Platform Played On: PlayStation 5
Available On: PlayStation 5 | Xbox Series | Steam
Release Date: October 27, 2023
Genre: Survival horror
I don’t like horror media. I love survival horror games. This is a problem.
A few years ago I decided to play Resident Evil 7 after having not played a Resident Evil since the original Playstation release of RE2. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, and used a guide, making sure to read ahead to get warned of jump scares. I made it through and really enjoyed the game. Then I played RE8 sometime after it was released and RE4 Remake last year. I’d grown more comfortable with the horror part of the genre so I didn’t think too much about it when I decided to jump into Alan Wake II. That was a mistake.
I don’t consume horror movies or books so I don’t have much of a baseline here, but I can pretty safely say that Alan Wake II is the scariest piece of media I have ever consumed as an adult (those dinosaurs opening doors in Jurassic Park when I was a kid will always be hard to top). That’s not to say it’s terrifying compared to what else is out there, just that it got me more than a few times with its jump scares, even when I thought I was prepared for them.
This preface is important because if Alan Wake II were a bad, mediocre, or even above average game, I almost certainly would have hit the home button on my PS5 controller and happily uninstalled the game after my 17th jumpscare or so. Alan Wake 2 is none of those things, so I didn’t, and the fact that I played through to the end is about as ringing of an endorsement as I could possibly give to this game.
Alan Wake II has you playing as two characters; Alan Wake is a writer stuck in The Dark Place who must replay chapters to figure out how to rewrite his book to produce a better ending and Saga Anderson is an FBI agent sent to a rural Pacific Northwestern town to investigate a gnarly cult murder.
The wonderful feat the game pulls off is making gameplay with these two characters feel significantly different. It is clearly the same game with the same core mechanics, but the way in which the chapters are structured, the available weapons, the enemies, and the setting are unique between the two and do a great job of making this feel like two different adventures for the player.
Alan Wake’s Dark Place is full of shadowy figures, most of which are just that; shadows. However, some of them are real and will attack you. If you try to run through them all you will make it past some, but eventually one will chokeslam you to the ground. He can use a burst from his flashlight to definitively determine if shadow is actually a shadow or not, but that comes at the cost of battery usage and, like any good survival horror game, batteries are at a premium in this game. Alan’s chapters take place in a desolate city, abandoned hotels and movie theaters, with only these shadows lurking. The sense of horror here comes from the chance of very quickly moving enemies jumping across the room at you in a split second. The unease of not knowing if you are looking at a shadow or an actual being capable of attacking you carries throughout all of Alan’s sections.
Saga lives in the real world with more tangible threats. She mostly traverses large outdoor areas including a small town, forest, and a closed amusement park. Her enemies are all real, “taken” people who have been enveloped in a weird aura which turns them violent. There is no mystery in Saga’s enemies; if you see somebody while in a “guns out” area, they are there to kill you. Instead, her chapters rely on more classic horror tropes such as the aforementioned jump scares and creepy basements to keep you nervous. There was one chapter in particular that was the perfect mix of setting, unease, and jump scares. I won’t spoil anything, but if you’ve played then you likely know, it was the chapter that made me realize how much I was enjoying the game as I wasn’t rushing to uninstall the game.
Things aren’t totally different between the two, however, as it makes sense to have some connective tissue tying things together. Saga, for example, can also use a flashlight burst on her enemies. In her case, it essentially lowers their shield making them easier to kill, but batteries are also at a premium in the real world, so be sure to pick your spots. Both sides hit the right notes on the survival side of survival horror as well. Bullets, batteries, healing items, and explosives are the core inventory items here and there were times with both characters where I was down to my last bullet or two. As does tend to happen in these games, this is less of a concern later in the game, but it is replaced by inventory space limitations. You get a lot of guns with Saga, for example, but you will have a difficult time carrying the best of them, enough heals, bullets, and the vital crowd-controlling explosives until you’ve unlocked all of the slots in your invisible backpack.
Gameplay is king in this game, for me anyway, but Remedy gets so much else right as well. The visuals in the game are great, the two distinct worlds you play in feel unique to each other but also connected in the slightest way. The visual design around the enemies adds significant tension to the game in Alan’s levels while the atmosphere traversing a closed amusement park in the woods is perfect in Saga’s. The game also manages to successfully incorporate live action videos into the game successfully. That’s not a sentence I ever thought I would write.
Beyond the visuals, the game incorporates music in ways that not many games do. There is a full chapter that plays out with a musical sequence playing on massive screens all around you. It’s a chaotic, action packed chapter and the music fits the mood perfectly. The climactic gameplay moment also prominently features a massive musical section. After each chapter you are greeted with a song with on-the-nose lyrics explaining where we are in the story. Many games feature amazing music, but few push it into the gameplay as much as Alan Wake II does.
I’ve spent a while talking about the positives of this game so far, so I will take a break from that to call out the biggest issue I had with this game; the bugs. There was a lot of jank in this game, way more than I’d experienced in a true AAA title in a long while. Many times I could not grab loot because the camera couldn’t quite get the reticle on top of it properly. I had cases where my inventory got busted and slots would stop working. None of this was game breaking, but it was noticeable throughout my playthrough. My other main gripe in this game was the pacing of the last hour or two of the game. I won’t spoil anything with details, but I think they could have done better there.
Back to the good stuff! There is a lot I didn’t touch on. Puzzles, the amazing use of light as a weapon, the cool (even if mostly expected) weapons, the callbacks to other Remedy games, and so on. There is a lot going on in this game but, somehow, almost all of it sticks.
This game is an experience. Most games are, in some form or another, but Alan Wake II is an experience in the best way possible. I don’t really think many (if any) companies are out there making games like Remedy is right now. They’ve created a shared video game world and put together another absolutely bonkers stories to live in that world. At times the game is any number of fun, tough, dark, scary, confusing, and/or exhilarating. If you have any stomach at all for horror games, I highly recommend checking out Alan Wake II.
