Alan Wake 2 is a confident and often ground-breaking thriller

videogameschronicle.com:

There’s nothing like a developer that’s fully in its stride.

Remedy, the studio behind excellent single-player narrative games like Quantum Break and Control, and currently helming a remake of its seminal Max Payne series, feels like it’s finally at the point where the technology of video games has caught up with its ambitions.

The result is Alan Wake 2, an excellent survival horror game that uses mixed-media in ways which are groundbreaking in gaming, and tells an engaging mystery story befitting a prestige HBO miniseries. There’s also a large helping of weirdness and sequences you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t see them with your own eyes.

While the third-person-shooting doesn’t quite keep up with the true benchmark setters of the genre, everything around Alan Wake 2, from the writing, the performances, the huge amount of scares, and the technology powering the game, is hugely impressive, and way beyond what many would expect from a sequel to a cult game from 2010.

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Speaking of 2010, in typical meta-Remedy style, you begin the game as FBI agent Saga Anderson, investigating a cult murder, that you soon realize may be connected to Alan Wake, a writer who disappeared in 2010.

It’s now 2023, and you and your partner Alex Casey (played by Remedy creative director and Max Payne’s face, Sam Lake), have to get to the bottom of the cult’s schemes. However, it doesn’t take long for things to become significantly more supernatural, as Saga discovers a connection to Wake, who is still alive, only stuck in what seems to be a parallel dimension, referred to as The Dark Place.

In this Dark Place, Alan is trapped, writing the manuscript for a novel