Alan Wake 2 — A tardy review reminding you not to skip this gaming masterpiece

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Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece of video game design, full of so many memorable scenes. Everybody knows this thanks to plenitude of Game of the Year awards and the oddball dance routine at The Game Awards.

It’s my favorite game of 2023, easily beating out other contenders like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. It’s the kind of experience you might get if you took a film like Inception and stretched it out for 33 hours — in an articulation of horror, comedy and weirdness. In a good way.

Somehow, I feel compelled to add my own review of the game for posterity. It’s like some dark and twisted demon is forcing me to go down this road that so many critics have already been down. But before we say goodbye to the games of the fall of 2023, I want to remind you to play this one.

I knew this was going to be a weighty game, as it came out 13 years after the original psychological thriller, which I rated at 95 out of 100 in a review that came out in 2010.

In that review, I wrote, “Alan Wake is a work of art, and it’s one of the best video games I’ve ever played. It deserves critical accolades, but the jury is out as to whether it will also be a commercial success.”

I’m pretty sure this sequel is going to sell well without my help. But what I’d like to say is that the experience of playing Alan Wake 2 is going to change the way you think about video games. You’ll remember how you wove and threaded the experience in your own unique way, like you were crafting the story yourself. As Alan Wake is a character who is a writer, and you are the player, it feels like the plot itself was designed to make you understand the