YMMV / Creeping Darkness

• Harsher in Hindsight / Hilarious in Hindsight: With the release of Alan Wake II, it's pretty entertaining to see what this story got right, as well as wrong:
  • In the prologue, Alan mentions that the Dark Place has been physically erasing his writing as a result of its dissatisfaction with how Return is turning out. It also turns out that Alan has to write a whole other book — Initiation — before he can even finish Return.
  • As a means to fix his mistake of setting the Dark Presence upon Equestria, Alan resolves to write "a horror story with a happy ending", something he also attempts in Alan Wake II. Here, however, it only takes him one try before he's ultimately successful.
  • After Alan initially writes himself into the story as a Zane-like mentor figure, the Dark Place retaliates by infecting Alan with a part of it, slowly turning him into a Taken. In II, the Dark Presence 'infects' Alan prior to his return to the real world, which allows Scratch to tag along as a dark passenger. The shadows that attack Alan during his portion of the story are also other versions of Alan, caught at different points in the same loop.
  • Even the power of the sun can't save Celestia, since being able to summon the sun removes the tension from a horror story. In II, the Taken are also unaffected by sunlight.
  • Alan ends the story with the resolve to finally complete Return... only to still wind up trapped, 11 years after this story's writing (13 years total between the first game and the second). However, Alan also mentions that he only needs to write himself out of the dark halfway. Meanwhile, he can rely on Barry and Alice to help him. Alan learns a similar lesson in II, with Saga and Casey set to join him on the journey out.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Or Nyx. Thanks to the authors' later My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic Past Sins. The two stories are Alternate Continuities, sharing the common element of Nyx but otherwise being completely unrelated to each other.