Game Review: Alan Wake 2 (2023)
Remedy Entertainment
(This review contains minor spoilers about the first few hours of play. It contains descriptions of violence found in the game.)
When Alan Wake was released in 2010, gaming was dominated by large-caliber, story-driven action games like Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Mass Effect 2. The industry-leading titles featured lead characters that each fulfilled some variant of power fantasy, able to destroy enemy hordes and giant monsters with a few presses of a button. Taking a then-out-of-fashion survival horror approach and casting a novelist armed with a flashlight as the lead, Alan Wake offered something that tonally and narratively contrasted with the marquee titles of the time. While highly praised by many who played it, the title ultimately failed to make an obvious impact in the wider video game world at the time.
But cerebral gamers who valued story and vibe over the flashy action and the occasionally absurd melodrama of the period’s big titles saw something remarkable in Alan Wake: it married an unexpectedly deep story, rich in high strangeness, with unique gameplay mechanics that set it apart from its zombie- and alien-focused survival horror contemporaries. Alan Wake was not only unlike anything else around at the time, but unlike anything players has seen before. Finnish developer, Remedy Entertainment, who created Alan Wake, cited Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Bret Easton Ellis, and even Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves as narrative inspirations for the game, while setting the story in what feels like a very intentional recreation of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s iconic 1990s television series, Twin Peaks.
Alan Wake, the player-character and protagonist, was not an ex-cop, special forces member, augmented human, or tough-as-nails lone wolf like most of his counterparts in the games of the period. Alan was a writer of dark fiction, and one suddenly thrust into a plot that made more sense appearing in the pages of his novels than the world in which he found himself. He was neither strong nor fearless, and his flickering flashlight was as important a weapon to him as any firearm. He didn’t level-up, wear armor, or have any obvious special powers; he was a writer looking for his wife who had mysteriously disappeared in a remote part of the Pacific Northwest, near a place called Cauldron Lake.
The title received solid critical reviews and was a moderate commercial success, but within a few years of its publication, Alan Wake felt a touch ephemeral, something destined to be a generational-quality title that nonetheless remained trapped in the past, as game publishers moved away from detail-rich, personal adventures and chased the cash cow of multiplayer, games-as-service titles.
Despite the shift in the zeitgeist, Wake clung to the periphery of the gaming world. Sequels were proposed, delayed, and canceled for a multitude of reasons, and those of us who played and loved the title were left to lament it as another gravestone in the narrative-driven pauper’s field that claimed so many great franchises of the 2000s.
Fortunately, good things don’t always stay dead, and after a decade of many paper-thin stories, multiplayer-everything, and microtransactions, news of Alan Wake’s return appeared, and the teaser elements which followed showed that some of that old magic might still be around. Not only was Alan Wake 2 in production, but the story would be set thirteen years later, keeping us right alongside the lost writer on a parallel timeline. In a way, this was the first shot of immersion players would get with Alan Wake 2, which would, in my assessment, take that particular element to a unmatched level in gaming.
“Wake Has Returned.”
Alan Wake 2 opens with a grisly, unforgettable scene where a naked, obese, seemingly helpless middle-aged FBI agent named Robert Nightingale washes up on the shores of a lake and stumbles his way up a wooded, moonlit path toward what he hopes will be safety. As he makes his way through the dense forest, he has flash visions of Alan Wake, the famed author now missing for thirteen years, grinning and gnashing his teeth, his face smeared with blood. A disembodied voice barks from the darkness around him, and seeing headlights ahead, Nightingale runs toward them. But instead of meeting a rescuer, the agent–who harassed and obstructed Alan Wake’s search for his missing wife in the original game–sees a group of men in deer masks. These strangers call out to him, opening fire and wounding his leg when he tries to run, then a roar from the darkness rises and the scene fades to black, only to cut abruptly to the masked men splaying out Nightingale on a table and cutting out his heart.
Pretty intense, and by slaying Wake’s primary mortal antagonist in the opening scene in brutal fashion, it signals to the player that we are in new territory. Out with the old, and whatnot.
In the first few hours, I realized that this game was taking video game narratives to the next level, and while it does a pretty good job of recapping the events of the previous game, it does presume players to be somewhat familiar with the history of Alan Wake and understand where the story left off in the original–I definitely recommend watching a recap of the 2010 game before beginning this one.
The next scene shows dawn in the same forest, where two (fresh-faced and fit) FBI agents have shown up to investigate the murder. One of them is our protagonist, Saga Anderson, who possesses a semi-supernatural ability called her Mind Place, which is one part visualized deductive reasoning and another part remote viewing. The other is Alex Casey (played by Sam Lake, the game’s creator and Creative Director at Remedy), Saga’s piss-and-vinegar partner who bears an uncanny resemblance to Alan Wake’s most popular fictional detective. Saga and Alex proceed to investigate the crime scene of Nightingale’s murder before moving to the nearby town of Bright Falls to piece together the evidence and set a course.
Saga Anderson (Remedy Entertainment)
The story takes on a new, bizarre wrinkle when Saga reaches Bright Falls: a diner waitress named Rose–returning players will remember from the first game–recognizes her, saying she can’t believe that Saga would return to Bright Falls after suffering the tragedy of her daughter drowning in Caldron Lake years before. Saga, of course, has never been to Bright Falls before the investigation, and believes her daughter is very much alive and well. Just to be sure, she later makes a phone call, and confirms that everything with her family is exactly as she left it. Rose won’t be the first person to recognize Saga and insist that she has an established history in Bright Falls, and the source of the confusion eventually becomes a secondary course to investigate.
In time, the strangeness increases, and the longer she spends in Bright Falls, the less Saga Anderson’s past seems to remain stable. Later, she learns that the missing author Alan Wake isn’t dead, but has only been drawn into something called the Dark Place, a shadowy nether realm that shares a connection to Bright Falls and twists artistic endeavors undertaken in the area. Saga uses Overlaps–thin places between our world and the Dark Place, to communicate with Wake and work on getting him out. But nothing is simple, and these Overlaps are populated by Taken, corrupted, violent souls who wander between worlds and seek to draw more into the dark place. Cauldron Lake, where Saga first arrived and where her daughter purportedly drowned in the minds of Bright Falls residents, is one such place.
As Saga struggles to piece together the mystery of Alan Wake and rescue him from the Dark Place, her work is undermined by an evil doppelganger figure named Scratch, whom Wake believes has taken his place in our world and is set about using the power of the Dark Place to corrupt it.
There’s a whole lot more to it than that, and the layers of story fold back in on one another to create a narrative that is really unlike anything else in video games. The level of immersion is exceptional, as every asset feels crafted for this particular story. While the mechanical gameplay elements are all great-to-excellent, this is very much a story-forward game that will foremost appeal to fans of discordant fiction as well as survival horror.
Remedy Entertainment
I spent nearly two hours exploring every corner of the opening chapter, taking my time to read files, watch broadcasts, and talk to other characters, all before ever reaching any significant combat (I’m pretty sure I could get through it all in twenty or so minutes if I were just rushing through). That amount of richness and depth is something we don’t get too often in modern video games, and usually only narrative is the primary focus of the game. Alan Wake 2 lets you linger on subplots and side ventures if you wish, and at times the game is happy to move very far from the dark tones presented at the outset of the story. This broad palette that accommodates moments of kitschy absurdity and pure evil is strongly reminiscent of Twin Peaks, and it provides a harmonious balance of experience for the player.
That being said, once the sun goes down and the scary things crawl out of the darkness, Alan Wake 2 doesn’t dawdle, throwing the player into an intense survival horror experience punctuated by moody reprieves that fit the narrative aesthetic created in the opening chapter. The pacing is exceptional, balancing the frenetic combat sequences with the more expositional chapters with unmatched grace, all the while gradually revealing pieces of the numerous storylines around Saga, Wake, and Bright Falls itself.
My Nightstand Drawer is Full of Crossbow Bolts
Alan Wake 2 shares a lot of mechanical DNA with its predecessor, with Saga and Alan needing to use light to effectively break the defenses of the enemies they encounter. While virtually all of the enemies in the game are Taken, twisted versions of humans with adequately varied attack patterns and behaviors, the core mechanics of burning away the darkness and using conventional weapons to destroy enemies holds true.
While I could devote the entire review to the depth and beauty of AW2’s narrative elements, it’s definitely still a survival horror title, with the player needing to manage healing supplies, defensive resources, and ammunition like a seasoned zombie hunter. The game strikes an ideal balance for the genre, giving you just enough ammo and supplies to encourage conservation, but not so little that you feel you can’t occasionally Danny DeVito your way out of a tough spot. Importantly, you never feel safe in Alan Wake, as the disturbing Taken are always capable opponents ready to end your adventure in a moment of carelessness.
There is a small weakness in the gameplay though, and that is that the Taken, despite the variations, are the only enemy both Saga and Alan will face. Some of them are less obviously human than others, but by the end of the game I was really ready to battle something distinctly different, as we did in a limited capacity in the original Alan Wake. I know Remedy has planned multiple DLCs for Alan Wake 2, and I hope we get some non-humanoid opponents there.
Apart from the occasional box of bullets stowed away in a random drawer at a nursing home, Alan Wake 2 does a remarkable job of making the player feel like they’re in a living, believable environment that matches the story. In a world where crunch and overpromising define the format, Alan Wake 2 feels like the work of an unfettered visionary team that, true or not, were able to make exactly what they aspired to, and the end result is that the game achieves a level of immersion and intentionality that isn’t readily comparable to anything else in the format.
“You can never know in which tree the devil sits.”
Time and again, the game introduces pleasant settings during the day only to patiently draw them into the discordant dark, and the locations of Alan Wake 2 embody the concept of the horrific hiding within the mundane. A flooded amusement park looks normal enough at a distance, but once you reach it you hear the groan of the aged rides and the drone of the slightly failing calliope music, and these elements combine naturally to tinge the experience with dread. Later, an eclectic retirement home in the woods takes on an element of evil as the sun begins to go down and Saga discovers the nasty truth behind recent events in the community. An innocent parade float becomes a murder scene when the last touches are put in place.
Remedy Entertainment
Survival horror often trades on sneaky, unexpected attacks and ambushes, using these to create tension even when no danger is recognized, but Alan Wake 2 takes a wild approach where you always hear your enemies before you see them. And yet, this doesn’t lessen the dread because the Taken, who often shriek unsettling bits of dialogue divorced from the context of their mortal lives, are unwaveringly disturbing. Even when I had relatively plenty of ammo and health, I never got comfortable around Wake’s enemies, as the disturbing Taken are always unsettling, always dangerous, always something from which you want to flee at the earliest possibility.
For me, Alan Wake 2 was able to accomplish something almost no horror property can but to which the highest aspire to: the ability to create a perpetually deepening sense of dread. The game is heavy with ambient audio cues (good headphones are a must!) that keep you on edge any time you’re not surrounded by friendly characters. While the subtle horror elements of the title deserve a lot of praise, the overt ones nearly match their effectiveness, and there were moments where I strongly considered giving my nerves a break.
The Conclusion Must Fit the Story
I describe the original Alan Wake as “an early-years Stephen King novel married to an extended cut of Twin Peaks” and feel that does a pretty solid job of capturing the aesthetic. Alan Wake 2 is more original, carving its own path while retaining and respecting that foundation, creating a next-level survival horror narrative that strikes a remarkably well-balanced note between action and story.
Remedy Entertainment
Much as 2023’s Baldur’s Gate 3 has changed the standard of evaluation for RPGs for all time, I feel like Alan Wake 2 has comparably raised the bar for survival horror. This is a sharp narrative that hits on all notes, creating an experience that is as memorable as the original legendary title. Remedy is a developer like no other, as vaunted and special as Blizzard Entertainment in its heyday, or FromSoftware is today. Their hallmarks include immersive, organic, well-detailed worlds broken into small, content-rich chapters with a masterful number of intentional elements present in each passage of the story. Unquestionably the most intelligent of horror video games, Alan Wake 2 is as deep and mysterious as Twin Peaks, as challenging as Black Mirror, and as monolithic in the horror landscape as The Stand.
Alan Wake 2 is a shining example of why I cover video games on Vogue Horror. It perfectly embodies the unique storytelling tools available to the format, and makes exceptional use of these to create what is an unequivocal masterpiece in both the format and the genre.
Verdict: 10/10
Strengths
Uncompromised vision, telling a bold story with exceptional deftness
Brilliant plot and characters, supported by solid mechanical elements
Remarkably well-balanced and paced
Genuinely scary, possessing a sense of creeping dread punctuated by more aggressive scares
Weaknesses
Effective, but ultimately limited palette of enemies and encounters
Tension in certain sequences may be too much for many gamers
Story is going to go over some heads
You can purchase Alan Wake 2 on the Epic Game Store, Playstation, or Xbox.
You may also like: Twin Peaks, Alan Wake, Control, SOMA, Stephen King
