Alan Wake 2's Case Board Had To Be Reworked Because It Was Too "Anxiety-Inducing"
Alan Wake 2's Case Board was given such overwhelmingly negative feedback during development due to its "anxiety-inducing" mechanical depth that it had to be toned down a ton for the final game.
As anyone who has played "We Sing" can tell you, Alan Wake 2 has some of the most memorable levels and gameplay mechanics of any title that was released in 2023. One of the most interesting mechanics in the game is the Case Board, which Saga Anderson uses in her investigations to figure out suspects, clues, intentions, and what her next move should be.
The Case Board might look complicated with its many different pathways and connections, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In the final game, each pin on the board can really only be matched up with one specific thing, and Saga will always guide you to the right answer if you just start shoving stuff on the board. Not the way you're supposed to do it, but it works.
That relative simplicity wasn't always the case, however. Alan Wake 2's associate game director Simon Wasselin and narrative designer Molly Maloney just spoke at GDC 2024 for the "Making Linear Story Playable: The Narrative Design of Alan Wake 2" panel, which revealed a ton of secrets about how the game changed during development.
One section of the talk focused on one of the main pillars of the game - Saga Anderson's Case Board. Beyond saying that Case Board was styled after True Detective, Wasselin and Maloney revealed that the Case Board was much more complicated during development, with loose questions that were in no particular order and the possibility of getting connections wrong.
That might sound like it'd make for an interesting time, but that isn't what early playtesters found. Instead, the early feedback for the mechanic was "overwhelmingly negative", with testers finding it too "anxiety-inducing" with how many options there were. Players didn't know when they could move on and always felt like they were missing something that would help them out
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