Alan Wake 2 has the best 15-minute stretch in a video game in years

polygon.com:

To say that Alan Wake 2 hooked me at the outset would be an understatement. The survival-horror masterpiece was gripping, surreal, and creepy from the second Remedy Entertainment gave me control of a naked man who had just crawled out of a supernatural lake and found himself lost in the woods and hunted by a maniacal cult. But one sequence, a little more than halfway through the story, convinced me that I was truly playing a game for the ages.

[Ed. Note: Spoilers follow for Alan’s storyline in the “We Sing” part of the “Initiation” chapter.]

After gaining the ability to freely swap between the parallel (and occasionally intersecting) storylines of FBI agent Saga Anderson and the titular writer, I opted to stick with the former for about four hours. I love its confluence of vibes from True Detective’s first season, Twin Peaks, Resident Evil 4, and procedurals such as Mindhunter, or even Mare of Easttown. What’s more, Saga is as compelling character as I’ve seen all year, with a knack for snappy dialogue and a borderline superhuman intuition. She’s cool as hell, and I didn’t want to leave the creepy Pacific Northwest towns of Bright Falls or the neighboring Watery.

However, at a certain point, it nagged me that there was basically a whole second video game I wasn’t playing. And upon returning to Alan’s “reality” in the Dark Place, a nightmarish facsimile of New York City, I was surprised to find myself back in the green room for In Between with Mr. Door, the talk show where Alan’s story began. Looping scenarios that change each time you travel through them is a common theme in all of Remedy’s games, so I wasn’t shocked, per se — that is, until I got sucked into the green room’s TV and entered a full-on interactive rock