It’s Not an Alan Wake II Review

I’m not ready to write an Alan Wake II review. I’ve played maybe 10 hours since we got a code on Monday afternoon, and I’m pretty sure I’m nowhere near the end. The embargo beckons, though, and I can’t say no to traffic. The original Alan Wake, of course, took about 10 hours in full to finish, which made it a breath of fresh air compared to most games, even back in 2010. Sam Lake, its writer (and co-star), says the sequel requires twice that much time, making it the longest game yet from Remedy Entertainment, the designers of Control and the first two Max Payne games. I’m as vocal as anybody I know about games dragging on for way too long these days, but so far I’m not feeling that way about Alan Wake II. Sure, it’s already eaten up as much time as its excellent predecessor, but it hasn’t felt bloated or padded yet. With Alan Wake II Remedy is taking the time it needs to tell its story, and it’s kept me under its sway along the way.

That story is a more complex and confusing one than Alan Wake’s, with two protagonists and at least one additional new alter ego for Wake himself. During the game’s first passage you play not as Wake but as Saga Anderson, an FBI agent picking up on Wake’s trail 13 years after his disappearance during the first game. Along with her partner, Alex Casey, who shares a name with Wake’s most popular fictional creation (and a face with Lake himself, who plays the character), Anderson returns to the Twin Peaks-inspired Northwestern town of Bright Falls to investigate cult activity and the apparent murder of Robert Nightingale, an FBI agent from the first Alan Wake. Anderson essentially fills the role Wake did in 2010, as a confused outsider reacting to the otherworldly, metafictional madness swarming around this unassuming small town. 

Instead of stumbling about in the dark forest with just a flashlight and some flares, though, Anderson brings both a service revolver and an investigative mind to the proceedings. The shooting is fairly self-explanatory to Wake vets; you use your flashlight to burn away the darkness shielding your enemies, and then plug away with that pistol until they fall. (Aim for the big glowing red spot, natch.) It’s very familiar if you’ve played the original.

The mystery-solving side of Alan Wake II is one of many major additions to the game, and I’m still not sure if it’s a good one or not. As she collects clues and connects the dots between the weird goings-on in Bright Falls and the neighboring Finnish settlement of Watery, Anderson will regularly retreat to a mental field office where she analyzes all the data. It might only exist within her mind, but it’s an actual three-dimensional in-game room that she moves throughout, with the kind of photo- and string-covered mystery board familiar from the Always Sunny meme. As you find clues by searching crime scenes and other locations within the game, they’ll become available within Anderson’s mind place (she literally calls it her mind place within the game); all you have to do is select a clue and then place it on the correct part of the board for Anderson to make an important realization about what she’s looking for. There’s an even simpler mechanic where she profiles various subjects; here all you have to do is select a question or piece of data within the mind place and Anderson will suddenly have a mystical revelation about the case, with her hunches unerringly turning out right.

That might sound exceptionally convenient until you remember one of the core conceits of both Alan Wake games. Wake is a novelist, a Stephen King-style writer of mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, and horror books, and even though he’s a playable character seemingly controlled by the decisions of the player, he’s also writing his games as the player plays through them. Remedy has always loved a good meta twist, and Alan Wake II is predicated entirely upon questions of authorship, ownership, and free will. Saga Anderson being a real-life Cassandra who doesn’t have to convince anybody of the truth of her visions stops feeling like an overly convenient videogame contrivance when the game highlights how everything within it is a contrivance.

With its Pacific Northwest setting and overt Twin Peaks references, Saga Anderson’s portions of the story feel the most like the first Alan Wake, even if Wake himself isn’t a playable character. The other half of Alan Wake II does star Wake, and it’s a much smarter, trippier, and more unique exploration of the game’s meta fascination. Whereas Saga’s story feels like a fairly rote continuation of Alan Wake so far, Wake’s story expands on it, taking it into some deeply unsettling and disturbing territory.

In his part of the game, Alan Wake is still trapped within the spare writing room he winds up in at the end of the first game. As with Saga’s mind place, he (and thus the player) returns regularly to this room to look over what he’s discovered, revisit the music and full-motion video clips he’s uncovered along the way, and to also level up some of his skills in a predictably oblique way. Instead of plotting out mysteries, though, Wake uses this time to write new scenes for his latest book, which he hopes will double as his own escape from the weird prison he’s trapped in by the Dark Presence. (You might know it in human form as Mr. Scratch, Wake’s evil doppelganger; once more, Sam Lake loves David Lynch and Twin Peaks. Hell, the shadows that plague Anderson and Wake could straight up be the woodsmen who ask for a light after the Trinity test.) 

That prison takes the form of a noir-ish, nebulous slice of New York City surrounding the luxury skyscraper Wake and his missing wife Alice reside in. Wake has to search through the city and its subway system looking for inspiration for his latest novel, which he then rewrites for his own needs. His only protection throughout the city is that trusty combo of a gun and flashlight, along with an angel-shaped lamp that can soak up light and discharge it when needed into other light sources. Shuffling light around like that changes the very shape of the city itself, helping Wake find new paths to take. 

Wake writes his scenes and Anderson solves her cases with similar mechanics. They each look at a board, where they place photos related to their tasks. Whereas Anderson often has several clues to sift through, and typically constructs fairly long chains of clues and deductions, Wake usually only has one or two options per scene; his choices can materially change his physical surroundings, though, unlike Anderson. There’s not a lot to either process, making the time necessary to flip between these menus and the game itself feel a little unnecessary, and if there is any padding found in Alan Wake II, it’s probably in these moments. It’s all a little too simplistic to ever feel like you’re actually solving a mystery or building a new scene, and amounts to not much more than just hitting the X button a few times to trigger whatever you need to happen next.

Occasionally there are bosses you have to fight, whether you’re Saga or Alan. Typically these battles are less about how talented a shot you are and more about figuring out the puzzle or the weird physical rules of the encounter and sticking to them enough to outwit your enemy. Some of them can be extremely frustrating your first few times through, but once you catch on to what you have to do they’re usually not that difficult.

You can jump between Anderson and Wake’s stories at most safehouses. I’m not yet sure how that plays out narratively—like, I don’t know what happens if you play only one track and get deep into one story before really starting the other—but I can tell you that whenever I got tired of one character (which does happen) I appreciated being able to seamlessly pick up with another one. 

Of course one character’s story is far more interesting than the other’s so far. Anderson is a likable, empathetic hero, but as of the 10 hour mark she still mostly serves as a newcomer’s entry point into the game’s esoteric elements. Her personal life gradually grows more entwined with the weirdness of Bright Falls and its fictional undercurrent, but she’s constantly playing catch up to stuff the player already understands more than she does. It’s a bit of a thankless story her character has to hold up, and feels like the medicine you have to take before the sugar of Wake’s considerably more unhinged and entertaining storyline. Wake’s half of the story isn’t simply meta in the sense of an in-game character writing the plot another character has to play through, but regularly breaks down the walls between the game and the “real” world and between the characters and player, switching between computer graphics and full-motion video and the game world and a TV talk show in which the novelist Wake is a guest. Lake himself, the game’s author, even appears as Alex Casey, both in CGI form as Saga’s partner and in video as a fellow guest on the same talk show as Wake. That kind of postmodernism is decades old now, but it’s still so rarely seen in major videogames that it retains a surprising spark whenever it happens. 

Again, I’m probably only about halfway through the game. I’m not sure where it’s going, and not especially confident that it knows where it’s going at this point. It keeps layering on new twists, angles, and bits of weirdness, in both halves of its story, and I worry that Lake and his fellow creators are tossing in so many details and ideas that they’ll ultimately lose sight of whatever they were trying to say. And even though it’s still fairly novel within games, Alan Wake II’s metafictional elements have been so thoroughly done in other media that the game doesn’t feel quite as startling or original as the unassuming original did when it came out 13 years ago. It’s more ambitious, though, and with half the game left there’s more than enough time for all the various strands and digressions to reconnect into a satisfying whole. 

Based on its first half, Alan Wake II might wind up being brilliant or totally full of shit. Some of the very best art ever made splits that right down the middle, with equal amounts of both. If Alan Wake II can land in that sweet spot, it could wind up being one of the greatest games ever made—or at least one of the most memorable. I guess we’ll find out together in the days to come.

(Oh, and if you haven’t yet, go read Jenn Frank’s preview of Alan Wake II from last month. She’s way better at this racket than I am.)

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.