A sequel poses a difficult challenge in any form of media. You need to do something new and push the story forward, maybe recontextualise information or motives, or introduce new conflicts that may not have been planned for when you were writing the original. It needs to be fresh, but also familiar. For a good sequel, you need to balance innovation with nostalgia, without retreading the same story you did before.
This, I imagine, is especially hard when the original property came out over a decade ago and has developed a cult following, and you have decided to tie the sequel into a shared narrative universe with some of your other properties. This brave feat is exactly what Remedy Entertainment decided to do with Alan Wake when they set up plots for a sequel as part of DLC for their 2019 game, Control. It was a bold move, but it paid off and generated a lot of hype and expectation for it before its release in 2023. So with finishing Alan Wake Remastered a few weeks ago, I jumped straight into the sequel ready to take on the darkness once more.
It’s an unavoidable fact that a lot has changed in the gaming landscape over the last 13 years since Alan Wake was released on the Xbox 360. Survival Horror has seen a renaissance of sorts with the Resident Evil series of Remakes and last year’s Dead Space remake, and it seems like Remedy has been paying attention to these games and absorbed the lessons it learned from their success. The most obvious of these is the game’s graphical fidelity.
The graphics on display here blew me away even when compared to the incredible-looking remakes I just mentioned., The character models look amazing and the motion capture was perfect, capturing the emotiveness and movements of its actors in a way that really breathed life into each character. There are so many parts of the game where you see a character in rendered in-engine next to or near a live action character and honestly you can see how close technology is to reaching true photorealism. The environments are beautiful and detailed too in a way that it’s easy to get lost looking around. The graffiti that fills every wall in the twisted version of New York Alan must traverse, the little signs that have quotes from the manuscripts from the first game. The way the paths bend and circle naturally around the rocks and trees of the woods around Cauldron Lake. It’s a delight to just drink in the world around you as you explore.
The oppressive darkness of the original is back too, with the improved lighting systems the game uses. The darkness now feels more threatening and impenetrable than ever before and there are moments of the game where the shadows from the torch you use genuinely set me on edge, worried that creatures would jump at me from the dark. There are moments, where you enter what’s known as an “overlap” an area between worlds, and the game uses these to great effect. The first one of these filled the area with a harsh red tone, that stained everything around the main path, and it felt like I was stepping right into a horror movie. It felt like Remedy had learned some incredible things about colour and light when making Control and it’s in these overlaps that this is most evident.
This is heightened by the soundtrack of the game as well. The ambient music and sounds you hear are always there just helping the tension slowly build, until it crescendos in a moment of combat or panicked sprinting to the light of a safe haven. The sound design is also nerve-wracking, I hated the shades in New York that whisper Alan’s name, sometimes sounding far away, sometimes right next to you, never sure if they will attack you or leave you unaccosted.
I am usually pretty good with scary media. Jump scares don’t usually phase me, and the level of atmosphere and tension a game like Alien Isolation has is usually something I’m comfortable with. Alan Wake 2 however, made me jump more times than I can count. There are jump scares that happen during the game as you explore and get closer to each chapter finale, but generally, enemies seemed quieter and more prone to sneaking up on you, and I found myself swearing at the screen a lot more than I expected to, as I got knocked over by a hostile shadow I had walked passed, or was attacked by those creepy swimming taken that look like they have four arms popping out of nowhere and the sound design of the game is owed a huge amount of credit for making me feel that tense and on edge.
As a side note while talking about the music and sounds, the game’s chapters are split up similarly to Alan Wakes where each chapter has an ending screen with a song playing over it. I believe this time they are all original pieces and they are all brilliant. There are also a couple of new songs from the Old Gods of Asgard, a returning band from the original game, that have been stuck in my head for days now and are played at two of the best and coolest parts of the game.
In the original Alan Wake, it felt like there were only a few enemy types, and they were all very similar-looking except for the birds and poltergeists. Alan Wake 2 does a much better job differentiating its enemies and how you deal with them depends on what you are fighting, unlike the first game which had the same strategy for them all. One big chage to the enemies is not all of them need to have the shadows stripped from them before you can shoot them, but flashing them with a focussed blast of light does stun most enemies for a short time, so its always good to do. This is balanced by the torch not regenerating over time and each flash using a chunk of the battery instead of slowly draining. There are still safe havens in the form of lamp posts again, but these only stop enemies from seeing you, they don’t make enemies disappear anymore. It makes the enemy encounters a lot more tense when you can see a group of them just waiting for you to step out of your hiding place
This is just one example of some of the huge changes to gameplay between the original and the sequel. Resident Evil has clearly been a huge influence on the title, with you now having the same inventory management as Resident Evil 2 and 3 Remakes, and there being safe rooms that you can find that let you store items and save your game, no Ink Ribbons needed here though. You can find upgrades that let you increase your carrying capacity, and certain weapons take up more space, I did feel like I was running out of space a lot, especially with Saga having charms that act as equippable little power-ups, but they do take up space when you find them. There are also medical kits of various potencies to use as the light doesn’t heal you the same way it did before.
The biggest change though, is that there are two playable characters. Alan Wake, and Saga Anderson, have their own areas to explore and specific gameplay mechanics to utilise. Alan Wake must traverse the Dark Place, attempting to escape again. To do this he must write his way through the world, as his story directly affects the world around him. In gameplay terms what this means is as you explore, you find Scenes and Plot Points. A scene is a location, like a collapsed tunnel inside a subway. A Plot Point is a key term you can find in the form of echoes that give Alan Inspiration, and in Alan’s Writing room, you can combine these two things to make paths forward. For example, combine the Collapsed Tunnel, with the Murder Cult Plot Point, and the area will change, filling the space with an altar, and perhaps a door leading to a new area.
Alan also has access to a fancy lamp that you get early on, that can steal light and put it somewhere else. Much like the story-boarding, moving the lights changes the world around Alan, opening up paths to push ever forward into the darkness.
Saga Anderson, the new addition to the cast, is an FBI agent sent to Bright Falls to investigate a cult with her partner, who gets dragged into the story Alan is writing, and forced to deal with the taken that have started appearing back in Bright Falls. As an FBI agent in the real world, she cannot change the world around her the same way Alan can, but she does have access to her Mind Palace. In here she can put together clues on her cork board, or profile people she has met to learn more about their motives or what they are hiding. I found the profiling to be a very interesting system, especially because of the way it is presented, as Saga sits in a chair contemplating a characters thoughts or motives, a live action version of that character paces behind her talking to her and it makes for some really interesting scenes. However the case board felt shallow in comparison, where you mostly just click and drag pictures to right space on the board. There are moments where you need to fill in the board to progress the game, but most of the time it felt like pointless busywork especially when compared with Alan’s more interesting writers board.
When most of Alan’s chapters felt like puzzle solving, with combat being less common and less threatening overall, Saga’s chapters are a lot more action-heavy. Combat is fairly regular, with enemies spawning randomly as you explore, but she also has the games only boss fights. I don’t mind this separation of the two as for most of the game you can freely swap between the two stories in safe rooms, so if you get bored of one style you can mix it up. Overall though, combat was definitely less common than the original, but it felt more impactful when it was forced upon you.
Each character’s chapters also are quite different when it comes to trophies, with the majority of them coming from collectables from Saga’s side in Bright Falls and its surrounding areas. Thankfully this is another huge improvement from the original, there are way fewer mandatory collectables, and most of them are tied to small puzzles that you need to solve. There are still manuscripts to find, that are worth finding for their contents, but you only need to find one for a trophy which is unmissable anyway. Instead, there are lunchboxes to find, which also provide a currency to upgrade your weapons, so are worth seeking out regardless. Cult Stashes, which contain useful supplies, or secrets and are usually locked with a hidden key, or puzzle to solve to get the answer. Then there are the nursery rhyme puzzles, in which you need to find small dolls around the world, then place them in specific spots around the rhyme, to solve the puzzle. These always reward you with very useful charms. All three of these components, Dolls, Rhymes and Charms have a trophy for collecting them all. Lastly, there are TV commercials to watch. I am so happy that these are back, and these might even be better than the Night Springs episodes due to the fantastic acting of Peter Franzen of Vikings fame, who plays both of the Koskela brothers.
Alan on the other hand has things he can collect, Words of Power dotted around the world can be used to upgrade his gear or his abilities, but only one of these is needed for a trophy. The only other collectables to look out for are the Writers Journey videos, which play on TVs you can find and aren’t even really hidden out of the way for the most part. The game also has trophies for finding each weapon and using all of the small consumable tools like Rocket Flares, Flashbangs and Explosives to kill enemies. Overall the trophies are not that hard to get, and the game makes it very clear when there is a point of no return, and no collectible is missable before that point. It’s a nice thing when the trophies don’t stand in the way of the game itself by making you do unnecessary things, and are just an added bonus on top of a useful thing to pick up in the game. I would recommend following a guide though to help you find all the collectibles so your journey to the “Sisu” trophy will be a smooth one.
There is also a trophy for petting a dog you can meet in the town of Watery just before the point of no return, so that’s a win in my book.
Finally, then, let’s talk about the part of Alan Wake 2 that I think is truly outstanding.
The stories of the two protagonists are naturally liked throughout the narrative, but for the most part, you can choose which story to follow, until the game forces you to finish both before the finale. Both sides are equally brilliant though. I don’t want to spoil the story as it’s something best experienced for yourself, but I will say this. Alan Wake 2’s narrative is so clever and so fun to follow down the rabbit hole that even when it lampoons itself for its use of tropes, or use of metafiction, it always feels earnest and believable.
Its constant use of different types of art and media, referencing movies or books or even remedy’s previous titles acts to constantly remind the player they are part of the fiction just as much as Saga and Alan are. It pushes you to ask what’s real here, what’s part of the stories Alan is writing and how much is being corrupted by the Dark Presence, blurring the lines between the reality of the world and the fiction of it. There is so much to unpack in the story of the game, especially with the small added scenes from the Final Draft update, that I know I will be reading and theorising on what everything means, and wondering where the story will go next in the DLC that is planned to come out later in 2024.
In my Alan Wake Remastered review, I said that my favourite part of that game was how well the game ties all of its parts together to serve its narrative, and Alan Wake 2 is exactly the same. The way the story loops and spirals around Alan’s story is so interesting, so obvious in its message but also so vague at the same time that I feel like I still don’t understand everything I played through. All I can say, is I loved every dark twisted turn of it.
The original Alan Wake ends with Alan saying “It’s not a lake…it’s an Ocean” as he comes to his grand realisation about the Dark Place, and it mirrors how I feel about the two games. If Alan Wake, is a beautiful dark lake, its sequel is an ocean, more expansive, more impressive and more encompassing in every way.
Leave a Reply