The Alan Wake 2 demo I sat through at Gamescom made me want to scream and shout. Not because developer Remedy Entertainment has stretched comfortably into survival horror territory, although this Dark Place prison is certainly an evocative tool for ratcheting up tension. I wanted to make myself heard because whoever was in command of the controller would not slow down. There was a lot of ground to cover in a 40-minute presentation, but I could have spent hours lost in the streets of this twisted vision of New York City – a space of stark contrasts, empowered by impossibly deep shadows and dying embers of flickering light.
The visual fidelity is astounding. I wanted to breathe in the atmosphere to the point of suffocation, with the Northlight Engine being employed to deliver truly staggering scale and detail. Neon hues shimmer delicately across puddles of rain, soft light from street lamps struggles to cut through thick plumes of fog, the flashlight piercing the new Fade Out enemies with explosive volatility. When Alan heads below ground, struggling to discern fact from fiction in the claustrophobic tunnels of the subway system, I'm almost too startled to track the links back to Control graffitied all over the walls.
