It was impossible to anticipate what Remedy Entertainment would do with Alan Wake 2. Trust me, I've spent much of the last decade trying to dream this sequel into reality. Wake's long-awaited escape from the Dark Place had always seemed so obvious to me: the writer would commence work on a new novel, allowing us to explore a twisted shadow of Bright Falls while Wake inadvertently rewrote reality around him, with Remedy using this frame to pull focus onto larger combat scenarios and a more authored open world – less of a Departure, and more of a continuation. Thankfully, Remedy has gone in an entirely different direction with its upcoming sequel for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.
The Alan Wake 2 set for release on October 17 appears to be far more thematically adventurous, mechanically interesting, and narratively dense than anything I could have ever imagined that we'd get. Wake has spent the last 13 years as a prisoner of the Dark Place, trapped beneath the nightmarish waters under Cauldron Lake. But the thrust of Alan Wake 2 won't seemingly be in us attempting to secure his Return, but rather in seeing what horrors his ongoing attempts to write himself out of a nightmare have wrought on the small town of Bright Falls.
