HomeFeaturesAlan Wake 2
The RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 21stHark! The herald of darkness sings
Hark! The herald of darkness sings
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Before you open this door on the Advent Calendar, make sure you have enough batteries for your mega-powered torch. The environment be damned, throw those spent batts on the floor where you stand and open-palm slam the new ones in, because light is the only way you’re getting out of here alive.
That and fabulous dance sequences, that is! Say hello toAlan Wake 2!
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Epic Games Publishing
Katharine:2023 may be a year that’s best remembered for its greatRPGs, but I reckon it will also go down as a pretty good year for survivalhorror, too. After all, it began with some of the best all-time great excavations of the genre’s former glory (looking at you,Dead Spaceand Resi 4 remakes), and ended with what can only be a glimpse into its weird and wonderful future withAlan Wake 2.
It can be a bit of a hard sell, picking up the story of a game that first came out 13 years ago, and I would honestly still recommend playing the first one (or at least watching a recap video) beforehand to give yourself the best experience. But Alan Wake 2 still does a pretty good job of getting its players up to speed with what’s been happening in the Washington state town of Bright Falls since our last outing here, and that’s all thanks to the introduction of new deuteragonist and FBI agent Saga Anderson.
And yet, so muchhaschanged during that time in Bright Falls, not least for poor old Alan, who’s been stuck in the alternate reality known as The Dark Place ever since the conclusion ofAlan Wake1. His sections play like a living nightmare, bringing to bear over a decade’s worth of technical advancements to create a realm where ghosts and spectres haunt the streets with menacing overtones, and the shifting, kaleidoscopic walls of reality twist and bend to the will of some greater, evil power. Alan still has his trusty torch and gun to keep the darkness at bay, but he must also use his talents as a writer to literally rewrite the scenes in front of him to find an escape. It’s very artfully done, and if we ever see a more confident realisation of what it is to be trapped inside a dreamlike hellscape, we’ll be in for a right old treat indeed.
Image credit:IEpic Games PublishingImage credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Epic Games Publishing
Image credit:IEpic Games Publishing
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Epic Games Publishing
There really is nothing quite like it, this year or otherwise, and I cannot wait to see what the next decade of Remedy games bring after this.
Alice Bee:When I played some of the original Alan Wake earlier this year, I was disappointed because nobody had ever bothered to tell me Alan is basically Garth Marenghi. If they had, I would have played it much sooner. Alan Wake 2 feels like it leans into thegenreof it all much more, both taking itself less seriously (and therefore being better) and doing as much multimedia vamping as it can. It’s great! And I maintain that a lot of the critical discussion of Alan Wake hasn’t fully engaged with the strong element of complete and utter nonsense that I find every time I play it. Sam Lake is in it as about a million different characters, leading me to suspect that our ostensibly real life version of him is in fact not a real life person at all. Saga, canonically, has investigative ideasmanually, where she goes into a Mind Place in her head, which is a replica of their field office in town, and walks around looking at imaginary files and pinning evidence to an imaginary wall before she can come to a fairly obvious conclusion. And this takes place in real time! She just goes AFK in front of people whenever she thinks! It’s ridiculous (complimentary).
