Remedy Entertainment has come a long way since the first Alan Wake game, with Control in particular breaking it out into the developer big leagues.

Now it’s revisiting its troubled writer again, spinning a dual-narrative paranormal thriller that will scare you and amaze you in equal measure, with some of the best visuals I’ve ever seen.

Bright Falls, dark nights

If you have never played Alan Wake (or it’s a solid remaster from 2021), then I won’t lie to you – Alan Wake 2 will take some catching up on. Remedy says it’s a standalone story, but that’s frankly not true.

This game picks up 13 years after the first, with the small foggy town of Bright Falls once again besieged by mysterious crimes, this time in the form of a murder cult.

You initially play as FBI agent Saga Anderson as she arrives in town to investigate the latest in a line of connected murders, but it doesn’t take too long before a bedraggled Alan Wake emerges from the town’s lake to join the fun.

From there, Alan Wake 2 becomes a pair of stories – you can swap at any time between Saga’s missions and Alan’s, progressing each of their viewpoints at whatever pace you like to uncover how they intertwine.

Saga plays in the real world, fighting off darkness-infected Fallen enemies and figuring out what’s going on in Bright Falls, while Alan’s missions are altogether more esoteric.

He’s mired in the Dark Place, much like Stranger Things’ Upside-Down, and this means his missions are way more surreal, which makes for a quite different pace.

The story is inventive and disturbing, and once you remind yourself of who a few people are (or read notes attentively to catch up if you’re coming to this fresh), it gets pretty interesting.

It also ties heavily in with Control and, more unexpectedly, heavily references the Max Payne series, making Alan Wake 2 a treasure trove of easter eggs and meta-commentary.

That said, it’s also prone to navel-gazing. While the set pieces it conjures are mind-boggling (particularly in Alan’s sequences), it doesn’t always manage to attain the profundity it grasps at with regard to authorship and art.

Point and shoot

Whether you’re playing as Alan or Saga, while the pacing is pretty different, you’ll still be doing roughly the same things – solving puzzles and fighting off enemies.

For the most part, the former option dominates, with environmental puzzles and combination oddities aplenty, and these slower stretches let Remedy really flex its “scary” muscles.

Terrifying sound mixing and a willingness to throw in abrupt jump scares mean that you’ll be on edge a lot of the time (especially with a headset on), even if music cues generally let you know if there are really enemies nearby.

Saga and Alan both have a few abilities that you’ll use to progress. Saga can visit her Mind Place at any time to compile her case notes and profile individuals in her head to figure out what she needs to do next – it’s slightly by the numbers but works well to show her deduction process.

Alan, meanwhile, is able to rewrite whole scenes that he’s stuck in to change their details and make new opportunities, something that prompts some really dazzling transitions as environments swap their realities for him.

These systems make exploration and puzzles fun to get through, although it’s every so often interrupted by relatively short combat encounters.

These see you, with either character, using that recognisable flashlight-led tactic of stripping away a baddie’s shield of darkness to weaken them before blasting away with your choice from a few weapons.

It’s serviceable stuff but feels noticeably less innovative (or even just interesting) than the rest of the game’s approach, which makes it a comfort that it feels like a less prominent part than ever.

This makes tepid boss encounters stand out all the more obviously – these are rare, but each one felt frustratingly retrograde to me, not least because of their dark and hard-to-judge arenas. A game this considered shouldn’t feel the need to build to such videogame-y climaxes.

Glorious presentation

If Alan Wake’s narrative and gameplay feel like they’re pretty variable in their success, its visual presentation is one of the most resounding triumphs in recent memory.

Playing on PS5, this is, without any real qualification, one of the best-looking games I’ve ever played, consistently hitting visual high notes and blowing away even recent competition.

Its quality mode sticks to a steady 30FPS with some unbelievably impressive volumetric fog and environmental detail pairing beautifully with lighting choices to make almost every scene stand out.

I sampled the 60FPS targeting performance mode but found the cutbacks a little too obvious and stuck with the quality option for a game that rarely demands twitchy reflexes of you and never really stopped marvelling at how good everything looks.

Whether it’s the fetid forests around Bright Falls or the miasmic dreamscape of Alan’s chunk of otherworldly New York, this is visual design and technical know-how demonstrated on a seriously crazy scale.

Audio is similarly atmospheric and tension-heightening, and the way the game layers in real-world scenes and acting over its presentation has to be seen to really be appreciated – it’s brilliant, and a staged musical sequence midway through Alan’s journey is one of the most impressive visual achievements I can remember.

That said, this is also a game of profound bugs even at launch. I had to restart the game after 90 minutes of play on a pre-launch version due to a game-breaking bug that I’ve been told is now fixed, but the post-launch version has still proved rocky.

I’ve had my audio lose sync until I reloaded a save a fair few times, something that is reportedly more common still on Xbox, but I have also had button prompts similarly disappear until reloaded.

On one occasion, while swapping between Alan and Saga, I loaded into the latter’s world but still as Alan, and it took me five minutes to be certain this wasn’t an intentional sleight of hand given the game’s playfulness – I’m convinced that accidentally saving in this state would have caused a corruption of my progress, but I managed to roll it back.

Stability is something we increasingly can’t take for granted as a game launches, and with Alan Wake 2 on the cutting edge in so many ways, it’s perhaps no surprise that it doesn’t excel on that front.

Verdict

Alan Wake 2 is a confounding bit of genius wrapped in parts of a game that complement its smart ideas and others that hold it back, all of it enveloped in a slightly over-cocky surety about that very same genius.

Its combat is middling; there are no two ways around it, but its presentation feels like a genuine step forward, and some of its story beats are told so inventively that they’ll live long in the memory. If you’re a fan of Remedy’s work, it’s a must-play, but its rough edges somehow stand out all the more for the incredible smoothness it exhibits elsewhere.