Alan Wake 2: a horror game that, for some reason, sings

Alan Wake 2 released on 27 October 2023 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and Windows — digital only, with a physical edition arriving a full year later in October 2024. The publisher was Epic Games Publishing; the directors were Sam Lake and Kyle Rowley. At The Game Awards 2023 it won for game direction and for narrative. By the end of 2024 it had sold over two million copies and finally recouped development and marketing — Remedy's fastest-selling title.

The structure is unusual. There are two campaigns: FBI agent Saga Anderson investigating ritual killings in the town of Bright Falls, and the writer Alan Wake, thirteen years inside a dark dimension, rewriting reality. You can switch between them at almost any point, and the order of scenes is largely yours to assemble.

Two boards instead of one menu

Each protagonist has a workroom inside their head. Saga's is the Mind Place — a wall of photographs and string where she pins evidence and profiles suspects. Alan's is the Writer's Room: he selects a plot turn and the scene around him physically rearranges, so that the same alley under a different story becomes a different alley.

Alan's mechanic genuinely works: changing the plot changes the lighting, the passages and the enemies, and it is the only case I know where rewriting a story is implemented as a level switch rather than as a line of dialogue.

Saga's mechanic works less well. You pin evidence by hand, but the game draws the conclusions for you: drag a card, receive a paragraph of deduction. The sensation of investigating is there; the investigation is not.

The musical

Midway through, Alan lands inside a television show, and for the next several minutes the fictional band Old Gods of Asgard performs a song recapping the plot of both games — with choreography, lighting and editing. This happens inside a horror story about disappearing people, without explanation and without an ironic frame.

The scene works for one reason: the studio does not wink. It stages the musical in earnest, and so it does not break the tone but widens it.

Alongside it are live-action inserts: filmed actors, FBI training videos, interviews. Remedy has been doing this since Max Payne, but here the mixture of footage and render stops looking like a device and becomes a language.

What does not work

Combat. This is classic survival horror: scarce ammunition, heavy aiming, enemies whose darkness must first be burned off with a torch. The system itself is acceptable, but it breaks the pace precisely where the game is strongest — in conversation and exploration. After the twentieth encounter with the same figure in the same woods, it becomes clear the fighting is here out of genre obligation rather than need.

The grid inventory and the constant trips back to storage boxes are an inheritance that should have been dropped.

And the game assumes knowledge of the 2010 original, plus ideally Control. There is almost no recap inside.

Why 8.7

For the Writer's Room, the only genuinely new horror mechanic in years; for the nerve of the musical and the live action; and for light and sound that work better here than the script does. Points off for combat that drags the game backwards and for an investigation that only resembles one. An 8.7: not a flawless game, but a game that takes risks, and nearly every risk pays.