Release Date: October 17, 2023
Genre: Action Adventure, Third Person Shooter, Survival Horror, Horror
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Synopsis:
“Alan Wake 2” continues the eerie and captivating narrative of the original game, set in a world where horror and reality intertwine. Players will navigate the dual roles of Alan Wake and Saga Anderson, unraveling a dark and enigmatic plot. This survival horror sequel combines action, adventure, and psychological thrills, offering a unique gaming experience on modern gaming platforms.

Remedy’s Creative Evolution and Alan Wake 2: A Quintessential Blend

Finnish studio Remedy has always tried to add a twist to their games. In Max Payne – time dilation, in Alan Wake serial structure with episodes, in Quantum Break was literally woven into the series, and Control began to build a whole game universe Remedy Connected Universe. Whether Alan Wake 2 was able to combine all the developments of the studio and become the quintessence of Remedy’s many years of creativity, we’ll tell you in our review of the game.

13 Years Later: A Dark Mystery in Bright Falls

Alan Wake 2 came out 13 years after the original game. Accordingly, it’s been 13 years since the writer was swallowed by the Darkness, although most believe that Alan Wake drowned in Lake Cauldron near the town of Bright Falls. A pair of federal agents, Alex Casey and Saga Anderson, arrive in the same town on a case investigating serial ritualistic murders. The investigation of the murders leads the detectives to a missing writer and the mysterious events surrounding him.

Masterful Storytelling: Blending Reality with Fiction

For the reader, the viewer, and especially the player, it’s not what story the storytellers tell, but how they tell it that matters. Sam Lake and Clay Murphy masterfully play on the expectations of the player by throwing clues that immediately build in the head several options for the development of events. And until the end it is difficult to realize which of the options will be true, because even the most banal and expected, for the genre, plot twists here are turned out with the sick imagination of the guardians of David Lynch (“Twin Peaks”), Nick Pizzolatto (“True Detective”) and David Fincher (“Seven”). And in some ways, they even surpass them.

A New Era of Horror: Survival and Investigation in Alan Wake 2

The events of Remedy’s games take place in real time – in the year those games are released.

The new heroine, Saga Anderson, from the first minutes makes it seem as if she has always been a part of the story, and her story arc is no less interesting than the story of an outstanding writer. As the developers promised, you can go through the heroes’ stories in any sequence, except for a few episodes, when the gameplay narrative is taken under the control of the writers. Switching between characters can be done at designated locations, territorially usually the beginning and end of the mission. The method of doing so is rather… specific-looking, and it also asks several questions per Remedy Connected Universe character.

Innovations in Gameplay: Mindspace Mechanics and Dual Protagonists

The story holds you in a tight embrace from the first minutes and doesn’t let go for a second.
Genre-wise, both story-wise and gameplay-wise, Alan Wake 2 is a horror game. More specifically, a survival horror, which was a significant change from the first game. It was, for the most part, a sci-fi thriller with an action bias.

The sequel has noticeably slowed down the pace of the game, the locations have gotten bigger, and on medium difficulty there are just enough resources to fight back against enemies.

Even when it seems that it’s already possible to lay out Jenga with ammo, the upcoming fight with a couple of opponents can take away almost all the combat resources, including first aid kits and painkillers. The first few hours of the game go by with almost no shots at all, giving you time to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the northern state and feel like a real detective who is conducting a serious investigation.

Alan Wake is in The Darkness under the guise of New York City, Saga Anderson is investigating in the real world in and around the town of Bright Falls.

Lost in Translation: The Challenges of Localizing Alan Wake 2

An important innovation of the sequel was the Thinking Space. The mechanics are similar to the thinking chambers from Sherlock Holmes. It is a separate room “in Saga’s head” that we have access to at any point in the game. The room loads instantly, as if it were just an extra interface rather than a separate cozy little location with a bunch of objects.

In Mindspace, Saga investigates all the evidence found, compiles a portrait of the suspects, and pursues side cases that are somehow related to the main investigation.

Embracing Culture: Finnish Traditions in Alan Wake 2

The clue board in Mindspace is a staple of the game’s detective mechanics. Photos of each lead found have to be attached to the questions posed in a particular investigation and a red thread is pulled to each of them. And you have to do it by moving the photo with the gamepad stick or mouse. If you close the case before hanging all the photos, they will automatically stick to the right places, which is actually logical.Thanks to the almost tactile realization of this mechanics it does not bore for a second.

Mechanically, the whole process is realized in a simple, interesting and exciting way. The other puzzles in the game can be characterized by this sentence. They are complex enough for the player to think a little, but do not cross the line where you need a degree in math to solve the problem. Although in a few moments you will still have to remember math.

In Alan’s case, the function of Space is performed by the Writer’s Room, where he structures his story on a blackboard in such a way that the written story would lead him out of the Darkness. Through his ability to influence the world in the Darkness, Alan is able to alter the reality around him. Besides the fact that it sounds cool, it also looks spectacular. The developers showed some such transformations in the trailers.

Among other things, the game has an incredible number of literal and hidden references to other Remedy games, even those that are not officially part of the Remedy Connected Universe. What can I say, one of the secondary characters is literally Max Payne, only with a different name.

It’s not the game’s problem

The game as a tour guide will lead you through incredibly beautiful forests, amusement parks and mystical New York filled with neon. In a way it’s even good that the game doesn’t have a photo mode, otherwise the passage would be even longer. But everything has its price.

In the case of Alan Wake 2, the point of no return was the Mesh shaders technology supported by graphics cards starting from GeForce RTX 2000-series and AMD Radeon RX 6000-series. On older graphics cards the game will launch, but you won’t be able to play it with acceptable frames per second.

Considering the graphical look of the game even at minimum settings, it is well optimized, which is rare in current releases. I also didn’t encounter any serious bugs (or bugs in general) or flaws. Except for one.

The game has textual Ukrainian localization and this is one of the reasons why I was even more anticipating the release of Alan Wake 2. But as you already know, the translation has several problems, and the first one is of technical nature. The text often didn’t match the characters’ lines, and there were times when instead of sequential sentences, whole sheets of text appeared on the screen, covering almost most of the image for minutes.

This problem has been seen in many other localizations, such as Spanish. The developers are aware of this problem and with the latest patches should have solved it. I had only asynchronous text and lines, sometimes several subtitles overlapped, or the same line was shown in two lines.

However, technical problems are easy to fix and, most likely, at the time of this review, patches have already been released on PC and consoles that fix localization bugs. But there is a second, more serious problem – the quality of translation.

Already the main menu teasers the approach with which the localizers did their job, “Titles” for some reason is called “Credits” (English Credits). Throughout the game, as well as in the Hints menu there are untranslated lines or word combinations. Many words have been calacquered from Russian.

To summarize the overall quality of the translation, it is poor. It is not terrible, there are light moments in it too and in general these problems do not affect the perception of the plot.

But I would like to see a more strict approach to localization check in a game of this level. I would like to note that localization was done by Keywords Studios, a third-party company that is a partner of the game publisher, Epic Games.

For further development, improvement and appearance of our language in more and more games it is important that Ukrainians play in Ukrainian. Good statistics will also encourage publishers and especially contractors to take Ukrainian players more seriously.

Best of all, the translators managed to convey the puns that Saga is so fond of.

And in all this horror and mysticism, the developers have found a place for a cultural code. Somewhere with love, somewhere with positive ridicule, but Alan Wake 2 perfectly promotes and sometimes kindly ridicules the stereotypes of Finnish culture. Developers from other countries need to learn from the Finns how to present their culture in a way that would be a serious part of the game, but would look harmonious and not take away from the overall narrative. Starting from the bathhouse, which doesn’t look like something superfluous, and ending with songs in Finnish.

Alan Wake 2 lived up to expectations and exceeded them. It is a clever, witty, intriguing and mystical story that the game industry has been missing for a long time. And definitely the pinnacle of Remedy’s work as a game studio. One of the best games this year, and I’m sure for many players it will be the best in years.