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Alan Wake 2 Review
Outshined
Being creative is hard. My own urge to create is often overbalanced by intense self-criticism, while overhead hovers a nebulous existential beast that urges me to feel like I am working towards something meaningful. Often, this results in a Netflix-browsing state of indecision, resulting in weeks or months where nothing creative happens and frustration builds.
My experience finds resonance in Alan Wake 2, a game about creativity, by a large team of creative people, for the purpose of (in my view) inspiring people to be creative. It says, ‘Hey, look, we made a fun game and perhaps one day you might also want to, or make something else fun and interesting. This is what creating is about. Here is genre, and over there is plot, and this bit is about how Alan is a stand in for the dice-roll-success of mediocrity’.
At the forefront of the experience is the idea that anything creative can be edited, that elements can be repositioned, written over or tried in different ways to create new meaning. While there is confidence on display here, there’s still sideways body language that invites the player into the process. It is always clear that this is a piece of art created from the funnelled distillation of other art, with every influence blended, reconstructed and pasted across a changing reality that is more playful than anything we’ve seen from this studio (and possibly any other).
It's also a lot darker, which disappointed me at first. Alan Wake might have been a dark game, but it always had an aspect of levity and quirkiness to it. Alan Wake 2 fully embraces uncomfortable horror, the darkness of existence and the collateral damage caused by a dark presence with a singular, unwavering purpose.
Alan Wake 2 has me thinking about writing, because so much of what you do in Alan Wake 2 is about writing, from how Alan changes the game world with several clacks of a typewriter to the fact that one of the lead writers, Sam Lake, plays multiple characters here (and fairly well, I might add – at no point does this feel like an ego trip), a move that brought to mind Stephen King’s own cameo within his Dark Tower series.
It also has me thinking about textures, how something can benefit from being constructed from variations of new and traditional technologies. When Alan Wake 2 mixes digital characters with live action, you can’t help but feel a rush of excitement at the possibilities moving forward. For me, the true success of Alan Wake 2 is its unwavering goal of providing an open window into the development process. It makes everything feel honest, raw, and vulnerable, and thus endearing. This is perhaps all too deliberate. If this whole thing had ended up a flop, Sam Lake could have held his hands up and offered a Max Payne grimace. But I want to believe that the sense of earnest artistic endeavour is true. If nothing else, the inspiration it has ignited in me makes the truth of its intent irrelevant.
What I enjoyed most about Alan Wake – a game I’ve surely played through at least five times – was how it transported me to an idealistic Stephen King sleepy town. It had atmosphere in spades: the soughing trees, the unreliable denizens. All this is still present in the sequel, just laced with jump scares and rotting carcasses. Around halfway through Alan Wake 2, after swapping between the dual protagonists of Alan and Saga a few times, I warmed to the darker, survival-weighted theme and came to appreciate this as a statement of both competency and intent.
One other broad theme here is the value of collaboration. Remedy has friends along for the ride, such as The Old Gods of Asgard AKA Poets of the Fall, who settle in as the house band, banging out a seventeen-minute track for perhaps the most impressive audio-visual feast yet experienced in a videogame. And while most who worked on this is an employee or contractor, the frankly stunning efforts of level designers, environmental artists and technical personnel are at the forefront of Alan Wake 2’s presentation, leaving no doubt that the resultant triumph of this title thanks to Remedy’s collaborative vision. That such a game can come to fruition in a comparatively independent way, Remedy bearing all the risk without the billion-dollar weight of one of the big players in the industry, is quite incredible.
It is a compliment to the way that Remedy has built upon the first Alan Wake that I found myself enjoying Saga’s chapters far more than Wake’s, whose clipped writing started to grate, though that might be deliberate. Remedy has constructed a cyclone-proof structure for their combined metaverse, one that can accommodate spin-offs and DLC in any direction and genre they choose. Reality is theirs to shape.
Although there are technical elements that push the envelope for videogames (the analysis of which I leave to far more competent critics), Alan Wake 2’s best moments are when it is not afraid to be a little raw, slightly whiffy, like a backstage pass to a local theatre production. I have no doubt that if this sells well, Remedy will continue down the survival-horror path, giving the likes of Resident Evil some suitably creepy competition. But I wouldn’t place a bet on it. This developer is just as like to pivot to something completely different, and that makes the future of both Alan Wake and Remedy a realm of quantum possibilities.
*Alan Wake 2 was played to completion on PlayStation 5 from a copy purchased on the digital store.