CHENNAI: I am happy to leave Alan Wake 2 behind as we start the new year 2024! But not because it’s a terrible game. Really, if a player welcomes the psychological horror components of the game, Alan Wake 2 has much more to offer than one in the “Resident Evil” series. Alan Wake 2 has a way of playing with your feelings. As you walk around, talking to everyone, investigating the weird happenings — it succeeds in making you feel truly alone; unable to trust a soul.
So here’s the story. I start the game as Saga Anderson, a very cool FBI agent. She waddles around a lake, and sloshes in a creepy forest to thoroughly investigate the scene of the crime. She isn’t just courageous. She’s also super smart. Saga has her own “Mind Place”, which is her way of organising vague clues and conversations into coherent strings of thought. Eventually, this is what she discovers. In this town, with the strange happenings — a cult seems to be behind some of it.
But it’s not a straightforward crime, there are supernatural tones here. And by supernatural, I mean that the victim jumps back to life and runs after her. There are also wolves, and other humans covered by a dark shroud, determined to attack her, but extremely afraid of light so they can’t really do that in the daytime. And as if things can’t get any weirder for this sincere FBI agent, Saga encounters these pages. Typed out by a writer, these pages are filled with life events about to happen, and are found scattered around where Saga moves, almost orchestrating her next steps, but more often — predicting them. And the writer? His name, is Alan Wake…I can’t say too much about the parts of the game where we play as Alan Wake. I prefer the chapters with the Saga’s investigation. Navigating dialogue trees and organising clues in the mind place is where it’s all at.
But I put up with these Alan segments, because what they are is a mandatory juxtaposition between their situations, that also helps pace the plot. Through Alan’s eyes, we realise that he is stuck in an alternate realm — for over a decade. He’s stuck in a very normal seeming building, with working electricity and a TV. But you can sense that this isn’t the world as we know it. I’ll give it to you that Alan Wake is well-written. But the gameplay elements are excellent too. What I really liked here were Alan’s “Writer’s Room” and Saga’s “Mind Place”. The Mind Place is really like a live menu. It’s a menu, because it has an inventory of collected clues, radio recordings, and TV news callouts. It is a “live” menu, as all of these elements are organised into a barebones, but beautiful wooden cabin room. One end of the room has a gigantic wall where Saga organises her open cases, and stitches up her clues to identify patterns in the case. The game warns us that the menu’s do not actually pause the game — it’s just a temporary safe space to navigate essential plot information.
Little to nothing to say about the combat sequences — I played the game on the “story” mode, which is the easiest combat option available. Regardless, action events are legitimately terrifying, as Saga and Alan work with a limited inventory of weapon options, and must work primarily by using light to their advantage.
It is no big surprise to me that Alan Wake 2 won multiple awards for Narrative, Art Direction, and Game Direction in the Game Awards this year. It is a genuinely beautiful game, feeling like a full explorable mystery — especially with Saga’s ability to just walk around the tiny town to find clues and important side elements. It follows in 13 years after the release of the first in the series — a game that I am now quite keen on playing. What we must note though, is that Alan Wake 2 is quite demanding in terms of graphics, so if you’re playing it on the PC like I did, turn off high graphics settings, or make sure that you have all the high-end beefy specs. Alan Wake 2 is currently available for the Xbox, PC and PlayStation.