Alan Wake 2
Alan Wake II
Introduction
Alan Wake II is a survival horror video game, released on October 27th, 2023. It was co-directed by Sam Lake and Kyle Rowley, developed by Remedy Entertainment, and published by Epic Games. The game is set 13 years after the first entry, following two characters: Saga Anderson, an FBI investigator looking into a murder case in the quaint Washington town of Bright Falls, and Alan Wake, a best-selling novelist trapped in a strange alternate reality known as “The Dark Place”, ruled by “The Dark Presence”. The rules of this alternate world blur fiction and reality and, as an author, Wake has the ability to control that. He writes a horror novel titled “Return” about Saga’s ongoing investigation in an attempt to escape The Dark Place, and the novel begins to have very real effects upon Saga. The gameplay mostly consists of third-person shooting. Enemies have “shields” made of darkness that require players to break them using flashlights. This creates a balancing act of managing ammo, healing items and flashlight batteries while fighting enemies. There is also some puzzle solving, namely environmental puzzles in Wake’s sections where you manipulate the world to progress, and detective work where you enter each characters respective “Mind Palace”, a physical manifestation of their inner thoughts, and string things together on a detective board.
Autoethnographic Component
Let me give a few reasons why this game finds itself in my top five games of all time. Firstly, the use of live action video and mixed media approaches really sets this game apart. There is a lot of it in the game, and it fits the themes of the power of art and fiction to affect reality well. It almost feels like “going up a layer” within the fiction of the game. I find it pretty rare in video games that use live action video that it is able to balance the tone between them and the gameplay, but Remedy has the directorial chops to pull it off. They infuse it with the perfect amount of camp, but still keep it serious enough. Also, just on a purely mechanical level, it’s super cool. I distinctly remember finding a projector projecting a video onto a wall and walking in front of it with my character and just standing there walking back and forth seeing my shadow projected onto the real video on the wall. To point to a more specific point in the game that has not left my mind since I played it, let me discuss the “Herald of Darkness” section of the game. In this level, you play as Alan, and you walk through this strange set of different stages, all with giant billboards with live action video being displayed on them. To cut to the chase, this is basically a giant musical section. The music progresses as you walk through, transitioning from verse to chorus to guitar solo as you progress through the environment. The song, titled “Herald of Darkness”, contains lyrics about Alan Wake’s life and current situation. It talks about the “clicker” an ultra powerful device from Alan’s childhood that can control reality. It refers to Alan as the “Champion of Light” and speaks of how he must end the cycle he is trapped within, within the Dark Place. What I love about this section is how zany, and downright stupid it is. This is a game that takes itself fairly seriously most of the time, so when it breaks down into this ridiculous musical sequence, it creates a tonal whiplash that really surprised me the first time I experienced it. I love these tonal contrasts in media, another great example is the Yakuza franchise: super serious main plot, goofy side activities. It injects a lot of personality into these games.
Themes and Connections to Scholarship
Ontological Flattening
“I Play, Therefore I Think: Procedural Philosophy in Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 (2023)” is a 2024 article by Atėnė Mendelytė. Buried within a lot of philosophical jargon, she brings up a lot of interesting points relating to the layers of fiction within Alan Wake 2, how that relates to the player, and how it relates to different cultural touchpoints referenced by the game. It argues that the game places the players reality, the different in-game fictional realities, and its many metatextual references and homages on an even playing field, a phenomenon called “ontological flattening.” “In the beginning of the game, one hears Saga talk to her teenage daughter on the phone. As Wake’s/Scratch’s [Scratch is Wake’s evil doppelganger] story begins to transform reality or, in the game’s terminology, a World Altering Event(an AWE) starts to take place, she learns that her daughter is dead, and her marriage has been broken for a while due to this tragedy. One is thus made uncertain not only about the identities, their roles (villains or heroes—since it is implied that Scratch is Alan at a different narrative stage, the distinction being temporal, not ontic), but also about the degree of fictionalization—one cannot be certain to which degree Saga’s and Casey’s memories are altered by the story. One can only choose to believe that Saga’s believed version—where she is happily married and her daughter is still alive—is the “unedited” original. Since Saga holds to this belief until the end, her position is linked to Mulhall’s rejection of flat ontology—the fictional and the real are held separate.” (Mendelytė) In another section, a scene which Sam Lake, the games director, appears in The Dark Place in live action as a fictionalized version of himself, also named Sam Lake, on a live action talk show interview for Wake’s new novel. His character is an actor, playing a detective named Alex Casey in a film adaptation of Wake’s detective series of the same name. Meanwhile, on the flip side, Saga’s detective partner also bears the likeness of Sam Lake (albeit not the voice, which was provided by the late James McCaffrey.) His name? Alex Casey. This bridges our reality, the reality of the game, and The Dark Place into one interconnected web. In Remedy Entertainment’s first game, Max Payne, an action-packed, slo-mo filled third person shooter stars it’s titular badass, hardboiled NYC detective. Interestingly enough, he is portrayed by the same duo that plays Casey: likeness of Lake, voice of McCaffrey. This feels very intentional yet is not addressed or even hinted at by the game at all. One could make another parallel with another character, played by Shawn Ashmore: Tim Breaker. The local sheriff of Bright Falls, he makes remarks of dreams of another life, as if acknowledging his — or his likenesses — role as the main character within Remedy’s 2016 title Quantum Break. These more subtle metatextual references, in contrast with some of the more explicit references to the first game and their title “Control”, do have a reason, and that reason has to do with licensing. As it stands, Remedy does own the intellectual property to Control and Alan Wake, but the Max Payne franchise and Quantum Break are owned by Rockstar and Microsoft respectively. These paralells are extremely interesting, do they serve the same purpose as a cameo in film and television, or does it run deeper. (Waszkiewicz) Alan Wake as a character and as an author is a struggling author, someone who gained massive popularity for his books about Alex Casey, mystery novels that are implied to be sort of pulpy mystery fiction, the type of novels you find in airport bookstores. After years of writer’s block, he desires to be taken more seriously as an author, so he heads to Bright Falls for inspiration. Through the events in the games, he works on horror novels. When Casey is basically revealed to be Max Payne, the metaphor slides into place. Sam Lake(and Remedy writ large) and Alan Wake both started their careers with fairly accessible works that put them on the map, and now they both have turned to something more cerebral and darker, but their past successes still stand over their heads. Case in point: the Max Payne 1 remake that is currently in active development.
Remediation – Film and Literature Within Games
Alan Wake II is a multimedia experience, it incorporates other mediums be that live action cutscenes, or novel pages found throughout the game. This is known of remediation: the incorporation of one medium into another. This is covered in depth in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s 2000 book, Remediation: Understanding New Media. They discuss how remediation within games goes back a long time, citing early examples such as Dragon’s Lair, effectively an interactive animated short, and Myst, a puzzle game which uses “text, static graphics with text, digital video, and sound to refashion illusionistic painting, film, and, somewhat surprisingly, the book as well.”(Bolter & Grusin, 94) This remediation can serve many purposes, it can be used to emphasise the difference between mediums, such as the hard distinction of gameplay and cutscene within some games. On the other hand, though, the remediation can seek to blur the lines between mediums. (Bolter & Grusin, 46-47) An example there would be the narrative focused games developed by Telltale Games, e.g. The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. These seek to remediate television, even offering content in an episodic format spread over multiple seasons, and their gameplay consists of simplistic interactions and choices within a branching but still linear narrative. Another question we can ask ourselves: how does remediation speak to our societal and cultural biases towards different mediums? “Cinema is the most theorized medium incorporated by horror video games, a consequence of the form’s established position within both academic and cultural hierarchies. Associating video games with the cinematic enhance their status as respectable adult culture; aspects lacking in a medium featuring low on the quality hierarchy, and particularly pertinent in the case of the further-derided horror genre.” (Kirkland 117). Kirkland here is arguing that film lends “legitimacy” to games, games studies are a relatively new field, while film studies are generally already entrenched and respected in culture. Games are frequently praised for their “cinematic” qualities, you rarely if ever hear films praised for gamic attributes. These days movies are beginning to be more influenced by games, be that the myriad of game adaptations of varying quality, or movies more broadly about games such as 2012's Wreck-It-Ralph, or 2021's Free Guy, Movies even are beginning to borrow the language of action found in games: be that the first-person movie Hardcore Henry, or the very Hotline Miami coded top down action scene in John Wick 4(Geller, ~17:10) This is to say that while in the time since this article has been written, games and movies have developed more of a two way influence, its still clear that film is still the more respected medium. Alan Wake II feels more professional and legitimate due to the inclusion of live action cutscenes. Slight tangent: this is of course a societal bias, and a problematic one at that — placing mediums on a hierarchy of legitimacy doesn’t really help anyone. I’d argue though that it is not a completely unfounded one though, at least in a narrative sense. Of course, games can have incredibly profound and deeply affecting stories, but as a newer medium, even good stories within have been affected by an affliction I like to call the “for a” curse. As in: “the story is good… for a video game.” These days, however, game stories are getting better on average, for a myriad of reasons. The games industry, while still predominantly white and male, is more diverse than ever(significantly less white men, even comparing 2023 to 2025 (Game Developer Conference 2025/2023)), offering stories to be told from more perspectives. Indie development is also thriving, allowing developers to tell much more personal stories due to far greater creative control over their projects. To give a final example of remediation within the game, as you play you collect pages of the novels Alan has been writing: "Initiation" and "Return." Once again, the game remediates the art of literature for its own purposes.
Horror Aspects
You may notice that so far, nothing discussed here yet has been really on the topic of horror. That’s because on a personal level, I find the moment-to-moment scares are secondary to the narrative experience of the game, and the metatextual moves it makes, simply on the basis of the gameplay not feeling satisfying, and often going so far as to be frustrating. That being said, it definitely falls within the definition of the survival horror genre. Ewan Kirkland defines a survival horror game as a title in which “a typically average character navigates a maze-like landscape, solving puzzles and fighting off monsters with limited ammunition, energy and means of replenishing it”(Kirkland, 22) Alan Wake II checks most of these boxes, although at times has a more open structure, with less maze-like play spaces. Your resources come in forms of healing items, ammunition for your various guns, and batteries for your flashlight. Interestingly, some scares come not in the form as anything within the environment, but as disturbing images flashed across your screen in scripted moments, accompanied with loud sounds. These were a controversial addition to the game, some saw them as simply cheap jump scares, causing a myriad of complaints on social media and eventually a patch for the game allowing for players to tone them down.(Bell) What’s more interesting is how this game plays with genre. As stated previously, the book that Alan writes from the Dark Place affects the events happening in the real world to Saga Anderson. You would expect that Alan would try to write more of a happy story, but the rules of the Dark Place dictate that since Alan is writing a horror novel, he must stay within the genre. He must use horror tropes, such as the monsters fought by Anderson on the surface. In conclusion, this game falls solidly within the survival horror canon, but at least personally the survival horror gameplay is not as strong as the narrative conceits within the game.
Gameplay Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N2wKBdK7vk
Works Cited
Bell, A. (2024, February 1). Alan Wake 2’s latest patch adds a kind of jump scare intensity option. Rock Paper Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/alan-wake-2s-latest-patch-adds-a-kind-of-jump-scare-intensity-option
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding new Media
Game Developer Conference. 2025. https://investgame.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/0794a269-d5c4-4994-9bcf-8c5730d0815e_2025_GDC_State_of_the_Game_Industry_report-1.pdf
—. "State of the Game Industry 2023." 2023. https://www.scribd.com/document/625796642/Gdc-state-of-game-industry-2023
Geller, Jacob. “I Want to Tell You About My Favorite Fight Scene.” YouTube, 16 Feb. 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Ulxe-t6e8
Kirkland, Ewan (2009). "Resident Evil's Typewriter." Games & Culture 4.2 https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/doi/10.1177/1555412008325483
Kirkland, Ewan (2011). “Survival horrality: Analysis of a videogame genre” (1). The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, (10), 22-32. Retrieved from https://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/survival-horrality-analysis-videogame-genre-1/docview/1834037195/se-2
Mendelytė, Atėnė. (2024) "I Play, Therefore I Think: Procedural Philosophy in Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2 (2023)." Games & Culture: 18. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15554120241265775?int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.3
Waszkiewicz, Agata. (2024) "The Show, the Game, and the Old Gods: On the Ontological Reframing and the Fiction/Real Boundary." https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/doi/full/10.1177/15554120241263652
A.I. Use Disclosure
I did not use any A.I. tools in the creation of this work.