ALAN WAKE II

GAMES

Pulp metafiction…

★★★★★ OUT NOW PC, PS5, XBOX SERIES (DIGITAL ONLY)

After a 13-year sabbatical, the thriller-writing anti-hero returns

Back in 2010, Remedy Entertainment’s Stephen King-inspired action-horror saw the eponymous thriller author decamp to a quiet town in the Pacific Northwest to cure his writer’s block, only to fall into a nightmare of his own making. Thirteen years is a long wait for a follow-up - but rather than sweep that under the carpet, the Finnish developer boldly uses it as a metatextual plot point: where has Wake been all this time...?

We’re made to wait longer still for our hero’s reintroduction: a disturbing prologue concludes with a ritualistic murder, prompting the arrival of new playable protagonist, FBI agent Saga Anderson. Her half of the story takes the form of a gripping, slow-burn procedural – True Detective’s first season filtered through the lens of a Nordic noir, with a generous splash of Twin Peaks.

But even here, Wake’s influence is pervasive: the cult involved has seemingly been inspired by his work, while Anderson’s partner Alex Casey not only shares a name with Wake’s best-known creation, but bears the likeness of the game’s own writer-director Sam Lake. Who, as the lines between fiction and reality blur, turns up in a live-action chat show in the game’s other half, where a bewildered Wake fields questions about his latest novel – itself a long-awaited sequel – whose manuscript appears to be foreshadowing Anderson’s investigation…

If all that sounds like Alan Wake II is attempting to juggle more than a decade’s worth of ideas, Remedy ensures its key mysteries are straightforward to follow by giving players an active role in joining the dots. At any time, Anderson can retreat to her ‘mind place’, where Polaroids and documents are pinned on an evidence wall, with red thread connecting them. Her chapters initially serve as a gritty, grounded counterpoint to the dizzying weirdness of Wake’s: in his mental retreat he uses plot notes to rewrite reality, physically transforming the environments of the unsettling New York noir in which he’s trapped.

As Wake tries to escape his own Dark Place, the dialogue sometimes gets a bit Garth Marenghi; the relatively conventional third-person shoot-outs also underwhelm. But as realities bleed into one another, and the layers of fiction pile higher, the world-building – combining peerless visual imagination with astonishing technical craft – puts most of this year’s blockbusters in the shade. The unsettling, frequently unforgettable result leaves us hoping we don’t have to wait another 13 years for the saga’s final chapter to be written.