Games worth discovering

Alan Wake 2 offers a terrifying, warped reality in which David Lynch made Resident Evil 4

5K View2023-10-26

Alan Wake 2

9.3

DarkHorrorSingleplayerEditors' ChoiceStory Rich

Get

SHOULD I PLAY ALAN WAKE 2?

Absolutely play it if you’ve got a machine that can run it. Alan Wake 2 is a uniquely spine-chilling return to Bright Falls, Washington, where crime novelist Alan Wake disappeared thirteen years ago. Part murder mystery, part survival horror, Alan Wake 2 is jam-packed with developer Remedy Entertainment’s signature style, which now includes the reality-warping government agency from Control. It’s also a showcase of some of the most cutting-edge graphics technology around right now, so if you’ve got a fancy new graphics card and want to see what it’s capable of doing, Alan Wake 2 is the game for you.

TIME PLAYED

I played nine hours of Alan Wake 2, and because of the kind of game this is, I’m not going to tell you anything that happened during that time. There was some combat, there was some puzzle-solving, and there was a heck of a lot of exploring, which took me all around Bright Falls and beyond, in several senses of that term. At this point, I’m not coming in on the end of the story, but I may be getting close to solving one of its component mysteries. Because Alan Wake 2 deals with multiple realities and metanarratives, though, it’s very difficult to know how much more it has in store for me. It could literally go anywhere from here—and I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT ALAN WAKE 2?

• The story is instantly compelling. Alan Wake 2 kicks off like any crime thriller, and it’s a story that will grab both long-time fans and players who’ve never encountered Alan Wake or Control. You don’t need to know anything about what happened in Bright Falls before, but I was also pleased to see that familiarity with the other stories in Remedy’s back catalog is rewarded.

Things get weird pretty quickly, and so I was impressed at how deftly Alan Wake 2 managed to keep my objectives in view and the story moving forward, even when I wanted to take long detours to explore each new area. Within the first twenty minutes, I was getting immersed in local occult legends, tracking down a creepy cult, and working my way through a grisly campground crime scene.

• Beautiful, spooky locations. Alan Wake 2 takes place across several disjointed settings, but the main location is the rural mountain town of Bright Falls and the surrounding areas. Each new place I visited was full of vivid detail, from the plant and animal life to the assorted knickknacks people keep on their porches and in their backyards. I loved the way the sunset looked over Cauldron Lake, and the mists that set in over the nearby trailer park. The tall fir trees and shimmering puddles on the streets made it feel like I was really walking around in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, and the detailed homes and car models (I spotted several unmarked Ford Crown Victorias) all made Bright Falls feel like an authentic place—even being full of Twin Peaks-style weirdos.

• Excellent performances. Characters in Alan Wake 2 can be over-the-top and zany at times, but I appreciated how grounded the performances all felt—and how well they’ve been captured, too. Remedy has taken a lot of care to recreate the little things people do in conversations, like what they do with their hands and how they hold their heads, and it all combines to create extremely lifelike interactions. The fact that most characters feel so realistic and lifelike adds another layer of unsettling when someone acts a bit off, too—and as the story progressed, I found this happening more and more often. It’s creepy as heck.

• A cool system for organizing clues and planning. I don’t think it breaks my “no spoilers” rule to reveal that for part of Alan Wake 2, I played as FBI agent Saga Anderson, who has a kind of sixth sense for profiling persons of interest. As Saga, I could pull up my “mind palace” at any time and affix clues I had found to an ever-expanding chart on one of the walls. When I collected enough evidence about a particular idea or lead, a conclusion would form, and I’d have a new direction to head in. At no point did I ever have to wander around wondering what I was supposed to be doing next.

• Exploring is always worth it. Each scene in Alan Wake 2 was gorgeous and just begging to be explored, even as my fear of what was lurking in the shadows grew increasingly intense. Fortunately, the game always made exploration worthwhile by giving me new clues or vital resources every time I took the initiative to head off the beaten path. There was lore to discover, or collectibles, and everything I found had some gameplay value to it: A new clue might unlock a new lead on my evidence wall, or I might stumble across a resource cache with ammo and healing items in it. This stuff was plentiful enough that even though things got mighty scary, I always wanted to poke around in the dark to see what was in there.

• It’s an ode to speculative fiction. One of my favorite story genres is speculative fiction; it’s not exactly sci-fi, and it’s not quite horror, it’s just spooky because it’s weird. Remedy has played in this genre for a while, and I really fell in love with their approach to it in Control, and so I’ve been thrilled to see that continue on in Alan Wake 2.

Sure, Stephen King fans will feel right at home in Bright Falls, but I think it’s much more a David Lynch-inspired game that revels in leaving the player off balance, unsure of what’s real and what’s a dream, or even how many meta-layers deep they are at any given moment. You know how it was creepy when Psycho Mantis read your memory card in Metal Gear Solid? A lot of Alan Wake 2 feels a bit like that, just stretched over the course of many hours.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT ALAN WAKE II?

• Steep system requirements. If you’re on Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, I imagine you’ll be fine, but if you’re a PC player, double-check the system requirements before you pony up for Alan Wake 2—it's a demanding game, even on the low end. At the very minimum you’ll need a GeForce RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 6600, and that’s just to get you running on low settings at 1080p. For 60 fps on medium, you’ll need at least an RTX 3070, and using any of the fancy ray-tracing settings bumps you up into Nvidia's 40-series.

No matter how you play, you’ll need 90GB of free SSD space to install the game as well. My PC is powerful enough to run Alan Wake 2 on pretty high settings, but even with it installed on an SSD, I ran into some serious slowdowns at certain points, such as when I entered the save menu and during certain scene transitions.

• Combat can be frustrating. The combat in Alan Wake 2 is generally fine—it’s nothing to write home about, particularly after the fantastic Resident Evil reboots we’ve been graced with in recent years, but it certainly gets the job done. In a couple key combat encounters, however, I felt let down by the camera, which kind of gave up when a large enemy got too close to me. I couldn’t see where I was, or where the enemy was, and had to mash buttons and pray it worked out. It usually didn’t.

[Review written by TapTap editor Ian Boudreau]

💬 Are you planning on tracking Alan Wake down in Bright Falls, or do you have better things to do than chase a neurotic novelist around in his nightmares? What are your favorite horror games? Let us know in the comments.