REVIEW: Alan Wake II
Alan Wake II is the long awaited, and I mean like thirteen years, sequel to the 2010 action-adventure horror game, Alan Wake. It was originally followed by Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, but that Xbox Live exclusive was a scaled back version of the sequel that Remedy Entertainment never thought they’d be able to make. Still, after the success of Control, they got a chance to finally make the sequel to Alan Wake that they always wanted to. So, is Alan Wake II any good?
It is very good, but it is also very different. This is something that a lot of people care about when it comes to their sequels. Alan Wake was an unconventional third person horror shooter. This is a survival horror detective novel. There is shooting in it, but there is far less shooting in it. Indeed, the first shooting doesn’t take place until the very end of the second chapter of the story and then there is an even longer wait to get to more of it.
The premise is that Saga Anderson, an FBI agent, is invited to Bright Falls alongside her partner, Alex Casey. Alex, for fans of the Alan Wake novels, is a substitute for Max Payne that is legally distinct from the one owned by Rockstar Games. In-universe, the Alex Casey novels and movies by the in-universe Alan Wake are an annoyance for the “real” Casey who finds it strange that he shares a name as well as likeness with the character. The pair are investigating a recent ritual murder by a bunch of deer mask-wearing psychos that turn out to have a connection to the strange happenings in the town.
Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, what Saga and Alex find is tied to what Alan Wake has been up to for the past thirteen years in the Dark Place beneath Cauldron Lake. The game is tied with the Federal Bureau of Control from Control and makes more than a few references to the Quantum Break game despite not owning the rights to that IP either. It is a strange multilayered metatextual journal that is more detective game than shooter.
I really like Saga as the protagonist and her friendship with Alex Casey is one of the better realized ones that invokes the best of Mulder and Scully before they got ruined by the shippers. I would watch a TV show based around these two. I also love the addition of the Koskela brothers, who are a fantastic bit of rural life brought into Bright Falls. You can tell when comic relief is good in a horror game by the fact you want more of them not less. Old favorites like Rose Marigold and Pat Maine also make an appearance.
The game doesn’t 100% explain what is going on with all the occult shenanigans but does give some concrete answers that David Lynch never would with his works. There’s also some retcons that don’t precisely work with the original Alan Wake or American Nightmare, but I doubt anyone, but the most diehard fans will have problems with. The storytelling is deep and open to interpretation with a lot of focus on narrative, psychological projection, and symbolism. There’s even a twenty-minute supernatural thriller you can watch in a theater toward the end. Plus, two music video-inspired action scenes that are truly awesome.
Gameplaywise the secret sauce of Alan Wake 2 is that it is genuinely tense and frightening for the first playthrough. It’s much closer to Silent Hill than Resident Evil 2 and Alan’s previous badassery is no longer on display here as both protagonists are painfully slow individuals with limited health. Even so, long parts of the game are without any sort of enemy and that just leaves you on the edge of your seat. I think a lot of games could learn from this as the primary flaw of Silent Hill: Downpour and The Evil Within was that it showed their hand within the first few minutes.
Much of the gameplay for Saga is finding clues and puzzles scattered across the map then proceeding to put them up in your “Mind Place” board that is straight from Sherlock Holmes. Honestly, some of it is tedious busy work and I wish it had been cut down to about a third of its size.
In conclusion, Alan Wake II is a fantastic game, and it ends in a way that feels like it is a definitive one to Alan’s saga (no pun intended) but that could easily be continued in an Alan Wake 3. Tragically, the voice actor for Alex Casey, James McCaffrey, has passed on. This sadly will probably affect not only Alan Wake 3 but also any future Max Payne projects. Still, I think even if you didn’t play the original Alan Wake, you’ll enjoy this if you enjoy survival horror. There are some frustrating bits like the detective board interface and combat, but I think the game is awesome for its storytelling as well as music.
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