Alan Wake II: The Perfect Story

Being followed down the road by shadows that may or may not talk to you would unnerve anyone. Combine this with the endless darkness of the night and you have the perfect formula for a world unseen and unheard: the Dark Place.

Alan Wake II is the perfect blend of light and dark to drag you away from your day, offering five-star storytelling, action, and a small dose of rock and roll. It is more than a year old now, and having just finished it, this game still holds space in the dark recesses of my mind.

Story

Without wishing to delve too much into the story for fear of spoilers, Alan Wake II starts you off in the small town of Bright Falls to investigate a murder as detective Saga Anderson. From here you find a dead body, which appears to have been sacrificed in some cult ritual and so you investigate.

What proceeds from here breaks down the barriers of rationality and offers our initial hero (Saga) many lines of inquiry, which you can tangibly investigate.

The Mind Place is where you add all the clues you discover, from the manuscript pages littered around the dark woods to the stashes of weapons and cult symbols. Everything plays an important role and can be pieced together here.

That mental space never feels as though it is intrusive or demanding. In many ways, it is a bonus, and while you can ignore it for most of the experience if you choose, I decided to engage with it. Taking five or ten minutes at the end of a session to add all the clues to the board extended play and ensured that the feature never got in the way of the actual game; being chased by the shadowy cult only to pause in your Mind Place does rather erase the illusion.

The story is crafted at your own pace where you can pepper in as much or as little detail as you would like, much like the moment when you find the eponymous author, Alan Wake. Washed up on the shore he offers you a separate storyline, one that happens in the Dark Place, from which you must work together to bring light to darkness and scratch out the primary villain.

Action

Having a good story is wonderful, but beyond this, you need something that holds the game in its chosen medium. The action in Alan Wake II, therefore, is measured. The atmosphere is created as you move through each new environment where a stray sound could easily be the whistle of a knife flying through the trees or a new enemy arriving to cut you down a notch or two.

To combat all of these enemies, you need a decent inventory, and the game makes it quick and easy to manage, much like a more effective Resident Evil 5, without the annoying partner healing you every five minutes. If I have one gripe then it would be that the totals you could keep for each item (two painkillers) before you needed a new slot were quite stingy.

Inventory managing and clunky reloads aside (I spent one battle on the beach deciding that combat simply wasn't worth it and running around to survive) the combat was fun. The need to burn an enemy's darkness shield away before unleashing lead into them was a neat addition that demanded the ongoing search for lightbulbs (a metaphor perhaps for life in that we all need to top up the light to keep the darkness away).

My favourite section of combat is from the level, We Dance. It's a level I was not expecting, you are sucked into the TV and introduced to what first appears to be your own personal rock concert. Driven by the Old Gods of Asgard, it draws you in like a moth to the flame. Before long, your feet begin to tap out the beat; swiftly followed by an attack by a bunch of shadows, the level turns into a shoot-em-up. Unexpected but utterly captivating.

Soundtrack

I have played many games and can count on one hand the number of soundtracks that I consider to be first-class. This one is first class, like placing together all the incarnations of Linkin Park and squeezing them into your small screen; it was, quite frankly, the icing on the cake.

Played by real-life band Poets of the Fall, it is another tick in the direction of Remedy for going that extra mile and introducing a real band to the mix. The music pushes stages like We Dance and Summoning to the next level with the songs playing a central part and offering a track to your mood.

Fearful and alert at the thought of being trapped in the Dark Place again, and hopeful of bringing back a fallen hero, the music aligns with the player and provides a backdrop to this classic (at least in my mind) gaming experience.

A final thought

The result of these key pillars is the creation of an unforgettable experience, one that pulls the player close to the TV, whispering as it does: 'Wake' 'Alan Wake'. The words of the shadows still flow across my mind as I type - echoing the voices I hear when walking down a dark alley - and I question if I am still on Earth.

Is it a loop or a spiral; who knows? If there is never another game in this canon then I will be sad. Alan deserves the chance to find his wife and escape the Dark Place. Remedy should be responsible enough to know that this story deserves another chapter.

There are very few complete gaming experiences and I am lucky to have played; this is definitely one of them. Yes, there were some quirks, but realistically, when you look under the hood of any story, there are always areas that the writer wishes they could change in hindsight. Having said that, Alan Wake II is perfect in my eyes.