Alan Wake 2 offered a much deeper look at the sequel during today’s PlayStation Showcase, and many more details have been presented since. Unlike Alan Wake 2’s reveal teaser at The Game Awards 2021, this trailer reveals that there will be diverging narratives and players will have a hand in both. One of the more unique characteristics of Alan Wake’s storytelling, the eponymous writer’s work is able to manifest in reality. However, with two realities seemingly coexisting at once that players balance between, it will be interesting to see Wake’s full potential.
Alan Wake 2’s Saga Anderson is an interesting addition to the franchise as an FBI agent arriving in Bright Falls to solve its ritualistic murders. That insinuates that Alan Wake 2 would therefore swap back-and-forth between protagonists, but that is not necessarily the case, and how much influence Wake’s writing has on either storyline will be exciting to explore. The game leans fully into survival-horror gameplay this time around, echoing a lot of what made Resident Evil 2’s remake as compelling as it is, but Alan Wake 2 could be far more original if the player cannot trust Wake when he is at his typewriter.
Alan Wake’s Writer Affects Should Play a Bigger Role in the Sequel
It was reinforced throughout the original Alan Wake that the writer was experiencing the results of his written work as he discovered manuscript pages precluding or addressing every occurrence. Alan Wake’s episodic storytelling made it akin to a limited series of television rather than a novel, though, and the protagonist’s role in the sequel seems even more convoluted. Of course, Alan Wake's conclusion prepared players for this perfectly, and Remedy's connected universe could also have a role to play.
Alan Wake’s narrative being unreliably told by its own protagonist is a wonderfully surreal approach, playing well into Remedy's bread-and-butter as a developer, and means that surprises could come through in any scenario. Alan Wake’s manuscript pages did not have any gameplay ramifications that made a huge difference, but it would be excellent to see pages return in the sequel and help players prepare for subsequent encounters or learn of horrors that lurk behind an otherwise unassuming corner.
Still, Wake is awfully unreliable as the potential author of his and Anderson’s stories, and there will almost surely be something else at play that is manipulating events. Playing as Wake, it would be incredible to see options allowing the player to choose certain outcomes and write them into the story. This could lead to a lot of player choice, especially since Wake and Anderson’s stories are apparently playable in whichever order fans desire after a particular point.
That seems to suggest that there will not be a constant back-and-forth of manipulated influences, and there could be two isolated campaigns that the player can select from instead. Either way, Wake’s influence as a reality-warping writer could still have a much more meaningful impact than it seemed to in the original game. The juxtaposition of each narrative should hopefully intertwine with one another anyhow, but there are likely surprises here and there for how it could actually turn out.
It will be interesting to see how these two distinct storylines coincide with one another if they do at all, or if one has the potential to spoil something happening in the other. Resident Evil’s over-the-shoulder survival horror seems like a clear inspiration in the brief gameplay that was shown, but the effects of Wake’s writing and his inability to grasp his own reality should still play a definitive role in either of Alan Wake 2’s narratives.
Alan Wake 2 launches on October 17, 2023, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
