Thirteen years after his wife’s disappearance in the small town of Bright Falls, writer Alan Wake finds himself trapped in a dark place with no visible exit. As I sit down to write this review of Alan Wake II, I can empathize a little. This is so unlike anything I’ve played recently that I’m struggling to decide where exactly to start. Alan Wake II is a single-player adventure that seamlessly transitions from slow-burning psychological horror to wild survival horror action, from beautifully rendered game worlds to impressive full-motion video sequences, and from morbid investigations to breathtaking musical surprises. It’s brutal, it’s crazy, and most of the time, it’s absolutely brilliant. Arriving at the end of a year of games full of absolute bangers, Alan Wake II still burns bright like a flare that has just been lit.

Though it deals with two completely opposite realities, the story of the roughly 17-hour Alan Wake II is far more coherent than that of the original, despite being significantly more complicated. We start in present-day Bright Falls, controlling FBI agent Saga Anderson, who is dispatched to the small lakeside town to investigate the latest victim of a series of ritualistic massacres. The body is discovered next to Cauldron Lake, with a large hole in it; a hole where his heart once was. Saga is an instantly likeable addition to the strange world that Alan Wake shares with Remedy Entertainment’s other paranormal game, Control. She’s dedicated to working the case, but she’s also not averse to a little banter with her partner, Special Agent Alex Casey. The first few hours of mostly non-combat investigation give the story a grounding in reality, before darkness falls and all silence settles. The hills turn into a horrific hellscape.

One of the reasons it’s so easy to keep track of Alan Wake II’s main serial killer mystery and its numerous subplots is the case board in the saga’s metaphysical “heart place,” accessible at any time with the touch of a button. Every new piece of evidence, character profile, and thought-provoking manuscript page found in Bright Falls and the surrounding area is manually arranged on a branching tree of threads and handouts pinned to the wall, and it all needs to be organized, focused, and directed at the case. I’m not ashamed to say that I couldn’t get through a season of True Detective (at least one good season) without one eye on the TV and the other on Reddit threads on my phone, so I found this. The built-in method is great for keeping the facts straight.

As Saga’s investigation progresses at the beginning of Alan Wake II’s story, each discovery raises more troubling questions than answers. Why do so many locals act as if they’ve known Saga for years? Why is the manager of Control singing karaoke in the local town hall? And why did this corpse suddenly drag his bare buttocks out of the morgue and into the woods? Though the difficulty can be adjusted to three different levels, the atmosphere in Alan Wake II is always set to be uncomfortable.

The Dark Place Beyond the Pines

The mystery deepens when Alan Wake washes up on the shores of Lake Cauldron, wanders the Dark Place, and is surprised to learn that he’s been missing for thirteen years. That’s when Alan Wake II gets really weird. From here, the perspective switches back and forth between the saga’s search for the truth in Bright Falls and Alan’s desperate attempts to escape the damn Dark Place dimension, with both sides gradually blending together in increasingly unpredictable and confusing ways. A story that could barely distinguish fact from fiction (within fiction) eventually leads to a very well-executed low-brow ending that neatly wraps up most of the plot threads and leaves a few loose threads tantalizingly loose. Resolution: Waiting another thirteen years to link these (and even start them) makes it much less appealing.

The fascinating power of the contrasting backgrounds adds to the mystery. While the lakeside setting of Bright Falls offers breathtaking sunsets and a meticulously rendered woodland environment, it’s the grimy, neon-filled New York City backdrop of Alan’s stage that truly showcases the incredible skill of Remedy’s artistic team. This tainted slice of the Big Apple resembles the nightmare you might have if you spent 24 hours eating cheese and watching Taxi Driver and Cauldron on repeat. From the graffiti-ridden construction sites to the terrifying subway tunnels that lie beneath its surface, it felt hauntingly otherworldly and fascinating to me.

Alan’s levels also stimulated another part of my brain by introducing some fun environmental puzzles. The paranormal table lamp allows Alan to absorb the energy of one light source and redirect it to another, creating a new light-lit sanctuary from the evil lurking in the shadows while physically altering the world around him to pave the way for new paths. It’s a mind-boggling trick that reminds me of pulling the light switch cord on and off at the Ocean View Hotel in the oldest house in Control, and it gets more complicated over time. Determining the correct order to manipulate multiple light sources increases the challenge. Each time you explore a new area, more and more are unlocked.

Instead of collecting evidence and arranging it on a display board like in Saga’s levels, in Alan’s reality you have to look for plot elements in the form of a pair of floating orbs that need to be observed from the right perspective to create an eerie eclipse; intense scenes from Alan’s own Alex Casey crime series. These are rewritten into Alan’s present-day scenario, distorting his reality into disturbing new dioramas that can bring him closer to an exit from the dark place and reveal eerie parallels to the Bright Falls murders that Saga is trying to solve. (And this year I thought Michael Cera was the only Alan trying desperately to escape a corrupted parallel reality.)

Making things even more disturbing is that Sam Lake, the creative director of Alan Wake II, plays both the Alex Casey character in Alan Wake II; Alan’s world in Saga’s story and FBI Special Agent Alex Casey; and he also appears as himself on the weird late-night talk show where Alan is a regular guest. You may not know his name, but you probably know his famous face, as it was etched on the face of the original Max Payne – he even has that trademark grimace! Alan Wake II’s weighty meta-mystery is like a puzzle trapped in a Rubik’s Cube full of Sudokus, and to be honest, it’s a very strange and wonderful journey with more unexpected detours and recursive loops than a cranky Uber driver.

The Violence of the Lamps

In fact, Alan Wake II has more plots than graveyards, and just as many deaths. The basics of combat are pretty much the same as the original’s fun flashlight combat, but the execution has been vastly improved. Enemies are once again literal shadows of what they once were. The most efficient way to get rid of them is to use the enhanced beam of your flashlight to burn away their faint shields of darkness, then blast chunks of raw flesh from their bones with your growing arsenal of firearms. This time, glowing weak spots now appear on enemy bodies from time to time, and if you can aim them well, you can deal significantly more damage while saving precious ammo, which felt like a nice reward for splurging. Fractions took an extra second to carefully line up your shots.

For those used to games where you can run, this isn’t a big deal, but going back to Alan Wake, this is great. Both Saga and Alan are blessed with the ability to sprint infinitely. This is a vast improvement over the original, in which Alan is constantly out of breath and couldn’t walk more than 10 metres without writhing around like an asthmatic who’s taken a wrong turn and wandered into a smoking lounge. The heroes are also generally more agile. The dodge button is now more responsive, allowing you to more reliably dodge under swinging pipes and thrown pickaxes. It even works on the ground if you fall off your feet, allowing you to quickly roll out of danger and avoid a possible follow-up.

But that challenge was part of the original’s charm, and Remedy hasn’t forgotten it. Saga and Alan may be more agile in Alan Wake II, but ammo and batteries are still scarce. While it doesn’t come close to Resident Evil 4 in terms of enemy variety, it features a surprising variety of dark villains, so I never knew what shadow warrior was lurking to ambush me. From giant beasts wielding sledgehammers to scurrying wolves to a strange, multi-limbed mirror monster that I can’t quite explain, Alan Wake II constantly shuffled the cards, constantly leaving me with my head in my hands and my thumbs nervously hovering over my weapon. The quick-select menus toggled back and forth. Some enemies will even fire dark projectiles at you that you have to dodge or carefully intercept with a flashlight beam, like a fighter jet’s countermeasure. We haven’t seen this much shade since Eminem’s last diss track.

There are also some fantastically wild and unique boss fights, including a dimly lit close-quarters battle with an angry, reanimated corpse desperate to slam my chest with the sharp side of a torn branch. And then another scene dropped of me frantically burning through a darkness-filled arena, trying to avoid a distant enemy ripping my head off my shoulders with gunfire.

But strangely enough, the enemies I feared most in Alan Wake II turned out to be the ones that couldn’t even hurt me most of the time. Alan’s reality is littered with whispering ghosts, but if you shine a flashlight on them, they’ll most likely dissolve into smoke. But this tenth case is concerning, because it’s more likely to be an actual physical threat that will lull you into a false sense of security and then ambush you. As a result, I found myself questioning every shadow that took on human form (including my own), which felt perfectly in keeping with Alan’s own melting mental state.

Writing Wrongs

Alan’s mental health isn’t the only thing that isn’t as good as it seems here. The two playable characters’ different weapons each have their own benefits, from the increased penetration and reusable bolts of Saga’s crossbow to the increased range of effect of Alan’s flare gun, but the implementation of their individual skill trees seems somewhat unbalanced. Alan’s Word of Power skill tree contains 21 different skills, and each skill can be upgraded up to three times, while Saga’s upgrades are limited to three buffs per firearm in the inventory, each costing the same as those from collectible manuscript scraps. Bright I’ll say it in case it’s hidden, but by the time I reached the end credits, I only had a few invested. Honestly, these didn’t seem all that necessary on the normal difficulty setting, but they’ll probably be much more useful on the Nightmare difficulty setting that’s going to be added to Alan Wake II after launch.

Furthermore, in contrast to Alan’s impressive environmental redesigns, the saga regularly suffers from a few too many survival horror clichés, such as fuse boxes that need to be repaired and combination locks that need to be opened (though to be fair, the latter can require quite a bit of brainpower to decipher). I was also a little disappointed that the TV in Bright Falls didn’t air new episodes of Night Springs, but the commercial that aired instead (featuring two local entrepreneurs called the Koskela brothers) was so hilarious and quirky that I gave it a go anyway. I had to track down every in-game TV I could find. (I’m talking about fictional commercials, not poor Verizon Wireless product placement.)

Still, all the issues I had with Alan Wake II just vanished without a trace, like a backwater dweller swept away by the current of others, doing what it does right by others. It’s definitely heavily influenced by film and TV, building on the original’s Twin Peaks-meets-The Twilight Zone fusion, mixing in the best parts of True Detective, Seven, Inception, and more. But the title also includes nods to modern gaming classics, surprising you with a truly disturbing Inscryption-esque fourth-wall trick and a creepy full-motion video moment reminiscent of the 2022 found-footage hit Immortality.

I won’t give away the full story here, but one truly amazing moment early on turns the game into a temporary interactive musical. It’s as if the team at Remedy took one look at Super Mario Odyssey’s “Jump Up, Super Star!” level and decided to adapt it in the most over-the-top, wacky way possible. For a glorious 20 minutes or so, Alan Wake II is more like The Rocky Horror Show than a survival horror video game, and I found myself grinning like a madman from the first riff to the final ferocious guitar solo. There are plenty of moments in Alan Wake II that will have you falling out of your seat, but it’s moments like these that prove that Remedy is not afraid to go into the actual design of their long-awaited sequel.

Verdict

Alan Wake II delivers one of the grittiest survival horror stories since Silent Hill 2, with flawless art direction and audio design throughout, and the series’ signature light-based shooting revitalized as if it were fresh. One Energizer Pack loaded and locked in. Though the skill upgrade system seemed a little redundant and there were a few cliches that got caught in my throat throughout the story, I still found both sides of this twisting tale endlessly fascinating, often terrifying, and consistently surprising. Alan Wake II is a superior survival horror sequel that makes the cult classic original seem like a rough first draft.