Highlights
- Alan Wake 2 will feature abundant live-action segments, showcasing Remedy's love for cinema.
- The connection between Alan Wake and Control creates a shared universe, but it also risks alienating fans who are not interested in consuming content outside either game.
- Players of Alan Wake 2 may need to play Control and its DLC in order to fully understand the story, as Control's content seems deeply intertwined with Alan Wake's narrative.
Alan Wake was incredibly simple on paper in its original installment about a writer whose work manifested itself as horrors he had to navigate. Remedy then put its unabashed love for cinema at the helm in structuring Alan Wake’s narrative like a thriller series on television, and the parallels that Alan Wake 2 will now have with modern series developments may be made even more evident. It was unsurprising to learn that Alan Wake 2 would contain abundant live-action segments, but the prevalence that Remedy’s Control seems to have in the game could be both a blessing and a curse.
Control’s mind-bending romp became even more surreal when it dropped Alan Wake into its continuity, and in doing so Remedy has created a connected universe tethering both franchises together. It’s not as if a shared lore or canon between different IPs has never been attempted before, and fans of both Alan Wake and Control will surely adore how one may affect the other moving forward as a result. Rather, like how Disney and Marvel have decided to branch into Disney Plus shows to continue the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Remedy risks alienating its own fans by demanding their consumption elsewhere.
MCU Fans Get a Lesser Experience Unless They Consume Both TV and Movie Content
The MCU used to dominate movie theaters with releases that felt appropriately epic and grand. Now, since Endgame, the MCU has seemed more committed to shotgunning shows onto Disney Plus for new characters to have their origins told there. This was all well and good whether fans flocked to them or not, and Disney knew it had to take advantage of how popular the rise in streaming services was at that time.
Loki and WandaVision were not origin stories, for example. Still, they gave the MCU an opportunity to stretch out character-driven stories into a much longer outlet and allow them to marinate in that span of time as opposed to abridging everything in under three hours for the constraints of a movie. Not every Disney Plus show necessarily needed that much time and could have certainly crammed its important beats into the scale of a movie, but that is not where the problem lies.
Many fans may not be watching these shows regardless of if they are uninterested in their featured protagonists or if they don’t feel obligated to pay for Disney Plus in order to keep up with the MCU’s current canon. Consequently, anyone who is apathetic toward the MCU’s Disney Plus outings but makes time to go to a theater and watch the newest MCU movie nowadays will almost assuredly be misinformed about who a new batch of characters is, if not at least hazy on what has been going on in the greater continuity.
Alan Wake 2 Players Might Only Understand the Story if They Played Control and Its DLC
Alan Wake 2 seems like one of the few sequels lately that fans will benefit from having played the original first, but that goes a step further with Remedy connecting Alan Wake and Control as explicitly as it has. Because Control content seems interwoven profoundly into Alan Wake 2’s story, at least where Alan himself is concerned, Control might now also become required reading if players are to have any idea of what’s going on or what connections to certain characters and events infer about the story.
Not only might fans need a decent comprehension of Control, but they definitely need to have played or witnessed the AWE expansion that featured Alan and bridged a gap between the two games concretely. It will be interesting to see if Remedy makes an effort to explain this crossover in the opening moments of Alan Wake 2 or in a separate ‘Previously On’ option that could be featured in the main menu.
Otherwise, many fans could be left in the dark when it comes to why so much of Control appears in Alan Wake’s sequel and why that’s important. Alan Wake 2 might also dedicate time to setting fans up for Control 2, giving them their first tease at what that sequel’s narrative may entail, and like a domino effect Remedy could be making each new installment and its DLC required reading before heading into a subsequent one.
Alan Wake 2 releases October 27, 2023, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
