Posted in: Alan Wake II, Epic Games, Games, Remedy Entertainment, Video Games | Tagged: alan wake 2

Alan Wake II Preview: Horror's Fourth Wall Broken

We had a chance to go try out a demo of Alan Wake II ahead of the game's launch. Here's what we experienced before we got the full game.

A short time ago, we were treated to an immersive experience from Remedy Entertainment and Epic Games as we got to preview Alan Wake II. With the game set to be released this week, we thought we'd revisit that experience as a bit of a moment to prepare you for what's to come when the game drops on October 27, 2023.

Last month we got to experience a special event out in Los Angeles where we met the cast and crew behind the game, got to hear their thoughts on the making of it, and chatted with some of them about their experiences ahead of time. This included being a part of a special area that included a bar and a town that were all themed to the small Pacific Northwest town most of the game is set in.

They went all out to creepify all of us, as they made every piece of this look and feel like it was taken from the game, including these special stations made for everyone to try out the demo to look like an office we were working out of to solve a case. While we were playing, they would constantly have people dressed up in cult attire with deer masks come up and just stare at us. One dude tried really hard and crept up behind me, to which I just turned around, smiled, nodded, and went back to playing the demo. Kudos for trying, my guy! It was probably one of the better experiences I've had with a game demo in the past couple of years.

As far as the Alan Wake II demo went, everything was broken up into two separate pieces. The first part follows the new protagonist in this game, FBI Agent Saga Anderson. Anderson is taking part in an investigation that led them to the town of Watery, as she and her partner are looking into the Cult of the Tree. As you might imagine for the area, everyone seems to be acting weird, as if they are experiencing events differently than what she knows them to be. We jump into her part of the game, talking to the Koskela Brothers, who talk about how she lived there without her ever experiencing it. In order to find out more, she must go visit a specific home in a trailer park, but in order to do that, we had to travel through their backwater theme park to find the key to the place.

This is where the spooky immersion kicks in, as they have gone out of their way to make everything about as cryptic and hidden as possible. An amazing job by the designers to make this town go from being inviting and unassuming to dark and challenging in a heartbeat. The game has a couple of things going for it at the same time. The first was dealing with the cultists who seem to be affected by the area, as they can shift in the shadows and require more than just a couple of bullets to put them down. You have to shine a flashlight at them to get them to "catch on fire," which is the best I can describe it, in order to make them vulnerable enough to be hit.

The theme park offered up its own blend of puzzle solving and item hunting. We went from Coffee World over to the Gift Shop to get this key, which had to be found through a series of challenges. The first of which was finding the right item to break into the coffee shop, which was hiding on one of the rides. Which, of course, had enemies swarming the place while creepy carnival music played in the background. We then solved a puzzle about employees to get to another piece of the park to find a screwdriver. All while this is happening, we keep visiting our internal Mind Place to put together small pieces of the case to figure out what's been going on here. We eventually make out way to the trailer park, but we'll hold off on talking about that as we don't want to spoil it for you.

The second part of the demo finally threw us in the shoes of Alan Wake, as we're now seeing what happened to this guy between the first game and Alan Wake II. The game's ending was so intriguing that just about anything would have been an amazing surprise, and as far as this demo goes, we were not disappointed.

To get right to it, Alan had been trapped in The Dark Place for eleven years, and time there has passed by at a different pace than in the real world. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a challenging time just getting around and figuring out what's going on. After a mysterious caller instructs Alan to go to a hotel, we discover a new tool in our arsenal: The Angel Lamp. The lamp has the mechanic of lighting up areas the same way shining light on enemies does with the flashlight from Agent Anderson, but with the added bonus of being able to transfer the light to other objects that also hold light. So, if you hit an alleyway that looks spooky, you can shoot the light into a nearby lamp post and get a better perspective on things. It also helps with changing the way reality looks from time to time, as light in certain areas opens up new pathways.

This part of the game was far more about puzzle-solving than dealing with enemies. Not that they weren't around almost every corner of the Dark Place, but we were able to use a lot more stealth and map routing to avoid them than being forced to deal with them head-on. This place was basically a giant maze in which you needed to put together a number of different combinations of using the light and picking the right path in order to find your way around. It can be very easy to get lost and turned around, but the game has provided enough clues for you to eventually figure it out. All of which was designed to get us to a very specific room in the hotel where, for a brief moment, we were confronted with our own self in a very unique way that would mess with our mind. The team who put together the story for this did a great job of creating a world in which Alan knows he's in danger but feels almost at home in its danger.

Overall, the Alan Wake II demo was an amazing experience. Leading up to this, we had seen bits and pieces; some of them were cool, but others weren't that impressive. Actually getting our hands on the game changed our minds on a lot of aspects of the game, especially the Mind Place. It still has some stuff that is a bit annoying, such as being forced to deal with enemies when we'd rather stealth our way out of it and get to the more intriguing part, but we understand that this is an entirely different beast compared to the first game. This has made us look forward to playing it more than before.

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