Alan Wake 2: The First Preview | gamescom 2023

ign.com:

What’s it like to be trapped in a hell of your own making? For writer Alan Wake, that’s the story he’s trying to tell. And after watching a full 40-minute demo, played from the perspective of Wake himself, it certainly looks set to be a tale worth telling. Taking place in an area called The Dark Place, this lengthy slice of the story follows Alan as he makes his way through an oppressive and haunting replica of New York City riddled with danger, gunfights, and puzzles. It’s classic survival horror but with the distinct edge of developer Remedy - smart, engrossing, and consistently odd.

First things first, it's difficult to overstate just how visually striking The Dark Place is. Roads are populated by levitating, oil spill-like pools of darkness that glisten and contort as you move through them. Newspapers litter the streets, sticking to their remarkably detailed asphalt as Se7en-level amounts of rain crashes down. It's a truly stunning nightmare rendering of New York that not only impresses in its scope and monstrous nature (this is a significantly more detailed and expansive environment than anything in the original game) but also feels convincingly claustrophobic when in its dark and deadly alleyways. While not huge in terms of pure square footage, the city block winds and connects in unexpected ways, representative of its unreliable narrator who quite literally writes in new sections of architecture as he presses onward.

A world apart from the small town, Twin Peaks-inspired Bright Falls setting of the other half of Alan Wake 2’s story, these mean streets owe more to Martin Scorsese than David Lynch. The 1970s Taxi Driver-influenced colour palette bursts out the screen. Red and green neon lights slice through the