Highlights

  • Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror game that rewards cautious players with useful supplies and additional narrative elements, adding depth to the story.
  • Remedy Entertainment has a history of incorporating live-action into its games, with Alan Wake 2 showcasing the studio's expertise in seamlessly blending live-action with gameplay.
  • The "Nightless Night" segment in Alan Wake 2, found in the Poet's Cinema, offers a surreal and meta experience, featuring an elaborately constructed 15-minute film that many players may miss.

Alan Wake 2 is a full-on survival horror title, complete with all the features contained in the genre. With a slower pace along with resource management and less numerous but more dangerous enemies, the sequel is noticeably different from the original's more action-adventure fare. Alan Wake 2 encourages exercising more caution, often rewarding diligent players with both mechanically useful supplies and supplementary narrative elements. The latter adds yet another layer to the already multi-faceted story, fleshing out details and filling in important gaps that provide additional answers to certain questions that could otherwise be overlooked.

Remedy Entertainment has always had a great interest in incorporating live-action into its games. In one of its earlier chapters, players are treated to an elaborate live-action sequence in Alan Wake 2. It is bombastic and amusing, serving almost as a summary of the story, and impressively occurs entirely during gameplay. It's a surprising and incredible section, especially given the juxtaposition between its tone and the unnerving tenseness immediately preceding it.

As fantastic as this bit is, though, there is actually another live-action segment that arguably surpasses it in terms of strangeness and relevance to the plot, but which requires a bit of extra effort to experience.

RELATED: Alan Wake 2 Proves That Remedy's Love for Live-Action Hasn't Been Misplaced

The Best Live Action Sequence in Alan Wake 2 Is Completely Missable

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Remedy's Long Love Affair With Live-Action

Remedy has a well-established history of live-action components in its titles, going back to the early days of Max Payne. It was one of the few developers that poured resources into focusing on how live-action could be integrated in games and enhance the overall experience within the medium. As the studio grew and experimented more with their use, it started to find a better feel for what did and didn't work. Naturally, it stumbled along the way. For example, many felt the 22-minute-long episodes in 2016's Quantum Break dragged down the title instead of elevating it, interrupting the flow of the game while not standing out on their own enough to justify their inclusion.

Remedy's last title before Alan Wake 2, 2019's Control, was a course correction in this area. Control's live-action portions were highly praised, and noted as some of the best Remedy had done yet at the time. They showed the studio had learned from its prior missteps, and was honing the craft of marrying live-action and traditional gameplay in a unique and satisfying way. Alan Wake 2 can now be said to be Remedy's opus in terms of this aspect. Its live-action portions seamlessly segue into gameplay, their production value is of the highest quality, and they are integral to the story in a manner that none of the previous titles achieved.

Alan Wake 2's "Nightless Night"

The segment in question can be found in the Poet's Cinema. Outside, the marquee declares "Nightless Night" by Thomas Zane is showing. Alan Wake 2's Thomas Zane is an enigmatic figure with several important connections to the overall plot. Inside the theater, if players remove all plot board elements from the scene and then watch the movie screen, a 15-minute film plays out. This is the advertised picture, which resembles a foreign indie or arthouse flick—somewhat pretentious but somehow mesmerizing at the same time.

"Nightless Night" blends together recognizable events of both Alan Wake titles, but with other strange elements, and puts an even more surreal and meta bent on them. It's implied to be Zane's vision of how he plans to escape the Dark Place. In a fitting move, Remedy's creative director, Sam Lake (whose likeness is also used for the character of Alex Casey) appears in the lead role. "Nightless Night" showcases Remedy at the height of their talents in the live-action sector, going so far as to include such an elaborately constructed one that many players will likely completely miss.

Fans wanting to experience Alan Wake 2' s "Nightless Night" for themselves can do so during Initiation 8: Zane's Film , and owe it to themselves to see this fascinating creation firsthand.