Alan Wake II review: Stylish and moody, but about as subtle as a sledgehammer

(Image: Remedy Entertainment)

At some point this month, the bean counters and number-crunchers will sit down to calculate which of the games that released this year can be considered the best. And there were a tonne of them this year.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom redefined the idea of innovation.

Hi-Fi Rush was a non-stop thrillride.

Final Fantasy XVI represented a great new direction for the franchise.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 massively expanded on a successful formula.

Starfield unveiled a fantastic new universe (literally).

Baldur’s Gate 3 was… extremely well-received; I haven’t played it yet.

Will Alan Wake II make that cut? Let’s find out.

As someone, who lists the survival horror genre as quite possibly his least favourite (alongside flight simulators), it took me some time to convince myself to give this Remedy Entertainment’s latest a go. After all, my first brush with the genre (2001’s Silent Hill 2) was harrowing enough to put me off it for a decade. The second time I dipped a toe into this world was with the first Alan Wake game. Needless to say, it did not go well.

So why am I back here some 13 years later?

(Image: Remedy Entertainment)

Looks that kill

It’s no exaggeration to say that this was a case of me being enchanted by the game’s incredibly good looks and ignoring all the accompanying red flags and obvious incompatibilities. That its 2010 predecessor had given me plenty of anxiety and sleepless nights was seemingly lost on me as I fired up Alan Wake II.

Having read about the game’s extremely exacting hardware demands, I was pleased to be playing it on an Alienware Aurora R15 (with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU and an i9-13900KF processor), a system that satisfied the game’s lofty requirements — a GeForce RTX 3070 or Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU is the recommended GPU loadout! Some inexplicable stutter (that was fixed by 'verifying files' on the Epic Game Loader) in the third chapter apart, my gameplay experience on the Aurora R15 at the highest graphics settings was incredibly smooth.

Right from the opening scene of a car making its way down a winding road surrounded by trees (a very typical kickoff to a horror film), past the detailed autumn-hued trees along which deuteragonist and FBI agent Saga Anderson carefully walks, and protagonist Alan’s exploration of an almost post-apocalyptic New York City, all that horsepower really makes itself felt.

Simply put, the world of Alan Wake II is stunning. Truly.

Whether it’s the Twin Peaks-inspired locations like Bright Falls and Watery with their ever-present puddles to showcase the game’s ray tracing prowess or the nightmarish neon-tinged realm of the Dark Place, it’s very clear that you are playing one of the best-looking games ever made. The Dark Place, for those not in the know, is an alternate dimension in which art (whether music, literature or poetry) can chart and alter the course of reality. In Alan Wake II, the Dark Place is represented by a few blocks of New York that include a television studio, a subway station, a hotel and an apartment tower.

There’s very little in common between Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here) and Alan Wake II, except for the fact that both games have extremely ambitious and intricate visions of the city of New York, and execute them extremely well. While the former presents an impressive picture of one of the world’s greatest monuments to capitalism (Manhattan) alongside more varied boroughs, the latter is an exhibition of just how depressing, intimidating and menacing the city can be. And while Spider-Man 2 presented New York City in its glossiest possible form, Alan Wake II offers it up in the dankest, creepiest and grimiest manner possible.

Lighting is for the most part outstanding and does a great job in ratcheting up the tension when required. Particularly noteworthy is the way the world steadily gets darker as you enter denser and more dangerous forest areas. And sometimes just to creep you, the player, out that little bit more, everything is bathed in a red hue. A word also for the sound design and music that is equally up to the task when it comes to creating and sustaining tension.

(Image: Remedy Entertainment)

Walking simulator or pushing the boundaries of survival horror?

Expectedly, the internet has taken a rather Manichean view of Alan Wake II, in that it’s either being touted as the best game ever made or the worst one. And one of the phrases that continues to pop up in the second analysis is ‘walking simulator’. This is simultaneously an uncharitable dig and high praise. First, it’s uncharitable because Alan Wake II does contain some interesting gameplay loops that go beyond simply walking. Second, the last game to be referred to in this derisive manner was the Hideo Kojima-helmed Death Stranding.

Say what you will about Death Stranding, but there can be no doubting Kojima’s status as a videogame auteur. And Remedy creative director (the brains behind such titles as Max Payne, Control, Quantum Break and of course Alan Wake) Sami Järvi, popularly known as Sam Lake, is considered in some quarters as the Finnish Kojima. Both are known for their borderline-obsessive fascination with certain aspects of Western pop culture and their interpretations of these in the games they make.

Lake’s love for all things Stephen King, Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone shines through in Alan Wake II, which seeks to pay homage and at the same time, subvert a few sacred tropes. Unfortunately, a lot of this takes place in the setting, the visuals, the characters and the sound design of the game and not so much on the gameplay end of things.

Without spoiling too much of the story, the game is divided into two sets of chapters; you play one apiece as the titular author and the aforementioned FBI agent. Both broadly play out the same way with exploration and third-person flashlight-firearm interplay being the broad staple. But there are some key differences: Alan’s story is largely based in the Dark Place and Saga’s is in the real world. Alan uses his ‘writer’s room’ to sort collectables and flesh out storylines, while Saga has her ‘mind place’ (not to be confused with Sherlock Holmes’ Mind Palace) to sift through clues, manage collectables and read the minds of the dead and the living.

When you boil it all down, however, a majority of the game is spent on inventory management (it is a survival horror title, after all) and solving environmental puzzles. In the case of the latter, Alan’s storyboard puzzle — which lets him create new realities within a given space — shines brightest. It’s a remarkable showcase of the power of current hardware (rendering new scenes seamlessly and in seconds) as well as an innovative game mechanic. Elsewhere, whether it’s Saga’s case board or her ‘profiling’ ability (the mindreading to which I’d alluded in the previous paragraph), things get repetitive and mildly tedious after a while.

Staying on game mechanics, it was around the time I had to traipse around looking for a fuse or some key for the fourth or fifth time that the fetch-questness of it all began to grate on me. And it’s a shame because there are some great ideas here, like the storyboard for instance, but they’re underutilized in favour of more time-consuming mechanics.

Similarly, combat is satisfying and challenging, but it’s arguably used a bit sparingly throughout the game. This isn’t a problem per se because this is a survival horror game and not an action-adventure title, but when you look at some of the hunts for collectables that the game would rather send you on, it begins to chafe.

(Image: Remedy Entertainment)

How meta is too meta?

The idea of being able to rewrite a story from within its confines was a great trick Alan Wake pulled off back in 2010. Unfortunately, Lake and his pals at Remedy decided to double down on that formula with greater intensity and a fraction of the nuance. As a result, what we were left with is the videogaming equivalent of someone who sits next to you in the cinema, elbowing you in the ribs after every second line of dialogue with a “Did you get the joke?” or a “Did you catch the reference there?”. And then proceeds to shovel a fistful of popcorn into one’s mouth.

In its quest to show a great deal of awareness about itself and the universe and genre it inhabits, Alan Wake II’s plot often buckles under the weight of its meta-ness. Think Black Mirror: Bandersnatch or The Matrix Resurrections and you’re in the ballpark of the sort of cringe-inducing meta-ness we’re often exposed to in Alan Wake II. A number of the talk show segments fall into this category, however, it would be downright contemptuous of me to not single out the chapter titled ‘We Sing’ for special mention. Now that’s song-and-dance done right!

The overall reliance on being meta though is particularly glaring when there are such issues with story pacing. For instance, a revelation that occurs at approximately the halfway point of the game should have been given a more profound and meaningful treatment. Instead, it’s handled perfunctorily and we move swiftly onto the next bit of fuse-hunting or mindreading.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I feel a lighter hand with the self-references and a bit more focus on crafting a compelling story would’ve done the game a world of good. Particularly when this isn’t an RPG and is quite decidedly a streamlined and linear narrative-driven experience.

(Image: Remedy Entertainment)

Is Alan Wake II worth your while?

If you enjoy survival horror games and consider the Resident Evil series the holy grail or thereabouts, then this title is highly recommended for you. And this is especially so if you’re already familiar with the larger universe (which includes the previous title and its DLCs, and Control) that Alan Wake II inhabits.

The story loses some of its profundity as a result of the pacing and overly self-referential nature of the narrative. However, the sections with Alan essaying the role of a writer and throwing ideas around go some way in making up for it.

For me, however, the real draw of this title is that it looks utterly spectacular and is extremely atmospheric. For those reasons alone, I highly recommend the game… if that is, you have a console or can find a computer that can run it.

The game was reviewed on PC. Review code provided by NVIDIA