I wound up getting into Alan Wake after buying Alan Wake 2 on sale for super cheap. The first game, which was also super cheap through Steam, was a fun time. I didn’t care much for the gameplay, but I was intrigued with where the story went. I held off on starting 2 after I finished it though because I was going to try to get the entire lore (which involved playing a different Alan Wake game and Control) However, I decided to abandon that as I was not enjoying the other Alan Wake game (American Nightmare) and wanting to close the book on Alan Wake for a while (I’ll play Control sometime for its own merits)

Alan Wake 2 was a let-down.

I didn’t mind the idea of Alan Wake 2 getting darker than its predecessor (to start leaning into the horror idea) but the game relies a bit too heavily on jump scares. During particularly tense moments of the game, it can give you these flashes of people screaming. Sometimes you can predict them, but the times when you’re really invested, they can just pop you up and take you right out of it (Nothing usually happens after you see those scenes) They just feel crammed in to try and make the game feel like it’s scarier than it actually is.

Gameplay is not especially smooth. Clunky is what I’d describe it as. Even playing on the easiest difficulty, I felt like it was tripping me up more than enhancing the experience.

The story, where it goes, leaves a lot of stuff open. What worse is that you need to apparently finish it on New Game+ to get an ending that explains things a bit more. While I generally liked a lot of the ideas, the atmosphere, and the characters, it just felt anti-climatic in the end. More questions about this world they’re in and what’s really true. I could accept that maybe it’s not the end of Alan Wake’s saga but it really doesn’t even feel like an ending for the second game until you beat it again (Which I feel is kind of bad) There’s a reason why they do it that way, but there are better ways to do it than making people play through the same game again for only a few bread crumbs.

My overall grade for this would probably be a C. I was thinking I might play Control right after while playing, but now that I finished, I’m sort of Remedy’d out for a bit, I think.