ALAN WAKE 2 is a wild barrage of creative storytelling and visual flair
In the first playable moments of Alan Wake 2, you control a naked, balding, middle-aged man stumbling in confusion around a forest.
Even by Remedy’s own quirky standards, Alan Wake 2 is idiosyncratic. You could call it self-indulgent, even, as it dives headfirst into its every strange idea. Weaving a winkingly meta journey through all corners of the studio’s lore, at times it feels like watching Remedy get high off its own fumes. Which is exactly what makes it so enthrallingly brilliant.
The game picks up 13 years after writer Alan Wake’s disappearance at the end of the first game, following both his continuing attempts to escape the mysterious Dark Place – a dimension of psychological nightmare – and the investigations of new protagonist Saga Anderson, an FBI agent sent to the backwoods town of Bright Falls to find the culprits behind a series of ritual murders. You play as both characters, each following their own story threads that parallel and interweave with each other, and you can switch between them at set points, allowing you to experience the two journeys in your own unique order.
After a few seconds of staring at his hairy bottom while I guided him around, it dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be your typical big-budget videogame.
Keeps you on edge and makes you work for your moments of respite
SHADOW PLAY Though the story continues almost uninterrupted from the first game, tonally things feel very different in Bright Falls. Alan Wake was the sort of game I’d call spooky rather than scary; Alan Wake 2 is proper survival horror, full of brutal encounters, nail-bitingly tense delves into darkness, and surprisingly gory violence. For both Saga in the real world and Alan in the Dark Place, staying alive means managing your ammo and resources, and carefully deploying sources of light to keep the monstrous Taken at bay and burn away their shadowy defences.
It’s a game of tension and release; long stretches of quiet, building fear, punctuated by short bursts of violence and panic. Brilliantly impactful, satisfying gunplay helps that structure sing – when you hit a Taken’s weak spot, you really know about it, as the booming shot rings out, smokey shadows blast out of the wound, and the creature recoils back. That is, until it shrugs off having half its torso blasted away and starts advancing on you again.
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