A fantastic game released in 2010 created by the Finnish studio Remedy, a true tribute to Stephen King but also to David Lynch, Alan Wake is finally accompanied by a sequel awaited for years, released at the end of October. A great game.
Flashback sequence. Released in 2010 after five long and painful years of development, Alan Wake was well received by critics. If the development studio Remedy had started working on a sequel, it was never released, despite the 4.5 million copies sold of the first game. Alan Wake’s American Nightmarereleased in 2012, was not a direct sequel but a Spin Off.
The first game featured a character named Alan Wake, a bestselling thriller author. The latter rented with his wife Alice an isolated chalet near Bright Falls, a charming town nestled in the heart of a mountain range, in the heart of the United States. This escapade was an opportunity for him to get closer to his wife who understood him less and less, and to overcome his terrible anxiety of the blank page. To the point of sowing trouble in his career and endangering his relationship.
Remedy Entertainment
But Bright Falls hid a dark secret, and the lakeside cabin was not the haven the writer had come looking for. When Alice disappeared, Wake went looking for her, and discovered the pages of a book he didn’t remember writing.
As he moved deeper and deeper into the woods at the cost of increasingly precarious mental health, the pages of this book came to life. Darkness took hold of Alan; the chalet became the antechamber of Hell, while the majestic forest became the hunting ground of evil forces…
Stephen King to the rescue
“For Alan Wake, I really wanted to create a character who was not in the vein of an Action Hero; hence the idea of making him a writer. Added to this was the desire to make a supernatural thriller, with elements belonging to the horror genre. Stephen King was obviously the standard meter, an essential and absolute reference. He very often exposes his craft as a writer in his dark stories. So yes, it was a natural reference” Sam Lake, pillar of the Remedy studio and creator of the game, told us when we met him in 2016.
Adding: “It is Twin Peaks which gave us the idea of setting the story of Alan Wake in the small town called Cauldron Lake, wedged between a river and the mountain. Just like in Twin Peaks, the forest is a place inhabited by Evil. We also found that this environment worked extremely well in contrast to that of Max Payne; offer a small town as a starting point, instead of plunging the player into a large city like New York. It also reinforced the claustrophobic side that we were looking for in Alan Wake.
Remedy Entertainment
Leaving aside the spin off, we had to wait 13 years – and two games in that time – to once again embrace the thwarted destiny of the cursed writer. An opus on which Sam Lake also holds several positions, from creative director to writing the screenplay and even the incarnation of a character in the game. In this case an FBI agent named Alex Casey , protagonist of the novels written by Alan Wake…
But if Lake lends his features to this one, his voice is on the other hand that of the actor James McCaffrey, well known to aficionados for being that of the Max Payne games. A choice obviously anything but neutral, insofar as it Alan Wake II navigates in a sort of Remedy-verse, the universe created by the studio since the first Max Payne game, with its tortured characters, its interior monologues, its neo-noir film atmosphere, etc.
Here is the trailer…
Trapped between two worlds
Thirteen years later, nothing or very little has changed in Bright Falls, still bathed in its disturbing strangeness. A series of ritual murders threatens the small town. Saga Anderson, an accomplished FBI agent, arrives to investigate.
Meanwhile, Alan Wake, still trapped in a nightmare beyond our world from which he was unable to escape 13 years ago, writes a dark story in an attempt to shape the reality around him, and escape his prison. Anderson and Wake, two characters immersed in stories with distinct realities, but intimately linked.
Assembled as a procedural and Scandinavian detective series, Alan Wake II plunges the scalpel even further into the twists and turns of the tortured soul of its progenitor. A very meta and sprawling story, which unfolds its attractions over around 25 hours of play (really taking your time).
Remedy Entertainment
Always modeled on the model of TV series, with its episodes and its final Cliffhangers closed in music as David Lynch did in his 3rd season of Twin Peaks (here also no coincidence…), the story pushes to a point of incandescence rarely reached the reflection on the anguish of the blank page and its frustrations, parenthood, the reliability or lack of reliability of its memory, the nature of Art, what it means to create…
A story to be honest, quite dizzying and truly complex, multi-layered, of which we sometimes lost track a little. If Sam Lake obviously did not work alone at the helm of the story, it is clear that many of the themes addressed in the game are the fruit of his own questions, doubts and aspirations.
Diving into a mental lair
Alan Wake II incorporates investigation game elements. When the player plays Saga Anderson, he can pause the game, which allows him to access an enemy-free space called the “mental lair”.
It is in fact a visual representation of Saga’s thoughts, in which he can connect clues to reconstruct the different cases, connect the witnesses to each other and the crime scenes, etc. In addition to being able to carry out profiling, that is to say “enter” the heads of suspects and victims to question their modus operandi and collect clues that will advance the plot.
Switching to control of Alan Wake is a powerful gameplay discovery. Hunted by an evil double, like the character in The Dark Part of Stephen KingAlan Wake has no other way out than to constantly write and rewrite the chapters of a story (always dark, obviously…) which literally comes to life.
Trapped writing in his lair, like an endless loop, he can thus modify the environments in which he is led to evolve according to the story. It’s easier to experience with the controller in hand than to describe, but the result is absolutely striking and exhilarating.
Remedy Entertainment
As in the previous part, the player faces people controlled by dark forces and protected by a shadow. These are very vulnerable to light and the player must take advantage of light sources to remove the shadow which acts as a shield, before really being able to take them down using a (small) weapon rack.
From the pistol to the crossbow, the shotgun/hunting rifle, the distress pistol, flashbang grenade or other Bengal fire. And, even on normal difficulty (i.e. the 2nd level out of the three offered), the clashes can be really painful, especially when you come across clusters of enemies who are very angry and/or who set up vicious ambushes…
The (terrifying) call of the forest
While Alan Wake spends a large part of his time wandering around an absolutely sinister and nightmarish version of New York (nourished by the influences of Taxi Driver according to Sam Lake), visually impressive, and which is in fact the noir version of his Doppelgänger, Saga evolves a lot in the forests surrounding Bright Falls.
More organic and alive than ever, they are as visually sublime as they are very oppressive to cross, constantly distilling a diffuse unease. The woods don’t even wait for nightfall to become haunted, coming to life and unleashing their evil forces on the heroine, hunted like game.
We often even find ourselves running as quickly as possible towards the light, or sometimes searching for it frantically. Moments of (brief) respite in the middle of peaks of tension which sometimes put a strain on the nerves.
Remedy Entertainment
As for the environments, we will give a special mention to the town of Watery, where Saga is also conducting its investigation. Seeming to emerge in the middle of a sheet of mist, almost forgotten by everyone and populated by a gallery of characters, each more lunar than the other, as if time seemed to have frozen, it backs onto a park of attractions called “Coffee World”.
A kind of abandoned and anxiety-provoking Luna Park, like a sort of video game counterpart to the one seen in Carnival of Souls. A place that is both fascinating and absolutely sinister, at the heart of past and tragic events that are just waiting to resurface…
Race report
Carried by a plot capable of twisting your neurons and pushing its multiple interpretations to the point of dizziness, also irrigated in its form (brilliant, we can never say it enough) by incursions of Live sequences looking towards Arty cinema which make total sense (and already experienced in the past by the studio) and above all which fit into the plot with a sometimes disconcerting fluidity, Alan Wake II ultimately leaves more questions than it provides answers.
Two planned additional contents should take care of this. The first, Night Springsshould arrive in spring 2024. The second, entitled The Lake House, is still without a release date. In the meantime, the latest game created by the wizards at Remedy is absolutely essential. The wait was endless, but it was well worth it.