Alan Wake 2 Preview: In-depth at Summer Game Fest

When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the write.

It’s been thirteen years since Alan Wake was released. Thirteen years is a heck of a long time for expectations to build.

It’s been about twice that long that I’ve wanted to go to a downtown Los Angeles video game preview event (RIP E3), and so it was with a giddy sense of glee dredged up from my inner youth paired with a horrendous degree of jetlag that I entered the behind closed doors Summer Games Fest (SGF) preview of Alan Wake 2.

The demo was unfortunately a hands-off affair with the game being played and discussed live by a pair of developers from Remedy Entertainment. What was shown to us was a much longer section of the level featured in the gameplay snippet that ran during the SGF live presentation a day earlier.

The sequence began with the sequel’s new co-protagonist, FBI agent Saga Anderson, walking out to a crime scene in the woods with their partner Alex Casey. Despite Remedy Entertainment having firmly established its games as existing in a shared multiverse, and despite wearing the face of Remedy’s creative director Sam Lake and sporting the voice of Max-actor James McCaffrey, Alex is sadly not Max Payne. He has been written with an edge of the kind of amusingly gritty dialogue you’d hope to hear him speak at least, though.

Regardless of Alex’s Max-ness, the pair have come to the beautiful north-western wilderness of Cauldron Lake to investigate a string of grisly murders believed to be linked to a local cult. Anderson is keenly aware by this stage that something otherworldly is going on – and though this honestly could have been because of my jetlag – I never noticed her partner explicitly acknowledging it. The duo were soon split up and Saga was left to venture deeper into the woods alone as the sun ominously set.

Representatives from Remedy have spoken about how they’ve consciously shifted genre with the sequel from spooky action game to true survival horror, and we were told during the demonstration that “dread and unease” was the guiding philosophy here over “cheap jump-scares”.

As I watched Saga walk slowly through the creepy forest while stopping periodically to investigate landmarks, the opening hour of Resident Evil 7 kept springing to my mind. There was that same palpable feeling that while Saga probably wasn’t going to be thrown into a sudden combat encounter against random enemies just yet, she definitely was headed toward something truly and significantly awful. After several minutes we arrived at the dilapidated general store where the fight against the towering antlered cultist featured in the public teaser occurs.

While that clip ended with Saga investigating a strange, tattooed heart shortly after the cultist fight, the demonstration we saw illustrated to us how objects such as this can become important clues in the FBI agents’ investigative process.

While playing as Saga you can tap a button at any time to enter their Mind Place, a “mental construct” which takes the form of a cozy – but still somewhat creepy – cabin that has all of her FBI case work laid out in a third-person navigated space. There’s a wall with polaroids and case notes connected with red strings that you’re free to move things around on, a desk where collected fragments of Alan’s manuscript can be investigated, a profiling station where you analyze photographs of key figures and try to make deductions based on both tangible evidence and Saga’s otherworldly experiences, a map, an armory station, and possibly more.

A fellow journalist asked if it were possible to make incorrect connections and resolutions with any of these interactive investigation tools, and the Remedy representative who did the speaking part of the presentation told us honestly that no, it isn’t, because giving players the freedom to do it completely wrong simply caused too many headaches and problems in testing. Another journalist present asked if Alan has a similar kind of space accessible during his side of the adventure, and with a big, coy smile the Remedy rep said “yes” but went no further into it. They did say that the game doesn’t actually pause while you’re in these spaces too, which felt like an oddly specific thing to state without being asked.

After a few minutes spent exploring the Mind Place we’re thrown back to the real world, and Saga pushes onward into the deep, dark woods. She comes upon a cabin she identifies as the witch’s hut from Alan’s story, but is quick to note that it isn’t lit up as the page she’d read had described, which leads her further into the woods on an errand to find a fuse. The environment becomes more dense and disorienting the deeper she goes, and the occasional darkness-possessed person attacks her along the way.

Enemies we saw were all dealt with in the same ‘weaken them with a light-source so that you can shoot them’ manner that was so satisfying in Alan Wake. It wasn’t broken, so it seems as if they haven’t tried to fix it. The Remedy spokesperson stated that players can expect more weapon variety than the original featured though, including an upgrade system, and that Saga also has weapon charms unique to her. They wouldn’t go into further detail about it, however.

As Saga pushes on she finds a shotgun, examines a few curious landmarks and phenomena, and inner-monologues to herself a lot before she comes to an intimidating boss fight inside of an extremely confined and twisting labyrinth of rocks and trees. Eventually she is brought to The Overlap, a meeting place of worlds where she meets Alan Wake himself. Disheveled and extremely anxious, he tells Saga fearfully about how Mr. Scratch is “changing the story”, and is horrified at Saga’s revelation that he’s been missing for thirteen years. The preview ended there.

I was a big fan of the original Alan Wake back in the day, and everything that I was shown at SGF has got me rabidly excited for the sequel.

Remedy has long been quite candid about the fact that it has wanted to do a proper Alan Wake sequel for many years, but that it “just didn’t pan out”. Common conjecture has it that sales weren’t quite strong enough for its publisher Microsoft to be able to justify giving it the green light, especially as the original’s release was clearly harmed somewhat by how it happened to coincide with the absolute juggernaut that was Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption.

Remedy themselves now control the Alan Wake property and have clearly been free to make the exact sequel that they wanted by virtue of this, but I can’t help but worry about the series’ future as it looks to release in the same ten-day span as Forza Motorsport, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and Spider-Man 2, and with the decision to do so exclusively digitally too. It’d be a tragedy for Alan to remain trapped in the darkness for another decade; I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

Alan Wake 2 heads to Windows PC, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X and PS5 on 17 October 2023. In the meantime, stay tuned for an interview with Remedy’s Sam Lake and Kyle Rowley.

Alan Wake 2 27 October 2023 PC PS5 Xbox Series S & X   Buy on Windows PC via Epic Games Store Buy on the Microsoft Store