Highlights

  • Alan Wake 2 fully embraces a dark and twisted horror tone, making it a very scary game from start to finish.
  • The game effectively sets the mood with eerie environments, supernatural horrors, and well-executed storytelling.
  • However, the constant jumpscares in Alan Wake 2 tend to ruin the horror atmosphere, becoming repetitive and less effective over time.

The original 2010 Alan Wake is classified largely as an action-thriller game, and as such has a few little scares inside. While the overall tone of Alan Wake is just a little dark, it does have some spookier moments, particularly those revolving around the Dark Presence and its alternate Dark Place reality. However, on the whole, Alan Wake wasn't all that scary, and its moment-to-moment gameplay was definitely more intense than horrifying. Alan Wake 2, on the other hand, fully embraces a dark and twisted horror tone.

By most accounts, Alan Wake 2 is considered a very scary game, pretty much from start to finish. From the moment players arrive in Bright Falls, they're thrown into a story filled with murderous cults, possessed shadow monsters, and nightmare dimensions drenched in blood and gruesome imagery. Alan Wake 2 has plenty to be scared of, but while the horror is maintained well throughout the whole game, there is one big element that tends to ruin Alan Wake 2's horror atmosphere, and that's its abundance of jumpscares.

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Alan Wake 2's Constant Jumpscares Ruin The Atmosphere

Alan Wake 2 Does a Great Job of Setting the Mood

From the minute Alan Wake 2 starts, the game's tone is set pretty clearly. Controlling FBI Agent Saga Anderson, players make their way through a silent, eerie forest, on their way to investigate a murder site. It's immediately evident that this murder isn't a run-of-the-mill affair, and players will very quickly begin to feel a tad unsettled at the dark mystery that's starting to envelop them. But as players progress through Alan Wake 2, the game only continues to get scarier, with supernatural horrors starting to creep their way into gameplay.

Playing as Saga Anderson, players will run into more grounded and realistic threats like cult members, usually in more dark and gritty environments such as pitch-black forests or abandoned amusement parks. But when players take control of Alan Wake, things get a lot more unsettling and strange. Trapped in the Dark Place, Alan's journey sees him run into shadow creatures that move erratically, and some horrifically well-done environmental storytelling. Everything from the lighting to the sound design to the enemy placement makes Alan Wake 2 an incredible survival horror experience that's sure to keep players on their toes at all times.

Alan Wake 2's Jumpscares Then Get in the Way of That Mood

But it definitely isn't perfect. The big thing holding back Alan Wake 2's horror atmosphere is its near-constant jumpscares. Beginning early on in the game, players will be hit with a black screen for a few seconds, with the white outline of a face moving erratically and contorting in an unnatural manner on top of the dark background. This unsettling imagery is paired with a loud and shrill shrieking noise.

The first time the player encounters one of these jumpscares it'll likely nail its intended effect, and have them reeling for a few seconds. However, this perfectly effective jumpscare quickly loses almost all of its impact, as Alan Wake 2 refuses to let up on them. Playing through some of Alan Wake 2's more intense sequences can see the player encounter a slew of these jumpscares in quick succession, and after one or two, they lose their impact almost entirely and instead become a little bit tedious.

Alan Wake 2 's jumpscares aren't delivered completely at random. Many of these jumpscares are actually meant to be an in-universe indication that the Dark Presence is approaching the character, though that doesn't stop them from being a little irritating after a while.

When a big gap is placed between Alan Wake 2's jumpscares they work exceptionally well and are almost always incredibly unsettling, but that's a pretty rare occurrence if fans are putting in some lengthy play-sessions. If Remedy even cut just a quarter of the game's jumpscares, then it could have avoided this issue entirely and kept Alan Wake 2 one of the scariest survival horror games of all time, which it might still be regardless for many fans.