The opening narration of Alan Wake 2 lays its cards on the table. “In a horror story,†intones the titular Wake, “there are only victims and monsters, and the trick is not to end up as either.†From there, the game plunges into a dreamy, subversive sequence: You’re given control of an overweight, middle-age man lurching naked from a lake at night. Pushing forward on the left analogue stick, you direct him through a forest until he reaches a handful of figures wearing deer marks. What unfolds is one of the most gruesome murders yet rendered in a video game, the screen erupting in a maelstrom of noise, light, and stomach-churning viscera.
Remedy Entertainment, the acclaimed Finnish video-game studio, has been working toward Alan Wake 2 for all of its 28-year existence. Surrealist dream-logic courses through its games, from the anguished flashbacks of 2001’s Max Payne to the supernatural architecture of 2019’s Control, but it has never been more confidently, elegantly, or cohesively executed than here. The game is a cosmic, Lynchian nightmare in the form of a slow-burn police procedural. The less sense it makes — indeed, the knottier its Pacific Northwest woods become — the more it pulls you in.
Alan Wake 2, a sequel to the 2010 cult classic about an author of schlocky novels, welcomes new protagonist FBI agent Saga Anderson to the fold. Where other Remedy games flirted with light investigative elements by asking the player to trawl environments for ancillary plot details, Alan Wake 2 makes detective gameplay a focal point. With her employer’s acronym emblazoned in bright yellow on her jacket, Anderson begins looking for clues, engaging in light patter with her partner, fellow agent Alex Casey (whose performance actor is the game’s creative director Sam Lake). Upon finding objects of interest, or accruing a new piece of information, Anderson warps to a plushly rendered 3-D mind palace, piecing events together by sticking clues to the case board. Slowly, she makes deductions, which push the narrative forward. Action is tense, claustrophobic, and challenging, as per the conventions of the survival horror genre: Every bullet must be made to count; every shot is a moment of drama in itself.
Things get freaky quickly. The locals of Bright Falls, a bunch so goofy they would give the residents of Twin Peaks a run for their money, claim to recognize Anderson from a tragic past but she, with understandable irritation, doesn’t recall such events. Wake, meanwhile, hasn’t been seen for 13 years, yet his manuscript pages keep appearing in the wilderness. In order to further her investigation, Anderson realizes she must venture into a paranormal space called the Overlap, a task she accepts unblinkingly. All of a sudden, the woods around her twist into gnarled, recursive shapes, the path forward bending back on itself as a series of confounding loops.
If Anderson and her procedural police work were the sum total of Alan Wake 2’s offering, it would be more than compelling enough. But we still have to find out what happened to Wake. The author, we learn, has languished in another surreal, alternate dimension called the Dark Place, a realm wherein works of art can influence and rewrite reality. For Wake, this setting manifests as his home, New York City, albeit a perpetually nocturnal, rain-soaked, and reflective version of it. He’s able to manipulate this environment using either a magical lantern or, more curiously, by editing the stories he’s currently working on from his plot board (visually similar to Anderson’s case board). These sequences are delightfully disorientating — level design as a dream-logic puzzle, which recalls, at times, the most beguiling environment work found in the Dark Souls series. It’s also rich thematically and narratively: Wake’s New York is a psychogeographic trap partly of his own making. He picks obsessively at this space, editing and rearranging the narrative until it presents him with a route of escape.
Between these two protagonists, we have the game’s central, oscillating tension: Anderson plunging into the depths of mystery; Wake trying to extrapolate himself from it; pastoral horror meets urban nightmare — a juxtaposition that is frequently jarring and thrilling.
Though these characters might appear at odds with one another (Wake: narcissistic, angry, preening. Anderson: rational, empathetic, earthy) they also share a means of processing the world, a point teased out elegantly by their respective plot and case boards. In piecing together crimes and writing novels, each is shown to use stories as a way of structuring reality, defining it, allowing them to parse chaos and opacity of the actual world. But in adhering to the comprehensible structure of narrative, they also lose sight of anything resembling objective truth. In this age where everyone has a story to tell, a point reinforced literally by our social-media platforms, Alan Wake 2 deftly shows the comfort and closure they provide may be illusory.
This is a bold position for Alan Wake 2 to take precisely because of its unashamedly metatextual nature and the love it extends toward its various influences. The stew is part Nordic noir (Anderson is giving The Killing’s Sarah Lund with her knitwear), hard-boiled fiction, and Lovecraftian terror. There are myriad allusions to other Remedy games, including Control (what the studio is calling the Remedy Connected Universe), all while creative director and writer Lake appears as multiple characters throughout. At one point, in a bizarre live-action talk show, he even makes an appearance as Sam Lake, the “actor†who portrays Wake’s fictionalized version of FBI agent Casey. Remedy games are often self-referential to the point of verging on self-sabotage, and Alan Wake 2 is no different. Crucially, it understands when to yield (right before these moments tip over into grating self-satisfaction), thrusting you back into its menacing, hyperviolent action.
It’s not just the survival horror action that ensures Alan Wake 2 remains grounded but a handful of pivotal characters, chief among them Wake’s wife, Alice, who is shown to be grieving for her missing husband. She begins processing his presumed death through her own photography until, eventually, we learn that “Alice’s work had consumed the apartment, her whole life.†These scenes, relayed via live-action footage, are some of the most poignant and shocking in the game — a heavily weighted counterpoint to the high weirdness found elsewhere. In melding the honest and personal with winking metatextual flourishes, including details from Lake’s own life, Alan Wake 2 feels in conversation with Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie that its co-director Daniel Kwan described as searching for a “version of post-postmodernism … metamodernism.†Like that movie, Alan Wake 2 contains multitudes: It is an eerie, grotesque, and frightening interdimensional scramble across time, genre, tone, and emotion; so too is it a moving portrait of loss.
“Earth is a cyclical song,†says one character, which, in a game of pulpy, hard-boiled dialogue and meta-reflexive quips, stands out for its unadorned beauty. There’s a sincerity in that line that gets to the core of Alan Wake 2, a game that, more than any other I can think of, interrogates the idea of fiction in terms of its transcendent and malignant possibilities echoing through the generations. It does so not just through the words of its protagonists or the images of the game world but through expressive, complicated mechanics. With these ingredients, Remedy and creative director Lake have crafted a dense, unsettling work of horror, one that fundamentally embraces video games as a form. The woods of Alan Wake 2 are not harmonious but discordant; they don’t sing but wail; they are worth losing yourself to.