Alan Wake II: The Lake House DLC Review

ign.com:

Under any other circumstance, The Lake House would sound like a nice spot for a serene summer getaway. In this case, though, it’s the setting for the second and final installment of Alan Wake II DLC, so it is naturally anything but. There’s no rest and relaxation to be found here, only another double-fisted dose of flashlights and firepower in this tightly paced two-hour tour inside the cold, concrete walls of a remote Federal Bureau of Control facility. In raw gameplay terms, The Lake House is not as eccentric a departure as Night Springs was a few months’ back, but as far as closing the book on Alan Wake II’s story and providing a bridge to the upcoming Control 2 goes, it’s yet another meta-storytelling slam dunk for the team at Remedy Entertainment.

You might remember The Lake House from the main Alan Wake II campaign, or at the very least the exterior of its grounds since it’s found behind a locked gate in Cauldron Lake near where the murder victim is found at the start of Saga Anderson’s story. This FBC research facility was strictly off-limits to Saga, but in this new chapter we’re able to fully explore it as returning FBC Agent Kiran Estevez. I liked Estevez in the main campaign and was happy to spend some time in her shoes, but the real show-stealing performances here come from the husband and wife scientist team of Jules and Diana Marmont. Initially I was laughing out loud at the petty bickering between them that occurs in the facility’s welcome video, but their relationship evidently took a much darker turn as evidenced by the many memos and emails I pored over as I continued my engrossing investigation inside the sinister shapeshifting structure.

The facility itself is only five floors, but thanks to its proximity to the Altered World Event in Cauldron Lake and the disturbing research experiments conducted by the Marmonts, The Lake House is as consistently unsettling a space as anything from the main Alan Wake II campaign. One floor finds Estevez caught in