Alan Wake 2
Alan Wake 2 is a 2023 survival horror video game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Epic Games Publishing. The sequel to Alan Wake, the story follows best-selling novelist Alan Wake, who has been trapped in an alternate dimension for 13 years, as he attempts to escape by writing a horror story involving an FBI Special Agent named Saga Anderson.
Alan Wake 2 was released for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on 27 October 2023. The game's development and marketing budget reportedly was €70 million, making it one of the most expensive games to develop and one of the most expensive cultural products from Finland. Alan Wake 2 received generally positive reviews from critics and was nominated for multiple Game of the Year awards. It had sold over 2 million units by December 2024, making it Remedy's fastest-selling game. A downloadable content expansion titled Night Springs was released on 8 June 2024, while a second expansion titled The Lake House was released on 22 October 2024.
Gameplay
Compared to the original Alan Wake, which is an action-adventure game with horror themes, Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror game, although it is still played from a third-person perspective. Players play as Alan Wake or Saga Anderson in two separate single-player stories, which can be played in any order the player chooses, although the opening and ending sequences of the game are linear.Wake and Anderson traverse environments and fight enemies using various firearms and a flashlight, the latter of which can be "focused" to render enemies vulnerable to firearm attacks. Focusing the flashlight drains its battery, and players need to strategically use a limited amount of batteries and ammunition in order to survive. When enemies are close, Alan or Saga can perform a dodge maneuver.
Alan Wake 2 incorporates detective elements: when playing as Saga, players can access an enemy-free space dubbed the "Mind Place". Described by Remedy as a "3D menu", the Mind Place is a visual representation of Saga's thoughts. In the Mind Place, players manage a pin board in which they can connect clues to piece together the main mystery, as well as profile characters to gather clues. As Alan, players have access to the "Writer's Room", where they can see the outline of a novel he is writing. By adding and changing plot details on the outline, they are able to manipulate the space around Alan. Both the Mind Place and the Writer's Room do not pause the outside world.
A returning element from Alan Wake is finding manuscript pages that foreshadow upcoming events in the story.
Synopsis
Plot
FBI agent Saga Anderson, known for her intuitive skills, arrives in Bright Falls with partner Alex Casey to investigate ritualistic murders linked to the Cult of the Tree. Their latest victim is Robert Nightingale, a fellow agent who went missing in a mass incident that occurred in the town in 2010 and was largely covered up by the US government. During the autopsy, Nightingale's corpse reanimates and escapes. Guided by mysterious typewritten pages that seem to predict events, Saga hunts Nightingale through the Cauldron Lake woods and kills him, then finds missing novelist Alan Wake washed ashore, warning of his evil doppelgänger, Mr. Scratch. Back in town, Alan recounts his 13 years trapped in the Dark Place—a dimension tied to the lake and ruled by the Dark Presence, which manifests as Scratch. Alan has tried to escape by writing stories that alter reality, but his attempts always loop back to an apparition of his New York apartment with his wife Alice. Video diaries left by Alice in the apartment suggest she is also haunted by Scratch.Alan eventually writes a story called Return about Saga's investigation, but realizes it has been twisted by Scratch. He warns Saga that Scratch is seeking the Clicker, a supernatural artifact capable of freeing or destroying the Dark Presence. As Return unfolds, Saga discovers her past has been rewritten so that her daughter Logan drowned. Determined to end the story, she retrieves the Clicker but is intercepted by the Federal Bureau of Control, led by Agent Kiran Estevez, who apprehends Alan and the Cult leaders, Ilmo and Jaakko Koskela.
Saga learns from Odin and Tor Anderson—her grand-uncle and grandfather—that her psychic abilities allow her to perceive changes in reality caused by Return. When she attempts to give Alan the Clicker, he kills Jaakko and attacks Saga, convincing her he is actually Scratch. Using FBC light tech, she drives him off. Ilmo, grieving his brother, reveals the Cult's purpose was to defend Bright Falls from the Taken, humans possessed by the Dark Presence. Saga joins forces with Casey, Estevez, Odin, and Tor to summon the real Alan from the Dark Place using the Clicker.
In the Dark Place, Alan learns from his future self that his endless rewrites have created time loops. He discovers a suicide note from Alice and realizes the haunting was caused by his repeated trips to the apartment. Mistaking his past self for Scratch, an enraged Alan kills him, perpetuating the cycle. His despair allows the Dark Presence to possess him, and he subsequently disappears.
The ritual succeeds in bringing Alan back, but at an earlier point in the story, with the Dark Presence inside of him waiting to take over. The possessed Alan attacks the group. Saga and Estevez banish the Dark Presence from Alan, but it transfers to Casey, steals the Clicker, and throws Saga into the Dark Place. Alan re-enters the Dark Place to write a new ending, while Saga learns to navigate the realm, retrieves the Clicker and a Bullet of Light, and reunites with Alan to complete the story.
Saga uses the Clicker to purge Casey. Alan provokes the Dark Presence into possessing him again, and Saga shoots him with the Bullet of Light, seemingly destroying both Alan and the entity. As he dies, Alan realizes the story is trapped in a loop and will reset. Saga calls Logan to see if reality has been restored, but the screen cuts to black.
In a final video diary, Alice reveals she tricked Alan into believing she had died, explaining that he must break the cycle through “destruction” or “ascension.” Alan revives, declaring, “It's not a loop, it's a spiral.”
In the New Game Plus mode, The Final Draft, repeated playthroughs bring the spiral to its end. Alan finishes Return, severing the Dark Presence, which was born from his own darkness and tied to Alice. The Bullet of Light destroys it permanently. Logan answers Saga's call, and Alan revives, free from the loop, proclaiming himself the master of “not just two worlds, but many.”
Expansions
''Night Springs''
Within the Remedy Connected Universe, Night Springs was a horror anthology show akin to The Twilight Zone, which had a few episodes written by Alan himself. Previously used during American Nightmare in a failed attempt to escape the Dark Place, a new season hosted by Warlin Door, a mysterious figure in the Dark Place who accosts Alan during the start of his chapters, covers three short and mostly disconnected stories featuring familiar faces from both Alan Wake and Control - it's implied that these were earlier drafts of Alan's that he rejected in favor of what would become the final version of Control and Return, given the parallels between each story:Number One Fan: A pastiche of poorly-written self-insert power fantasies, the Number One Fan fights through hordes of rabid critics in order to save her beloved writer from his evil twin. Notably, the evil twin attempts to impersonate the writer at one point; this makes it into Return as Scratch hiding in Alan before he tries to take the Clicker from Saga.
North Star: Effectively a cut-down retelling of Control, the Sibling is led to a coffee-themed amusement park, secretly a cover for an paranormal government agency, by her Guiding Star, to search for her long-lost brother, only to find the park taken over by an corruptive and alien force imbued within the park's coffee.
Time Breaker: Actor Shawn Ashmore seemingly finds his own dead body in his dressing room while starring in a videogame developed by Poison Pill Entertainment, subsequently becoming embroiled in a multiversal conflict between the Ripple Effect Corporation, spearheaded by Agent Jesbet and Ashmore's many counterparts, and the Master of Many Worlds. Notably, a number of elements both in the base game and Time Breaker imply that Tim Breaker, Jesse Faden, and Warlin Door are alternate versions of characters in Quantum Break.
''The Lake House''
After Alan washes up to shore from the Clicker ritual, the FBC is alerted to an Altered World Event occurring; Kiran Estevez and her team travel to a research facility dedicated to studying Cauldron Lake, the eponymous Lake House, to gather information and additional manpower in order to coordinate a response, only to find it under a state of emergency and seemingly abandoned. Estevez quickly finds out that the Dark Presence has managed to take over the facility - along with its two married heads, Jules and Diana Marmont, whose Taken forms subsequently slaughter the rest of her team.As the agent ventures further into the facility, Estevez discovers that the Marmonts began to chafe within their marriage and the continued stresses of running the Lake House, and exploited the Oldest House's continued lockdown to conduct increasingly unethical and deranged experiments with no oversight in an effort to one-up each other; Jules attempted to exploit the Dark Presence's abilities by abusing and drugging Rudolf Lane, artist and former patient of Emil Hartman, while Diana believed that attempting to emulate Alan Wake's writing style via automated typewriters and later "conscripting" a ghostwriter under false pretenses would better harness the reality-shaping effects of Cauldron Lake. Eventually, Rudolf broke and committed ritualistic suicide, using his own blood to paint a final, horrific self-portrait, the Painting, which was infused with his hatred and despair; Jules then used the Painting to open a Threshold directly into the Dark Place; the raw emotions within the Painting resonated with the Dark Presence, resulting in the entire facility being Taken. Estevez also encounters Dylan Faden after briefly being transported to the Oldest House via the Oceanview Motel, where he warns her of an upcoming cataclysm in New York City.
Estevez eventually makes her way into the lower levels where the Painting is held, only to witness Jules having his head caved in by his wife, their sheer hatred for each other briefly overpowering the Dark Presence, before Estevez finishes off Diana herself and seals the Painting's Threshold. She then witnesses a vision of Alan writing about their later confrontation at Saga and Casey's safehouse following the Cult of the Tree's attack, and sets it in motion by calling what she learnt in, as a "good tip, nothing more", to her backup.