Cenn's ramblings

Alan Wake 2 is awesome

So, I just played through Remedy's newest masterpiece, Alan Wake 2. (Major Spoilers ahead)

Also, as a fair warning, what follows is an incomprehensible manic episode (i.e. my writing), that may be hard to understand given that I give zero context.

After being blown away by Quantum Break back in the day because of its physics, I got interested in Remedy games. I must say that I'm a sucker for good writing, and Quantum Break is anything but that, but it's still very ambitious and cool, just like Control. Oh boy, Control. I can't even say how much I love that game. While lacking in variable gameplay or replayability, it's such an awesome and weird game to experience. Not to mention the graphics, which made my RTX 3050 want to commit sudoku—heck, it still only goes to 80fps on my 4070, but maintains a very stable framerate without any microstuttering. But front and center was the story, paranatural entities being tied in from Alan Wake 1, paranaturalism being normalized, categorized, and integrated into our world by this obscure federal branch. I could honestly fangirl about Control itself for hours, but not today.

So, Alan Wake 2, what's the big deal? Basically everything. This game was thirteen years in the making, has fun combat elements, and the story is so well written I could literally melt into Sam Lake's script if I saw it, AND it has even better graphics. The game begins by introducing us to a guy, a Taken, crawling out of Cauldron Lake and making his way through the forest, before being shot, his heart cut out, and left strapped to a picnic table by a bunch of cultists calling themselves the Cult of the Tree. From here we cut to our main character, FBI Agent Saga Anderson, and her partner Alex Casey. Saga, unbeknownst to her, is part of the Anderson and Door family tree, making her by all means a parautilitarian demigod, and then there is Casey, a poor guy whose entire life has been heavily influenced by Alan's writing in the Dark Place because he has the same name as Alan's fictional detective character Alex Casey. So our little paranatural gang drives down to Cauldron Lake and meets Deputy Mulligan and Thornton, who show them to the crime scene and provide some funny banter while at it. After determining the victim to be Robert Nightingale from Alan Wake 1 and examining the crime scene, Saga and Casey go down to the lake and examine their surroundings, Casey commenting on an unusually huge tree, which will turn out to be an overlap. At the roots of this tree, Saga finds a page of a Manuscript written with a typewriter and edited with a pen. This page seems to describe all the events that happened so far, as if they were prewritten and even writes about what Saga and Casey think. So, yep, that's our boi Alan, and if pages are washing up from the lake, then stuff's about to go down. Saga and Casey leave through the “shortcut route” on which there is an FBC monitoring station, no surprise there. At the end of the trail, they exit via a door in the fencing, which of course makes clear the presence of the FBC and states that the forest and lake were fenced off due to “volcanic gas.” Something I find so cool is that Casey mentions being stonewalled by the FBC when inquiring about Alan Wake, an inquiry which you can find in the Investigations Sector in Control! So cool.

Anyway, after arriving in Bright Falls to question some witnesses and to examine Nightingale's corpse, Rose, from the first game, speaks to Saga as if she knew her and tells her that her daughter died, which is not true, yet anyway. This is only the beginning of the Manuscript slowly rewriting reality. The next stop is, of course, the police station where Saga examines Nightingale's corpse and finds a new Manuscript page in his torso, describing Nightingale murdering, being a Taken, and where to find his heart, which the page claims Saga would seek out. Upon trying to hand more pages from “Return” to Saga, Sheriff Breaker gets blinked out of reality by Mr. Door. This is followed by Nightingale's corpse sitting up and killing a few officers in the morgue before Saga shoots him multiple times, after which he collapses and phases out of reality. From here, Saga and Casey return to Cauldron Lake, which is now flooded by water from the lake, running into Ilmo Koskala, one local prominent tour guide and business owner, and Steven Lin from the FBC, who is busy making repairs to the FBC's monitoring station. Inside the now-open station is only one note from Steven describing that the local cultists are sabotaging their equipment. Upon going further into the forest, Saga and Casey separate. Saga is currently searching for Nightingale's heart to perform a ritual to open an overlap at the previous big tree Casey mentioned, and Casey is exploring the forest. After completing the ritual and going into the overlap, Saga loses contact with Casey and kills the Taken Nightingale. This is followed by her accidentally getting in contact with Alan, and after exchanging a few broken words, she gets transported back to Cauldron Lake, where the flooding has now receded. Upon coming back, reality shifts again and the lake blips Alan back to reality. Alan, of course, not being in a right mental state, takes a while to normalize and even doubts his escape from the Dark Place. Which I would too, I mean, come on, the guy has been stuck in a Nightmare Dimension for thirteen years specially made for him by a void capable of manufacturing dimensions on a whim. After bringing Wake back to Bright Falls, Saga, Casey, and Alan level with each other about what they know, but mostly Alan does the talking because, of course, he would, he knows a lot more. This flows into Alan looking at a puddle and remembering his time in the Dark Place, or recent time, as in, how he got out. This is the point from which the player can freely choose whose story they want to play. You need to play both Alan's and Saga's part before arriving at the end, but generally there is a lot of flexibility, like being able to play through all of Alan's memories before hopping back to Saga. So on and so forth.

Alan's story consists of his struggle with his never-ending nightmare, being helped by Mr. Door, disguised as a talkshow host, inspiring and entertaining for his own reasons. Alan is also guided by visions of Saga whenever she's in an overlap, and this will eventually lead to Saga summoning Wake back to reality using the Clicker, back to the time she first found him. Saga is helping Wake so Wake can rewrite “Return” and save her family. Mr. Door is helping Wake because Wake wrote Saga into “Return” as the hero, and wouldn't you have guessed it, Door is Saga's father, so while still providing help, he is pissed at Wake. And then there is Alice, Alan's wife, faking her death, jumping into the Dark Place to help Alan from the background.

Saga's adventure takes her through Watery, Coffee World, and Valhalla nursing home. Watery and Coffee World are basically Saga exploring her rewritten past and searching for her trailer where she “used to live.” There she meets Tor and Odin Anderson, who aren't affected by the story as they are implied to be paranatural humans. They are a fun pair, and I would go into their stories, but I'm not built for that. They converse with Saga about their family connections and how they've missed her, which she brushes off as just the story changing reality. After leaving “her trailer,” Saga sees Mulligan in a cultist mask staring at her than walking away. Well, it turns out Thornton and Mulligan are both part of the Cult of the Tree and have accidentally killed an innocent woman they mistook for a Taken and dumped her body down a well. This left them with such guilt that the Dark Place could invade their beings, turning them Taken. Saga fights them and wins.

For my sanity's sake, I'm going to cut this short. Alan gets taken by the FBC, Ilmo turns out to be a cultist, who themselves are a kind of neighborhood watch killing Taken and paranatural entities that could endanger their towns. Saga goes to the police station where the FBC took Alan and almost gives him the Clicker. Alan turns into Scratch, who is Alan's evil double and who wrote “Return” in the first place. After making Scratch return to the Dark Place, Saga tries summoning the “real” Wake with help from Tor, Odin, and the Clicker. It works; however, as mentioned before, this summons Alan to the point where Saga met him, meaning that Scratch is just Alan with the Dark Presence inside of him. After Scratch arrives on site and manages to absolutely decimate everybody, he takes the body of Casey and takes the Clicker, throwing Saga into the lake in the process. After using the Clicker to start the process of rewriting reality to what he wants it to be, Scratch throws it away, but Alice retrieves it as the place it was used at became an overlap and thus allowed her to reach for it. After a really touching monologue by Alan, he enters the Dark Place again trying to find a copy of “Return” in Scratch's dream reality so that he could read the ending and rewrite it. I leave out a LOT here, but that's exactly what he does at the end, at the cost of his freedom. So he is back to square one, but not quite. As it turns out, he isn't in a looping nightmare; he's in a spiral, which means that there is an end, somewhere.

Ok, I'm done. I actually wanted to write about every aspect of the game I love so much, but then started just summarizing and I couldn't stop. Now that I'm here, after writing for the last one and a half hours, it's finally out of my system. As a conclusion to this borderline insane post I would recommend you to play Alan Wake 2. It is truly a fantastic game and hands down has the best narrative writing of 2023.