Alan Wake II (2023)

The basement at a glance seems innocuous. Studio equipment, green room mannequins litter the area. At a back of the place however, I find a shoebox. A simple object symbolic of something greater. Thomas Zane had used it in the first game to save the "clicker". (And as we will find later, the shoebox serves a similar purpose in this story: acting as a place to store and retrieve objects across save-points). This time, the box has a lamp for us. Alan exclaims that this is the lamp that the clicker was apparently torn from. Perhaps a piece of the puzzle leading to a greater whole.

The lamp is special. It can store the light from safe havens littered throughout the world, rendering them inactive in the process. Alan can then take the lamp to another such inactive site and return the light. Doing so changes the dark place. The light forces it to create a path where there was none before. Quite an ingenious way to make safe havens serve a dual-purpose: stay safe inside or turn the lights off and move forward.

I reach the janitor's room to find Ahti (again, a character from Control, isn't explained but appears to know more than us and talks in riddles). Offering help, Ahti says the work will instruct the creator. Did I create Ahti? An I his creator? Am I the one who trapped myself in this nightmare? Ahti calls me Tom, not Alan(Thomas Zane?). He tells me to find something in the basement that I had forgotten before. Something that I can make my own exit with. I need to get out. I need to get that something.

Quick note on the background-score of the game: it's haunting and makes me nervous. Even on the "story" difficulty I can't shake away the feeling of impending doom. Like a wire that is just about to snap with tension. Like a pendulum that will turn at any moment now and come at me with blinding speed.

I'm Wake now. Waiting in the green room of a talk show. The show starts as I stumble onto the stage. The host, called Mr. Door, tells me how excited he is for my next book "Initiation". I don't remember writing the book. I started writing "Return" at the end of the last game, but not this. The show ends and the lights go off, leaving me alone in the studio. Trying to find my way out of the studio, I'm chased by something. And when it catches me, I find myself waiting in the green room of a talk show. The show starts as I stumble onto the stage. Wait. This has happened before. The real Alex Casey is also a guest with me this time. The show ends and I solve a slightly different puzzle than the last time to unlock a door. I need to get out.

This time, I go farther. Alan's sprint is more hurried, like he is running away from something. He opens and closes door with an urgency as if the darkness will creep in and catch him at any moment. In comparison, Saga's sprint seems outright leisurely, like she runs towards a solution and trying not to get tired on the way.

Saga interrogates Alan in the temporary FBI base in Bright Falls. We are neither here nor there. A third person torn between the two protagonists. Alan has no memory of writing the manuscript pages. Pages which clearly had his name, although "scratched" out violently. Scratch. Mr. Scratch. Is scratch still here in the real world. Did we not burn away Wake's dark doppelganger in the American Nightmare. Are we for the first time witnessing someone else write the story?

Alan gets overwhelmed trying to remember what happened in the last 13 years he was trapped beneath the lake. No. Not a lake. An ocean. As Alan starts to remember, we are pulled into what is perhaps a memory or maybe another story that Wake wrote.

Alan is confused to say the least. Casey leads him to the car parking. Meanwhile, we explore a new region of the woods that the dark presence has now released from its grasp. We find more cultists and a new enemy type: wolves along the way. Seems like the darkness has evolved. Even animals are not out of its reach now. We find a new type of collectible in this region: nursery rhymes. These also act as riddles to be solved with strange dolls and dole out charms as a reward. Saga can equip these for additional effects. This brings us up to 3 different types of collectibles: manuscript pages, Alex Casey lunchboxes and the creepy rhyme-riddles. Turns out the FBC (from Control and the wider Remedy-verse) is actively monitoring the lake for preternatural activity. An FBC monitoring station blares its klaxon to the on-coming darkness as we meet up with Casey & Wake and finally depart towards Bright Falls. To the safety of light.

Along the way, Saga calls home and learns that her daughter had almost drowned in the shower. The waitress at the diner had recalled an eerily similar fate. Is this a sign of things yet to come? Or a forgotten fate still stalking Saga?

Saga cuts through more cultists and we find ourselves doing a morbid ritual in front of the aforementioned witch's epitaph. A path opens up where there was none. A path to the overlap. Inside await visions that sometimes "overlap" so much with "reality" that it becomes difficult to tell the two apart. The titular Alan Wake appears like a bad connection, asking for help. And finally, we face what is left of Nightingale. He is still searching for the "clicker" that defeated the dark presence. He knows that the writer has started writing again. we are stuck in a loop, following the same trail in circles through the woods with the undead FBI agent stalking us. Anytime Nightingale finds Saga, he slams a tree trunk into us. Nine shotgun shots are what it takes to bring Nightingale down.

A note on the visuals here: they are top notch. The darkness just doesn't dissolve away when we boost the flashlight. It chips away. Like taking a chainsaw to metal. Sparks fly until there is only the exposed husk of the enemy left to deposit my bullet into.

Nightingale defeated, the overlap clears. We find ourselves at the shore of the lake. The water has receded. A man lies face down in the sand. Saga helps him up. Who is it? The one and only: Alan Wake. A.Wake. Now awake. Cue chapter end music.

Darkness has fallen. Rain has almost swallowed the picnic spot we found Nightingale's non-corpse at. Footprints lead away. While we have been away from Bright Falls & Cauldron Lake for 13 years, the urban legend of the witch has taken a form of its own. A facsimile of Barbara Jagger, the veiled-widow skin that the darkness wears, has its own epitaph in the woods. A witch's cabin as well. The game advises you that the cabins/breakrooms can be used to save the game (literal safe havens). The save point is a blue thermos, a hundred of them scattered throughout the first game to be found. A ritual to go into the dark place necessitates that we find Nightingale's heart which has somehow found its way to the nearby abandoned general store's freezer. It is here that we find our first taken enemy. A raincoat-clad, deer-masked giant of a cultist that takes an entire clip of my 9mm bullets after I've whittled down its dark "shield" with a burst of my flashlight.

Another difference in mechanics here. Unlike the first game, the flashlight doesn't recharge. It is more akin to a gun, each battery has segments, and a click of the right bumper spends a single one. If you exhaust your battery, reload and repeat. Another step towards limiting resources. Another trademark of a survival horror game.

The police station seems to be the same as we left it in the last game, but only at a glance. The door that led to the sheriff's office, now leads to the basement. A morgue shared with the local funeral home. Nightingale lies on the table. Large gash on his chest, inviting us to look into the darkness. We pull out another manuscript page from inside him. This one describes how Nightingale comes back to hunt us just as Nightingale comes back to hunt us. The sheriff disappears and we are told to find refuge in the light.

This is where mechanics truly start to diverge. Earlier additions can be seen as quality of life changes, a more modern take on controls perhaps. But here, safe havens no longer signify a checkpoint. Enemies don't magically disappear when you're bathed in light. Nightingale is still there, his bloated heartless corpse shambling in search of prey. We are simply invisible to him. This is perhaps the first indication at shifting genres. Wake is still writing a horror story, but unlike the first game, action might have to give the wheel to survival horror instead.

We pick up our gun and shoot a couple of bullets into where Nightingale's heart should have been. He disappears and we find clues that he must have gone back to the crime scene. Alex, very smartly, calls for backup from the FBI and we leave once again for the source. Cauldron Lake calls.

The streets of the city feel familiar. Having recently replayed the first game, I recognize the now-flooded ferry station, the fish cannery that I found a secret cache in, the sloped road that has a bookstore that I died in twice. Of course, Saga is new to this town. Or is she? The waitress at the local diner recognizes her. Tells her that she used to live in this very town before her daughter drowned. Saga is confused. Her daughter is still alive back home.

As we follow sheriff Breaker (not Sarah Breaker from the last game, perhaps related to her though?) towards the police station to examine Nightingale once more, the air is filled with tension. The murders and disappearances that once spiked in 2010 have come back knocking on the town's door again. It is as if the air itself is coiling with something unsaid. Saga finds a cult symbol on the side of a building. Perhaps this cult isn't so secret after all.

I'm Saga Anderson now. Travelling to Bright Falls, along with my partner Alex Casey, following a string of murders. Alex shares his name with a fictional detective from Alan Wake's novels and his face with that of Max Payne. Saga meets up with deputies Thornton and Mulligan at the Cauldron Lake area.

This is also where the mind palace mechanic is introduced. Saga can essentially go inside a mental construct to match clues, look at found collectibles, as well as "profile" people to find out through "intuition" what no one would otherwise know.

We find that the dead body with a missing heart belongs to former FBI agent Nightingale, the same Nightingale who pursued Alan in the first game, who was swallowed by the darkness. The woods are filled with evidence of cult activity: cult symbols everywhere, two triangles - marking their territories and the caches within. Tracks show Nightingale's footprints coming out impossibly from under a boulder. This is where we find our first manuscript page, describing us finding our first manuscript page. Someone is playing a sick game with us. We send the body to the morgue at Bright Falls for an autopsy.

On the way back to Bright Falls, Saga exclaims that she is excited to have her first cult case, almost brimming with glee. Since when does murder excite us?