Alan Wake 2 has been a long time in the making and after a massive struggle to get the rights back, developer Remedy Entertainment is ready to push things in a more horrifying direction.
In Alan Wake 2, players will pivot back and forth between two different playable protagonists, one being Alan Wake and the other is FBI agent Anderson, who is looking into all the chilling murders happening in the northwestern United States. Following leads tied to a group called “Cult of the Tree”, agent Anderson and her partner Casey find themselves among the supernatural. Take a look:
As you can see from the clip above, Remedy is working hard to increase the violence, the gore, and the scares in what looks to be a deeper dive into the horror/survival genre. Oh, and if you didn’t notice, Anderson’s partner Casey is voiced by the same guy who plays Max Payne, who is also allegedly in the same universe.
Remedy Entertainment says that while the game took more than a decade to bring to life due to publishing obstacles and working on the best ideas for the story, the game takes place in the same amount of time since the original came out, so that means Alan Wake 2’s story is roughly thirteen or so years after the first one, give or take.
Alan Wake 2 Co-director Sam Lake had the following to say:
“We’ve been trying and now finally everything just clicked into place. We got the publishing rights of the original game back, so we were in a position to create a remastered version for the PlayStation audience as well as a wider audience. And we were trying to do Alan Wake 2 before we went and created Control. And so there was a concept. It’s not this concept; it was different, and we felt that it doesn’t quite feel like Alan Wake, but maybe cool ideas on this kind of almost superhero action and is more kind of a nonlinear game. We took those design ideas and we created Control.”
The dual protagonist system is also unique in that Alan Wake has been trapped in the Dark Place since the events of the first game while trying to find a way to escape. In doing so, Alan attempts to write a way for him to get out so he created the story of Agent Saga Anderson, who we play as out in the real world. Sam Lake expanded on this further saying:
“The idea that we would have two playable characters in this was around for a while and we were thinking about different aspects of it and it just feels really important to us that even if we have a connected universe and we can bring a ton of lore and things to be discovered – these threads that go into different games – it’s really, really crucial that it’s approachable for somebody who has never played around with the game before. Knowing the situation that we left Alan Wake in, and his experience with everything, it just felt that it’s tricky to make that approachable for a newcomer. And we wanted to bring in a character who is a newcomer to all of this crazy supernatural stuff as well.”
Alan Wake 2 comes to PS5, Xbox X|S, and PC this Ocotber 17th. For a breakdown of a more hands-on experience, you can read more over on GameInformer.com.
