Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 is a 2023 survival horror video game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Epic Games Publishing. The sequel to Alan Wake (2010), the story follows best-selling novelist Alan Wake, who has been trapped in an alternate dimension for 13 years, as he attempts to escape by writing a horror story involving an FBI Special Agent named Saga Anderson.

Alan Wake 2 was released for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on 27 October 2023. The game's development and marketing budget reportedly was €70 million, making it one of the most expensive games to develop and one of the most expensive cultural products from Finland. Alan Wake 2 received generally positive reviews from critics and was nominated for multiple Game of the Year awards. It had sold over 2 million units by December 2024, making it Remedy's fastest-selling game. A downloadable content (DLC) expansion titled Night Springs was released on 8 June 2024, while a second expansion titled The Lake House was released on 22 October 2024.

Gameplay

Compared to the original Alan Wake, which is an action-adventure game with horror themes, Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror game; it is still played from a third-person perspective. Players play as Alan Wake or Saga Anderson in two separate single-player stories, which can be played in any order the player chooses, although the opening and ending sequences of the game are linear.

Wake and Anderson traverse environments and fight enemies using various firearms and a flashlight, the latter of which can be "focused" to render enemies vulnerable to firearm attacks. Focusing the flashlight drains its battery, and players need to strategically use a limited amount of batteries and ammunition in order to survive. When enemies are close, Alan or Saga can perform a dodge maneuver.

Alan Wake 2 incorporates detective elements: when playing as Saga, players can access an enemy-free space dubbed the "Mind Place". Described by Remedy as a "3D menu", the Mind Place is a visual representation of Saga's thoughts. In the Mind Place, players manage a pin board in which they can connect clues to piece together the main mystery, as well as profile characters to gather clues. Lake said that his approach to Alan Wake 2 was bolstered by the success of the film Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Remedy confirmed the game would remain in the third-person perspective, and that both Ilkka Villi and Matthew Porretta would return to provide the appearance and the voice of Alan, respectively. Other cast include Melanie Liburd as the live-action and voice of Saga Anderson, David Harewood as both the live-action and voice of Mr. Door, James McCaffrey and Lake as the voice and live-action appearance of Alex Casey, respectively. Further, Alan Wake 2 includes cameos from characters in Control, including Jesse Faden (voiced by Courtney Hope), Dr. Darling (Porretta) and the mysterious janitor Ahti (Martti Suosalo).

Alan's mission "Initiation 4: We Sing" has the player guide Alan through a surreal set while the character Mr. Door and others sing "Herald of Darkness", a musical summarizing Alan's story to that point with music provided by Poets of the Fall (playing as the fictional band "Old Gods of Asgard"). Lake said the idea for the musical sequence was inspired by Alan Wake concert standoff as well as the Ashtray Maze level in Control, both set to Poets of the Fall's music. Lake also knew that Porretta (Wake) and Harewood (Mr. Door) could sing, and Poets of the Fall were able to help with choreography. Frequently through development, some of the developers questioned the need for the musical sequence due to both the strangeness of the sequence in the horror game and the difficulties in executing it. However, Lake insisted that the sequence must be kept. The song was played live at The Game Awards 2023 by Poets of the Fall, along with Villi, Porretta, Harewood, and Lake reprising their roles.

Overall, the game took 13 years to develop. In an interview, Sam Lake said this was because "The sequel contains many characters and locations, as well as a continuation of the supernatural lore established and introduced in the original Alan Wake."

The budget for the game reportedly stands at €70 million, with €50 million in development and an additional €20 million spent on marketing. This is considered to make the game one of the most expensive cultural products in the history of Finland.

Post-launch updates

In October 2024, Remedy Entertainment released the free anniversary update for Alan Wake 2, adding accessibility options like infinite ammo, one-shot kills, and gameplay assists. The update added DualSense motion control support and enhanced haptic feedback on PlayStation 5, along with expanded axis inversion options.

Graphics technology

Prior to the release of Alan Wake 2, Remedy Entertainment had earned a reputation for pushing visual boundaries and graphics technology with releases such as Control and Max Payne 2. Alan Wake 2 was developed with ninth generation consoles in mind. For its traditional graphics rasterization, Alan Wake 2 harnesses mesh shaders that are only supported by the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 20 and 16 series or AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series of GPUs and later on PC. The game was the first to be released with native support for mesh shaders. As opposed to older vertex and geometry shading techniques, mesh shaders try to reduce the bottleneck from rendering a large number of fixed vertex triangles by instead flexibly rendering large groups of triangles.

Developers are given greater control over rendering complex geometry as mesh shaders can be segmented into smaller meshlets that can be re-used and rendered in-parallel while making less calls for data from memory. The graphics pipeline is also shorter with mesh shaders as opposed to a traditional vertex and tessellation pipeline. Alan Wake 2 running on hardware without mesh shader support, such as Nvidia's GeForce GTX 10 series or AMD's Radeon RX 5000 series of GPUs and older, results in poor performance and visual errors. However, an optimization patch released in early 2024 improved performance on GTX 10-series GPUs.

Ray tracing is extensively used in Alan Wake 2 to better simulate how light realistically behaves in the real world. Scenes are lit using global illumination and the light provided by the global light source bounces off surfaces and diffuses depending on the materials present. The use of ray tracing is particularly important for adding ambience to dark scenes in the game that feature flashlights as a sole light source. Alan Wake 2 even goes beyond ray tracing to incorporate path tracing where diffused light will also bounce across duller surfaces in addition to reflective ones. Path tracing's computational demands means that it is not available on the limited console hardware. Alan Wake 2s extensive use of ray tracing made it a promotional vessel for Nvidia's graphics technologies such as supporting DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction.

On Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards, it seeks to improve ray tracing visual quality and performance by not performing calculations on multiple rays per pixel and instead using machine learning to fill in the gaps.

Music

The original score for Alan Wake 2 by Finnish composer Petri Alanko was released via Epic Games and Laced Records on 14 May 2024, the 14th anniversary of the first Alan Wake game's release. Alanko returns to the role of composer from the first Alan Wake game with his approach to composing for Alan Wake 2 "akin to reuniting with an old friend, discovering both familiar and new elements to play with".

Alanko first began recording Alan Wake 2s original score in 2011, and in the years since then, it became a "very different entity". The biggest change that occurred since Alanko began work on the score was the addition of the game's second protagonist Saga Anderson. In the years since beginning work on Alan Wake 2s score, he also composed the score for Remedy Entertainment's 2019 game Control. To create some of the sounds for Alan Wake 2, Alanko used unconventional means such as dropping pianos off forklift trucks.

Release

Remedy announced in May 2023 that Alan Wake 2 would be a digital-only release, rationalizing that many players had already shifted to only buying games digitally, so they wanted to ensure the game maintains a low price, and they didn't want it to require a separate download even if a physical version was released. Originally planned to release for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on 17 October 2023, Remedy delayed the game by ten days to 27 October to avoid competition from other major triple-A releases. The PC version is exclusive to the Epic Games Store for "a long time". Free downloadable content packs and two paid expansions titled Night Springs and The Lake House were announced. Remedy later announced that physical editions of the game would release in October 2024, including a limited collectors edition produced with Limited Run Games.

Marketing

An Alan Wake cosmetic outfit was added to Fortnite as part of the "Fortnitemares 2023" event and a retelling of the first Alan Wake was available within Fortnite Creative in the weeks prior to the sequel's release to help new players come up to speed on events from the first game.

From 10 October to 13 November 2023, a free copy of Alan Wake 2 was included in a promotional bundle with the purchase of certain GPUs of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40 series. The eligible GPUs for the bundle were the RTX 4070, RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080 and RTX 4090.

Alan Wake was added to the video game Dead by Daylight in January 2024. Additional cosmetics were included with his release, including skins that turn the character into either Saga Anderson, Rose Marigold, and Mr. Scratch.

Downloadable content

The first downloadable content (DLC) addition, Night Springs, was released on 8 June 2024. It contains three episodes, featuring echoes of existing characters in the Remedy shared universe in "what if" type scenarios within Bright Falls. These include "Number One Fan," with the player controlling the Waitress, who is based on Rose; the second is "North Star," which features a protagonist based on Jesse Faden, the main character of Control; the third is "Time Breaker," which features the Actor, real-life actor Shawn Ashmore appearing as himself as well as Sheriff Tim Breaker (whom Ashmore also voices).

The second DLC expansion, The Lake House, was released on 22 October 2024. This expansion is a crossover with Remedy's Control series. In The Lake House, players take control of FBC agent Kiran Estevez. While the events of the expansion take place towards the beginning of the main game's plot, players are able to access the expansion from the main menu at any time, or during the mission "Return 6: Scratch", in a similar vein to the Night Springs DLC, which players could enter by finding various television sets around the Dark Place. The game also saw the release of new tracks from Petri Alanko and Poe, as well as a new in-game outfit for Alan, the "classic outfit".

Reception

Critical response

Alan Wake 2 received "generally favorable" reviews from critics for the PC and PS5 versions, while the Xbox Series X/S version received "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator website Metacritic. OpenCritic determined that 93% of critics recommended the game.

Andrew Farrell of PCGamesN in his Alan Wake 2 review awarded the game 9 out of 10 saying, "Alan Wake 2 is a marvel, serving up intense gameplay, a twisty, dark story, and more secrets and surprises than you could possibly imagine. Remedy has outdone itself here, delivering a truly remarkable experience."

Alan Wake 2 was ranked first on Times top 10 best video games of 2023 list.

Night Springs

Night Springs expansion received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to Metacritic. OpenCritic determined that 79% of critics recommended the expansion.

The Lake House

The Lake House expansion received "mixed or average" reviews from critics for its Windows version and "generally favorable" reviews for the PlayStation 5 version, according to Metacritic. OpenCritic determined that 66% of critics recommended the expansion.

Sales

By December 2023, Alan Wake 2 had sold over 1 million units, and by February 2024, had sold over 1.3 million units, making it Remedy's fastest-selling game. It sold more units and over three times more digital units in its first month than Control did in its first four months. As of late April 2024, the game had not recouped its development and marketing costs. In its January–June 2024 financial report, Remedy confirmed that the game still had yet to turn a profit for the company. In the quarterly earnings report on 1 November 2024, the company announced that while the game has not yet started generating royalties, it is close to fully recouping most of the development and marketing costs with ongoing sales. On 19 November, Remedy announced that the game had sold over 1.8 million units. By the end of 2024, it had sold over 2 million units, and started generating royalties for Remedy due to development and marketing costs having been recouped. By the second quarter of 2026, Alan Wake 2 had sold over 3 million copies worldwide.

Awards