Alan Wake 2

Minor spoilers below.

TL;DR if you want to skip because of potential spoilers: “Alan Wake 2” is the worst universally acclaimed game I’ve ever played.

I liked the first “Alan Wake”. I loved “Control”. I went into “Alan Wake 2” with high expectations and my god, what a let down.

The start of the game quickly had me imagining what the design sessions must have been like. “You know what’s the most tedious thing about third-rate survival horror games? All the wandering around in the dark with a flashlight. So let’s take the flashlight away.”

Even once you get the flashlight, pretty much everything is pitch black. Sorry, why are we wandering into the woods in the middle of the night to look for a dead body, rather than waiting until the morning? I’m not an expert, but I doubt FBI investigators generally choose to perform woodland searches at night. If there’s one thing I wish developers had learned from “Silent Hill” it’s that you don’t need everything to be pitch black and illuminated solely by a narrow flashlight beam in order to sustain horror.

(I tried turning off HDR and adjusting the gamma, but could only seem to make it worse. Maybe there’s something specifically bad about the PS5 version’s lighting?)

Then there’s the difficulty. Presumably they had a lot of complaints about the first game being too easy, because the second one is ridiculous in many places. One missed shot and you’re swarmed and killed. (God help you if you don’t get all the weapon upgrades.)

The repetitive shadows haunting Alan would sometimes glitch into a state where they were just stuck there — impossible to clear away, but harmless, but also looking exactly like the active shadows. I’m assuming that’s a bug.

A lot of the landscape is entirely too easy to get lost in. Which bunch of trees was I heading towards, before something came at me and I flailed around in the dark fighting with the camera as a tree got in the way? No idea, let’s wander around in the dark hitting invisible barriers for a while. Look, I’m not asking for GPS, but at least give me a compass.

Don’t worry, though, the plot says that the darkness connects to our world through loops, so you’ll get to go down the same paths repeatedly, and eventually you’ll get to know them and be bored with them. Seriously, the TV studio again? Can we just not?

Combine that with the “shifting between realities” mechanism and it really felt like Remedy had specifically designed the gameplay to reduce the amount of map they had to build. The shifting reality thing is also bad because it makes navigation so much more annoying — you can’t just remember where things are, you have to remember which part of the map you have to go to in order to shift into the right reality to then go somewhere else.

The most unforgivable part of the game, in my view, is the sheer number of jump scares. Not even things suddenly happening in the game world, just jump scare images plastered over the gameplay with sudden noises. Call me a curmudgeon but I view jump scares as the mark of hack work. Sure, have one or two per game or movie if you must, and if you can incorporate them into the actual action. If you resort to literally dozens, I’m going to give you serious side-eye.

Dear me, that plot. I’m no stranger to complex and mysterious plots — I enjoy movies like “Tenet”, “Primer” and “Donnie Darko”. I loved “Twin Peaks”. “Alan Wake 2” is just incoherent and thinks it’s a lot cleverer than it actually is.

Presumably the Case Board and Plot Board were intended to help the story hang together, but they ended up just feeling like busywork — and frequently annoying when there were multiple places a particular piece of evidence could logically connect to. Or when you can’t make any progress in the actual game world because you have to jump to the boards and rearrange some photos and string.

The best part of the game? The crazy musical number half way through. The worst part? Everything else. I am utterly mystified by the critical acclaim heaped on this game. Like I said at the top, “Alan Wake 2” is the worst universally acclaimed game I’ve ever played.