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Alan Wake 2 is a sequel to the acclaimed horror game Alan Wake, set in the Pacific Northwest. Explore the dark and twisted reality of the Dark Place, where Alan Wake is trapped for 13 years, and meet Saga Anderson, an FBI agent investigating a series of murders linked to his story.
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Alan Wake 2[ a] is a 2023 survival horror video game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Epic Games Publishing.
- The write stuff.
- The Dark Place Beyond the Pines
- Alan Wake II - Review Screens
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- What's the best horror game of 2023 so far?
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- Alan Wake II Review
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By Tristan Ogilvie
Updated: Oct 26, 2023 3:58 pm
Posted: Oct 26, 2023 1:00 pm
Thirteen years after his wife went missing in the small town of Bright Falls, author Alan Wake is trapped inside a Dark Place that he can’t seem to write himself out of. As I sit down to type out this review of Alan Wake II, I can somewhat empathize. This is just so incomparable to anything else I’ve played in recent memory that it’s tough to work out exactly where to start. Alan Wake II is a single-player adventure that seamlessly shifts from slow-burn psychological terror to frantic survival-horror action, from gorgeously rendered game worlds to striking full-motion video sequences, and from morbid investigations to show-stopping musical surprises. It’s bloody, it's bonkers, and for the most part it's utterly brilliant. Coming in at the tail end of a bumper-crop gaming year packed with absolute bangers, Alan Wake II still manages to burn as brightly as a freshly fired signal flare.
Spanning two wildly contrasting realities, Alan Wake II’s roughly 17-hour story manages to be far more coherent than that of the original – despite its substantial increase in complexity. We pick things up in present day Bright Falls, taking control of FBI Agent Saga Anderson, who’s been dispatched to the small lakeside town to investigate the latest victim in a series of ritualistic slaughters: a body found beside Cauldron Lake with a gaping hole where his heart used to be. Saga is an instantly likable addition to the weird world that Alan Wake shares with Remedy Entertainment’s other supernatural game, Control. She’s dedicated to her casework but not above a bit of playful banter with her partner, Special Agent Alex Casey, and these opening couple of hours of mostly combat-free procedural investigation give the story a realistic grounding before the darkness starts to descend and every placid hillscape transforms into a harrowing hellscape.
The opening couple of hours of mostly combat-free procedural investigation give the story a realistic grounding.
The mystery deepens still when Alan Wake washes up onto the shore of Cauldron Lake, rambling about the Dark Place and surprised to learn that he’s been missing for the past 13 years. Then Alan Wake II really gets weird. From here, the perspective shifts back and forth between Saga’s search for the truth in Bright Falls and Alan’s desperate attempts...
The alluring power of its contrasting settings only further enhances its mystery, but while the lakeside shores of Bright Falls present some stunning sunset scenes and detail-rich forest surrounds, it’s the grimy, neon-soaked New York plaza setting of Alan’s stages that really show off the immense skill of Remedy’s team of artists. Resembling the kind of nightmare you might have after spending 24 hours eating cheese and watching Taxi Driver and Mean Streets on a loop, this rotten slice of the Big Apple is a haunting otherworld that I found consistently compelling to explore, from the graffiti-covered construction areas to the menacing sprawl of subway tunnels that lie beneath its surface.
Alan’s stages also stimulated a different part of my brain by introducing some enjoyable environmental puzzles. Using a paranormal table lamp, Alan can absorb the energy from one light source and redirect it to another in order to both create a new illuminated safe haven from the evils that lurk in the shadows – but also to physically alter the world around him and open up new paths forward. It’s a dazzling trick that recalls the pulling of the light switch cord to blink in and out of the Oceanview Hotel from the Oldest House in Control, and it grows in complexity over time: determining the right sequence to manipulate multiple light sources progressively ups the challenge involved in unlocking each new area to examine.
In place of gathering evidence and arranging it on a caseboard like in Saga’s stages, in Alan’s reality you must seek out plot elements in the form of floating pairs of orbs that must be observed from the right perspective to create an eclipse that triggers ghostly, hardboiled scenes from Alan’s own Alex Casey crime novel series. These can then be rewritten into Alan’s present scenario to distort his reality into disturbing new dioramas that bring him closer towards the dark place’s exit, and reveal ominous parallels to the Bright Falls slayings that Saga seeks to solve. (And here I was thinking Michael Cera was the only Alan desperate to escape a corrupted alternate reality this year.)
And here I was thinking Michael Cera was the only Alan desperate to escape a corrupted alternate reality this year.
“
To make things all the more disconcerting, Alan Wake II’s Creative Director, Sam Lake, plays both the character of Alex Casey in Alan’s world and FBI Special Agent Alex Casey in Saga’s story, and also appears as himself in a peculiar late night talk show that Alan finds himself as a recurring guest on. You might not know his name but you probably know his famous face, since it was plastered on the mug of the original Max Payne. He even does the signature scowl! Alan Wake II’s heavy meta-mystery is like a jigsaw puzzle locked inside a Rubik’s Cube that’s covered in sudokus, and it’s honestly such a strange and wonderful trip that takes more unexpected detours and recursive loops than a disgruntled Uber driver.
Indeed Alan Wake II features more plots than a cemetery, and just as high a bodycount. The fundamentals of combat remain largely the same as the enjoyable flashlight-fueled fighting of the original, but its execution has been enhanced significantly. Enemies are once again literal shadows of their former selves, and the most efficient way to dispatch them is by using the boosted beam of your flashlight to burn away their cloudy darkness shields and blasting disgusting chunks of exposed flesh off their bones with your expanding arsenal of firearms. This time around glowing weak points will occasionally be revealed on an enemies’ body, and if you manage to successfully target them you can inflict substantially more damage and save a few precious ammo rounds in the process, which felt like a nice reward for taking an extra fraction of a second to carefully line up my shots.
This won’t be a big deal to anybody used to games that allow you to run, but if you’re coming back to Alan Wake along with me it is fantastic: Both Saga and Alan are blessed with an unlimited sprint ability, which marks a huge improvement to the perennially out-of-puff Alan from the original, who couldn’t run 10 yards without doubling over like an asthmatic who just took a wrong turn into a smokers lounge. Our protagonists are generally more nimble, too; the dodge button feels snappier and allowed me to more reliably duck under swinging pipes or thrown pickaxes, and it even works on the ground should you be knocked off your feet, allowing you to quickly roll out of harm’s way and avoid any potential follow-up attacks.
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Resident Evil 4 (Remake)
Alan Wake II
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Alan’s mental health isn’t the only thing here that isn’t as strong as it could be. Although the different arsenals of the two playable characters each boast their own advantages, from the heightened stopping power and reusable bolts of Saga’s crossbow to the expanded area-of-effect of Alan’s flare gun, their individual skill trees seem somewhat lopsided in their implementation. Whereas Alan’s ‘Words of Power’ skill tree features 21 different skills that can each be potentially upgraded up to three times over, Saga’s upgrades are limited to just three buffs for each firearm in her inventory, and each comes at such a high cost of the collectable manuscript scraps hidden around Bright Falls that by the time I’d reached the end credits I’d only invested in a handful of them. To be frank, they didn’t feel all that necessary on the normal difficulty setting, but perhaps they’ll be of far greater use in the planned Nightmare difficulty that’s set to be added to Alan Wake II post-launch.
Furthermore, and in contrast with Alan’s impressive environmental remixing, Saga is regularly saddled with a few too many survival-horror stereotypes, like fuse boxes to repair and combination locks to solve (although to be fair, decoding the latter does require a significant amount of brain power at times). I was also a little bit disappointed that there were no new Night Springs episodes to watch on the televisions in Bright Falls, although having said that, the commercials that are substituted in their place (starring a pair of local entrepreneurs called the Koskela brothers) were so hilariously offbeat that I still tried to track down every in-game idiot box I could find. (I’m talking about fictional commercials, that is, not poorly implemented product-placement for Verizon Wireless.)
Intensity in ten entries.
Still, any issues I had with Alan Wake II sank without a trace like an out-of-towner in Cauldron Lake, washed away by the torrent of other things that it gets right. It undoubtedly takes a lot of inspiration from film and television, taking the Twin Peaks-meets-The Twilight Zone base of the original and mixing in the best bits of True Detective, Seven, Inception, and more into the pot. But it also folds in some nods to some modern gaming classics, blindsiding you with truly unnerving, Inscryption-like fourth-wall trickery and eerie full-motion video moments that recall 2022’s found-footage freak out, Immortality.
Any issues I had with Alan Wake II sank without a trace like an out-of-towner in Cauldron Lake.
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Alan Wake II delivers one of the boldest and most brain-bending survival-horror storylines this side of Silent Hill 2, presents it with uniformly immaculate art direction and audio design, and reinvigorates the series’ signature light-based shooting as though it’s been locked and loaded with a fresh pack of Energizers. Even though its skill-upgrade...
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Review scoring
amazing
Alan Wake II is a superb survival horror sequel that makes the cult-classic original seem like little more than a rough first draft by comparison.
IGN praises Alan Wake II for its complex and coherent story, stunning visuals, and innovative gameplay. The review explores the contrasting realities of Bright Falls and New York, the paranormal puzzles, and the musical surprises.
Alan Wake II is a superb survival-horror sequel that makes the cult-classic original seem like little more than a rough first draft by comparison.
- Remedy Entertainment
- Windows
Oct 26, 2023 · Alan Wake 2 is a survival-horror game set in the Remedy Connected Universe, where a writer and an FBI agent face a nightmare world of fiction and reality. Learn about the game's release date, platforms, price, trailer, storyline, gameplay, expansions, and preorders.
Dec 10, 2021 · Alan Wake, the writer who faced the Taken in Bright Falls, returns in a survival horror sequel in 2023. Alan Wake 2 will be a next-generation game for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X, with a trailer and more details to come in Summer of 2022.
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Alan Wake 2 launches on Xbox Series X|S on October 17, 2023! The long awaited sequel to the award-winning cinematic action-thriller and Remedy Entertainment's take on survival horror. A string...
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