in the past. Everyone who'd meant anything was gone." In context, this is a really amusing line, as nothing as it is - in the absence of any cohesion to the character or plot, the best they can do ends up being a passing acknowledgment of that lack. It's like someone eventually realised it might be worth thinking about what makes this guy tick, but they best they could manage at that late stage was this - to be fair, the best line in the game.