Alan Wake 2 takes GTA 5’s character switching to a weird new place

polygon.com:

From its off-the-books detectives to its time-hopping plots, Remedy Entertainment has a storied history of breaking the rules. With Alan Wake 2, the upcoming survival-horror game featuring two protagonists and an unusual dual narrative, creative director Sam Lake and his team wanted to keep the tradition going. And it’s proven to be a tricky process.

“We’re getting out of our comfort zone in so many ways,” Lake says, sitting in a New York coffee shop while rain batters the windows. The night before, he sat down with horror director Mike Flanagan at Tribeca Festival 2023 to talk about the nerve-wracking process of writing a horror story in which the player has so much control. “I’ve been breathless along the way. I think there was this pent-up drive to just push everything forward. With the depth and layers of the story — just how it’s constructed, and how big it is…” Lake pantomimes swimming. “I feel as if my feet have not been touching the bottom.”

It’s been 13 years — both in the real world, and that of Alan Wake — since the first game ended with the titular novelist trapped in the Dark Place, an ethereal, never-ending nightmarescape of time loops and malevolent enemies. Not wanting players to have to “do homework” before playing the sequel, Lake and game director Kyle Rowley settled on the idea of a two-protagonist cast early on. As an FBI agent sent to investigate disturbances in the Pacific Northwest, Saga Anderson is the ideal stand-in for newcomers and veterans alike — she has just as many questions about the world (and the ways in which it’s changed) as players will. Based on what we saw of her half of the story at Summer Game Fest last week, we’re already strongly reminded of Resident Evil 4 and True Detective