Alan Wake 2 | Games of the Year 2023

gamesindustry.biz:

This article contains spoilers for events that occur within Alan Wake 2's narrative.

I started 2023 not knowing who or what Alan Wake was, let alone that a sequel was on the way.

This was a blessing in disguise, since I didn't have to wait 13 long, arduous years to discover whether Remedy's favourite tortured writer made it out of the Dark Place.

Instead, it was a matter of discovering this October that Alan Wake was indeed a thing, spending a week ploughing through the first game, then booting up the second at launch.

But the beauty of Alan Wake 2 is that it's made for newcomers and returning fans.

The sequel features a secondary protagonist, FBI agent Saga Anderson, who acts as a vessel for new players. She's drawn to the Pacific Northwest with her partner Alex Casey to investigate a string of murders in Bright Falls, the small town Alan disappeared from over a decade ago. Saga knows very little about Alan outside of his success as a bestselling author, and is experiencing the strange, paranatural events shrouding the town at the same pace as those playing the game for the first time.

Alan, on the other hand, is still trapped in the Dark Place, where we left him at the end of the first game. In this dream-like alternate dimension, fiction can become reality when pushed by a creative mind.

Alan struggles to remember what has and hasn't happened in his efforts to escape, and has to piece together the right formula to write a story that will end his eternal nightmare. His sense of what's real and what isn't constantly changes as he spirals deeper and deeper into the Dark Place, and his attempts to change the story affect the outside world with terrifying consequences.

The game itself is a loop, beginning and ending