I'll give Remedy this bit of credit: in a world overrun with soul-less, design-by-committee, live-services and vehicles for micro-transaction economies, Alan Wake 2 is a game that actually has a strong creative vision and personality. It follows in the footsteps of Hideo Kojima and Death Stranding by being completely confident in itself and being un-abashedly weird. And just like with Death Stranding, that means that sometimes Alan Wake 2 is genius; other times it's confoundingly stupid and hackneyed!
It's hard even to classify Alan Wake 2 into a single genre. That goes for both narrative genre and also ludic genre. In both cases, it's kind of all over the place. At the most reductionist level, it follows the basic formula of a modern horror game: exploring creepy environments to find keys for doors, fighting monsters as an over-the-shoulder 3rd-person shooter, solving puzzles, and managing a limited inventory. So it's a "horror game", right? In fact, sometimes, it's seriously scary and disturbing. But other times, I'm questioning its "horror" status while I'm laughing out loud to a deliberate joke, or bored out of my mind because nothing scary or particularly exciting has happened in hours. Yet other times still, it's farcically campy or schlocky, and un-intentionally laughable. It's story is ridiculously out there in its concepts and execution, but somehow every beat of the plot is set up and signposted as clearly and obviously as the neon signs that point the player to the next objective in the Dark Place.
Plot twists are signposted more clearly and obviously than the neon signs that often guide the player through levels.
It's also frequently up its own ass. It is, after all, a fictional story about the power of fiction to alter reality (and our perception of reality). It even features the lead designer as a self-insert character within the story. Though surprisingly, he made himself a secondary character instead of one of the 2 playable protagonists. So it's not really about him, but he still found a way to make the entire plot revolve around that secondary character.
In the mind's eye
I feel that Alan Wake 2 is consistently at its best when its sitting firmly in its horror-mystery mode. As such, the opening couple hours of the game really pulled me in and hooked me. The game's main quest and side content are split up into various "cases" for the FBI agent protagonists to solve. There's a mechanic in which the player can retreat into Agent Saga Anderson's "Mind Space", which is an imaginary office room in which she sorts through all the clues she's gathered and strings them together on an imaginary wall in order to fit the puzzle pieces of the mystery together. Each time the player discovers a critical piece of information in the game world, it will show up in the Mind Space's filing cabinet as a new file in a case folder. Putting the clues together in the right way will unlock new lines of inquiry, and can even reveal the next objective.
Agent Anderson can review the known evidence in her imaginary Mind Space office.
Apparently, the actual game doesn't even pause, and continues to play in the background while the player is in the Mind Space. Even though the Mind Space is a full-screen environment, the character can still be attacked by enemies in the "real world". At first, I thought this would be obnoxious, but after the first time I was attacked while trying to re-arrange items on the case board in the Mind Space, I learned my lesson. After that, I actually came to realize that that needing to find a safe, peaceful space in order to let the character think about clues they've discovered (and how to proceed), really helps to emphasize the danger and stakes of the situation.
Arranging the clues in the Mind Space is not very difficult or complicated. It's not like having to solve a person's fate in Return of the Obra Dinn, or anything like that. Most of the time, the process is just going through the motions. Even when there are multiple options for where a piece of evidence can go, the solution can be easily brute-forced without the player having to know anything about what's going on.
The Case Board is an immersive quest log and objective tracker.
Even so, the Mind Space is a creative idea for presenting objectives, quest logs, story summaries, and characterization. The Mind Space at least tries to force the player to have to engage with the events of the story in a meaningful and immersive way. The player has to at least pretend to know how the various events of the story, the characters, and the McGuffins you find all fit together in the broader story in order to progress the main story or side quests.
And in fact, the entire game is about the interplay between the audience and the fiction. For most of the story, it's about the ability of fiction to re-shape people's perception of reality, but as the game goes on, it becomes more and more about the audience's ability to shape or re-shape the actual fiction. It emphasizes that any creative work is made up of both the voices of its creator(s) and also the interpretation and reception of the audience. This has always been true, with all forms of fiction and story-telling, but it's even more true with video games.
From the page to the screen
Alan has his own variation of the Mind Space called the "Writer's Room". Instead of organizing evidence into cases like a cop would, he instead uses a plot board to outline the events of the game as if they are the plot points of a story. He can also apply different plot elements to different scenes of the story (which correspond to locations on the map) in order to affect changes in the actual environment. Putting a plot point on a scene changes the scene to reflect the state of the environment at the time of the story in which that plot point occurs. Basically, it moves a small chunk of the environment forward or backwards in time. This is used to bypass obstacles or solve puzzles, instead of just unlocking the next objective.
Again, the plot board isn't very complicated or difficult. There's never more than 3 or 4 possible plot points that can be applied to any given scene, and there's never any wrong answers. In fact, most scenes will require every possible plot point to be assigned to them at some point during the playthrough of a given level.
Alan can change the state of a particular set piece to different times in the story's plot.
Alan can also use light to physically change the environment. Turning a bright light on or off will have similar effects to changing the plot on the plot board. Turning on certain lights will open up new pathways, or change where a particular door or pathway leads. This creates some simple environmental puzzles in which the player has to go back and forth between locations with different permutations of lighting in order to access different parts of the level and progress towards the objective.
This method of changing the game's physical reality is an impressive technical feat of the game. There's a brief special effect whenever a change is made, but the environment changes in a matter of a couple seconds -- basically instantly, in real-time. No lengthy load times or animations to mask buffering content from the disc. I'm sure that the existence of solid state drives on new consoles gave the developers a lot more leeway to load in different set pieces at the players' whim. In fact, the minimum system specs for the PC version even says the game requires a solid state drive.
Alan can change his reality by altering the scene on the plot board.
Alan's levels can also get pretty whimsical. A running trend in Remedy's games is including a "music video" setpiece level. Alan Wake 2's musical level contains live-action performances, which means Remedy hired an actual choreographer and actual dancers and acrobats. As a father of a teenager who takes "circus" acrobatics classes and does competitive performances and shows, I appreciate that Remedy made that effort to let real people do a real musical dance performance (as opposed to just having one performer do motion-cap for a bunch of digital dancers rendered in-engine). It bodes well for my daughter's ability to potentially find work doing what she loves -- and hey, maybe she'll even be in a video game someday!
Anyway, it's a pretty spectacular set piece, and a lot of fun. It's not as awesome as Light Bright's live performance from America's Got Talent, But it's great stuff! Though I kind of hated actually playing it...
Control's Ashtray Maze is a celebratory victory
tour near the end of the campaign.
In general, I kind of hate both Alan Wake games whenever they require me to point a gun at anything, and the combat gauntlet at the backend of this musical set piece seemed obnoxiously hard for me. I had to redo the last checkpoint probably 10 times or so before finally getting a lucky roll where the enemies didn't all bum rush me at once, and I was actually able to back off to heal before finishing off the gauntlet. The whole sequence became an exercise in trial-and-error for me, as I'd wander into a new "room", get ambushed from behind and surrounded.
Control had a similar setpiece (in the Ashtray Maze), which was fuckin' awesome! I think I cleared the Ashtray Maze in my first attempt in Control. I think the big difference is that the Ashtray Maze comes near the end of Control's campaign, at which point, I had a good feel for the game's controls and combat strategies, and the character was leveled up with lots of advanced abilities and weapon upgrades. The musical Ashtray Maze in Control comes off almost like a celebratory victory lap for the player: "you've made it this far, you clearly know what you're doing. Now go kick some ass in this trippy, heavy-metal rock music video!".
"Herald of Darkness", on the other hand, comes much earlier in Alan Wake 2's campaign. I did it before I had really gotten the grasp of how to use the hand torches and other tools for crowd control. Though this chapter definitely taught me how to use those tools! It's more of a "skill check" than a "victory tour", and so the deaths and retries really saps the energy and momentum from the scene. Alan Wake is also a much slower-paced game than Control. It isn't a high-octane spectacle action game. In any case, as cool as this chapter is, I think it is a bit out of place. It probably should have been much later in the game, after there is a greater expectation that the player has more mastery of the controls and mechanics.
There is another music-video set piece late in the game that could serve a purpose more akin to that in Control. Except that it is designed more as a "run around and survive as long as you can" can of set piece that does not make the player feel empowered at all.
The analogous music video setpiece comes too early, and can easily degrade to trial and error.
Not exactly Shakespeare -- or even Stephen King
Unfortunately, Alan Wake 2 is only a part-time horror-mystery. The rest of the time, it's trying to be a schlocky action-shooter. Just like with the original Alan Wake on the XBox360, the results are passable at best, and outright awful at worst. Not only did Remedy not learn from the original game's failings (or from criticisms of Control), but they actually doubled down on some of them!
It isn't even the case that the combat gets difficult or frustrating late in the game. It's difficult and frustrating almost right from the start! Enemy design is awful, the dodge command is unreliable, and special effects often clutter the screen and make it hard to read what is going on around the character. Almost every enemy is a bullet sponge, with regular enemies seeming to take exactly 7 shots to kill -- from my 6-shot revolver -- no matter where I hit them. Reloading is cumbersome and easily interrupted. Worst of all is that most enemies can teleport, which means that even if you retreat and hide behind cover to reload or heal, there's a good chance the enemy will just teleport right next to you, hit you in the process, and cancel your reload or heal attempt.
Enemies often teleport or throw projectiles from off-screen, and interrupt reload or heal attempts.
The enclosed environments also often put the enemies right up in the player's face, which makes a lot of the combat accessories feel useless. When I don't loose track of the exploding propane tanks because they bounce off in some random direction and get lost in underbrush or environmental clutter, and am actually able to shoot them to make them explode, it doesn't matter. The enemies just teleport right past or through the propane explosion anyway. And the flashbang grenades feel sorely under-powered.
Thankfully, Alan Wake 2 is much more restrained than its predecessor when it comes to its action and combat set pieces. The original game was an almost non-stop gauntlet of shootouts against wave after wave of enemies in abandoned lumbermills. The sequel frequently slows down for lengthy exploration and puzzle-solving with hardly any enemies at all, with a handful of [awful] boss fights to punctuate climactic moments. Most enemy encounters are with 2 or 3 enemies, which can be easily dispatched if you're quick with the flashlight or have hand flares to spare. But when there is an enemy gauntlet or boss fights, the game quickly degrades into misery. And when deaths happen, they rarely feel fair or deserved.
Each death may require redoing several tedious side content activities, many of which involve listening to an un-skippable monologue voice-over for a minute or 2 ... over and over again. And if you try to walk away during that monologue, or are interrupted by an enemy ambush, the game won't log that you listened to it, so you'll have to restart the monologue over again if you want credit for listening to it.
Enemies will also respawn if you go too far away or stop at a break room. The crossbow comes in handy here, since Saga can retrieve used crossbow ammo from defeated enemies. This makes it a lot easier to fight the respawning enemies, since it isn't nearly as much of a drain on my resources. Of course, this also means that the crossbow comes off as overpowered. In addition to being able to recover ammo, the crossbow also kills most enemies in just 1 or 2 hits, and has other powerful upgrade buffs that make it the go-to weapon to start any enemy encounter.
The overpowered crossbow helps offset the resource drain of respawning enemies.
I feel like the crossbow is an artifact of this game's lengthy development time. Crossbows were a huge tend in games in the 2010's, but have started to fall off a bit recently. It's always been a silly trend, since if crossbows were this devastating and efficient of a weapon, then humanity would probably have never invented guns to begin with.
And just when I thought I was starting to get the hang of combat, and maybe it was starting to click for me, the game would throw one of its god-awful bosses at me.
I went into the boss fight against Cynthia with only 1 hand flare because the bunker did not provide me with any extras, nor did I find a single shoebox in the entire bunker level from which to retrieve my stored flares (due to simple bad luck, since the item pick-ups are pseudo-randomized each time the game is loaded). The boss fight itself was a miserable slog that I had to re-do half a dozen times. The entire arena was full of bugs and glitches. Saga got stuck on the geometry multiple times, making it impossible to dodge or avoid Cynthia's projectile or wave attacks. At one point, she pinned me between a piece of debris and the wall, and I could not escape. In other instances, Saga would lay on the floor and refuse to get up, or her character model would start flipping and rotating, taking away all of my control and causing her to take multiple hits.
This was one of the worst boss experiences I've ever had in any game, ever.
And when I finally did enough damage to force Cynthia to stop hovering above the ground, she would charge at me non-stop with arms flailing, leaving me with no window to turn around and get a shot off, let alone to stop and heal. In general, she created a near-constant barrage of attacks, and her projectile and wave attacks would hit me through walls, leaving me (again) with no opportunity to heal or reload, few windows of opportunity to stop and line up a shot, and no opportunity to try opening any of the boxes in the arena to look for some god damn flares. All the healing items that the bunker level had loaded me up with were useless, since I rarely (if ever) would have an opportunity to use one in the actual fight.
It was at this point that I finally caved and checked the Options menu in the pause screen to try lowering the difficulty to "easy" just to get past this awful, glitchy boss fight. But there was no such option to change the difficulty mid-game, nor are there any assist features or options to mitigate the difficulty (or make it harder, if that's what you want). If you get halfway through the game and just aren't gelling with the combat, you're only choices are to restart the game entirely, or to just tank through and hope it doesn't make you hate the game.
Too many re-writes
Oh, and speaking of having to re-do tedious content... If you're going to split your game into chapters -- especially if you have such clear and explicit chapter breaks (like Alan Wake 2 has), then you need to save the game at the end of the chapter! Or at least prompt the player to save. No, I don't want to continue past this explicit, natural stopping point, which you (the game's designers) put into the game!!! If I want to save and quit, I have to start the next chapter, which probably involves watching another lengthy cutscene that sets context for the next chapter. Then I have to find the nearest save point, which may or may not be easily accessible from wherever the next chapter begins. Or I can quit at the "End of Part" screen, only to have to reload prior to a boss fight, enemy gauntlet, or puzzle at the end of the previous chapter and replay that content because the fucking game didn't auto-save!
It's bad enough that I have to re-do sections of the game because I die to cheap deaths, but it just rubs salt in the wound to shut off the game at a splash screen that says "End of Part" and "Press X to continue", only to reload the game later and have to replay the last few minutes of the previous chapter. At least the cutscenes that bookend chapters are skippable.
If you're going to stop the action at an explicit stopping point, then SAVE THE FRIGGIN' GAME!!!
This was a problem in the first Alan Wake too. But this time around, the doubling-down doesn't come in the form of making all the same mistakes again, but rather doing the opposite. The first game stupidly showed a "previously on Alan Wake" recap of the story so far, as if they expected the player to stop at the end of a chapter and pick up the game again later. But without a chance to save between the end of one chapter and the start of the next, they end up just being recaps of whatever you literally just finished playing. This time around, there aren't recaps in Alan Wake 2. There's only a short musical interlude. But the fact that the sequel has the player alternating between different playable characters for lengthy periods of time means that a recap of the current character's story would actually be welcome and beneficial.
I also wish the game would give me the option to switch characters at the end of a chapter, instead of having to start the next chapter with the current character, and then make my way to the next break room to change realities.
The people at Remedy are obviously talented game designers and programmers. There's some really impressive technical accomplishments in this game (as well as in Control and also in the first Alan Wake), so I know they know what they're doing. But they also make absolutely dumbfounding design decisions, like not auto-saving at the end of a chapter. Why would any professional game designer (someone who gets paid to make games) make a decision like that?!
And it isn't like the game isn't capable of auto-saving. It auto-saves all the time. Sometimes even at places where I don't want it to the auto-save. Or it will go on for lengthy periods of time without any auto-saves and no access to a manual save point. In general, the save system is absolute garbage.
An un-satisfying half a game that's still too long
I think the gist of my feelings about Alan Wake 2 comes down to me hating the combat and bosses, but mostly enjoying the rest of the game. The Mind Space and Case Board concepts could be a really cool mechanic in a more open-ended mystery game, so that they feel more like an actual puzzle, and less like busy-work. I also like a lot of the visual design. Light and darkness are used very well. The forested areas are a great horror setting because the constantly swaying trees and bushes means there's always movement at the peripheral of the screen that keeps the player on edge. Even in the urban settings, the presence of ubiquitous graffiti creates silhouettes everywhere that can create some cool fake-outs as the player turns a corner or runs the flashlight across a dark room. Alan Wake 2 works very well as a "horror mystery", when it's actually leaning into its horror elements. Most of its comedy lands as well.
But then it spends so much time as a whimsical, schlocky action game that occasionally stops dead in its tracks to ask the player to solve an SAT question. It throws off the entire experience and makes the whole game feel uneven.
It doesn't help that the story is both overly-convoluted and pretentious, while also somehow managing to be completely predictable down to almost every plot point that it makes the characters look kind of like bumbling bafoons. I had predicted the plot twists about Scratch and Saga by the end of the 2nd or 3rd chapter. I knew the identity of the cult leader as soon as the mystery of that person's identity was introduced to the Case Board, and I also figured that this would probably turn into a double twist. I had even guessed at the identity of the person leaving all the Alex Casey lunchboxes long before Saga even started wondering who was responsible. But then, the end of the game is all self-aware and points out how obvious all these plot twists were all along, only to cop out with a cliff-hanger ending that doesn't resolve anything... Unless you play the entire game again!
Even if the 40+ hours that I spent on Alan Wake 2 had all been fantastic (it wasn't -- not even close), and even if I had seen the secret New Game Plus alternate ending, there would still be massive unresolved threads that would still make me feel like I was only given 2/3 of a game. Yet that fraction of a game still somehow felt far too long and drawn out (without even having to play it all twice). I would probably be much more willing to put up with the weird and experimental narrative decisions if the game hadn't been so full of bad gameplay decisions. How about, instead of patching in a New Game Plus mode with an alternate ending that the majority of your audience will never see, you patch in an autosave and chapter break system that works?!
Alan Wake 2 sees Silent Hill's Shakespeare poem puzzles, and raises an SAT algebra question!
P.S. I want to add that I like the U.S. cover art for Alan Wake 2. It's not mind-blowingly awesome or anything like that, but it's a huge step above most other American game covers. So many AAA games fall back on a cover that just frames the protagonist dead center in some generic action pose, and don't really convey how the actual game plays or feels. Alan Wake 2's cover doesn't stray too far, but it does split the cover in half vertically, featuring Alan Wake's face on the top, and Saga on the bottom. Alan is framed against a black background looking exhausted, disheveled, and a little bit threatening. Meanwhile, Saga looks like she's taking a moment to second-guess herself before wandering into some evil-looking foliage, with the letters "FBI" on the back of her jacket clearly legible.
The cover highlights that the gameplay will be split between the 2 characters, while also giving a good idea of what each character is doing within the story. Alan is stuck in the "Dark Place" of his own mind. And Saga is an FBI agent who's gameplay consists of methodical exploration of wilderness, while trying to solve a criminal mystery. The cover communicates all of this, with some eye-catching color contrast that helps it to stand out on a shelf. So bonus points to the artists at Remedy who drew this cover art up.
The only note that I have would be to maybe also throw in some reference to the cult elements of the game? Perhaps include one of the cult symbols or deer mask somewhere in Saga's half of the cover art?