Alan Wake 2 review: Write and wrong married in ambitious sequel

Think of Stephen King’s The Shining with its blend of the mundane and the monstrous. Or Frederico Fellini’s Eight and A Half, which slips between the world of a director trying to shoot a movie and daydream sequences where he interacts with characters from the film and changes their world as he writes it.

Alan Wake 2, from Finnish developer Remedy, certainly doesn’t inhabit the same rarefied air as those two classics. But you can glimpse parallels and inspiration in its tangled treatment of a novelist attempting to write his way out of trouble. This, of course, is somewhat how the 2010 original played out, where Alan Wake searches for his missing wife in a small town called Bright Falls while incidents from his horror books come to life.

In this ambitious sequel, Wake again is ambushed by a nightmarish world full of murder, ghouls and strange phenomenon, a dark place that’s a shadow reality of New York. But now he also has reinforcement from an FBI detective named Saga Anderson who simultaneously investigates a new series of grisly killings in Bright Falls.

Remedy has been open about the team’s love for source material such as Twin Peaks and The Shining and there’s a very conscious effort to lean into the weird and the unexplained. Nonetheless, from the outset AW2 sets out its stall very clearly as a horror game – and not just a spooky, eerie one with echoes of Scandi noir. It’s debatable whether it’s more disturbing in the opening sequence to see the naked fat man lying dead on a picnic table– or to pick up his heart for examination as it lies beside his eviscerated chest. It’s that kind of game.

In contrast to the original, this story is structured with much more of an open world, allowing you flick between Anderson doing her detective work in Bright Falls and Wake wrestling with his writer’s block in New York. Obviously, you gradually realise the two worlds are interlinked.

The FBI agent certainly makes detectiving look effortless. Her contribution usually involves examining all clickable items in a murder scene, musing on their importance all the while before retreating to virtual incident room, where she pieces all the connections together in her mind. It’s quite the trick until the game reveals she’s actually psychic and therefore has access to information and flashbacks that you didn’t earn.

Wake meanwhile gets an even more surreal realm to explore, complete with live-action sequences such as a bizarre talk show. He too has his own “mind palace” where he can construct plot lines and connections – except that these actively change his reality to, for example, unblock a passageway.

As in AW1, light and dark play opposing roles. Wake owns a magic lantern that sometimes reveals hidden areas not immediately obvious. Similarly, both Anderson and Wake are forced to fight possessed humans using a combination of torch and guns, first burning off their shadowy outer layer before shooting them dead. The combat can be exhilarating but is thinly spread among the story beats.

Throughout all of these labyrinthine twists, Remedy plants copious self-referential seeds, which you’re either going to find annoying or ingenious. For instance, Remedy creative director Sam Lake co-stars in Bright Falls as Anderson’s FBI partner but his character also has a doppelganger in Alan Wake’s novels. Is it too clever or too lazy? You decide.

What can’t be denied is that AW2 is a visual and aural tour de force. The dread-filled warrens of Wake’s dimension are matched by the unsettling natural beauty of Bright Falls, all lavishly rendered and unnervingly scored.

Less welcome are the shaky technical underpinnings that sprout buggy behaviour far too often. One glitch cost me an hour of progress as a quest marker failed to trigger and reverting to a previous save was no help.

Remedy showed with its previous game, 2019’s Control, that it was a master of high-concept combat wedded to chilling storytelling. Alan Wake 2 can’t pull off the same success in an adjacent genre, burying its most interesting experiences in dense layers that can sap the plot’s momentum.

Yet it remains one of 2023’s most unconventional games, worth a look purely for the soaring height of its ambition.