Alan Wake II Is Far Darker Than Its Predecessor—and Perfects the Horror Genre

Alan Wake II begins with a man stumbling naked through the woods at night. He has just emerged from a lake, mud clinging to his back, and his body a deathly blue that blends with the thick shadows of the forest. Whispered words and groans sound in his ears as he runs, sudden flashes of a screaming face explode before his eyes like fireworks, and homicidal figures in deer masks appear from the murk to threaten him. Very soon this man will be dead and splayed on a picnic table, a pair of FBI agents examining his rigid corpse for clues to the motivation behind his murder and the ritual defilement of his body.

As an opening, it’s a strong statement of intent for a horror game—especially one that serves as a sequel to a far tamer predecessor released 13 years earlier.

Remedy Entertainment, headquartered in Espoo, Finland, has incorporated horror into its work from its first story-focused game, 2001’s Max Payne. (Its debut, a 1996 top-down car combat game called Death Rally, is an outlier in its catalog). A gleeful homage to hardboiled detective stories and Hong Kong action cinema, Payne was also the story of a man whose descent into a New York City criminal underworld is precipitated by a well-worn trope, the murder of the titular protagonist’s wife and infant daughter, centered with a depth of horror and wrenching sadness far rawer than a studio less interested in humanity would have employed. Payne regularly falls into nightmares that abstract the murders into surreal, playable mazes. He traverses an abyss whose exit can only be found by following trails of blood and a baby’s cries and is lost within a labyrinth of queasily distended nursery-wallpapered hallways. The audience is reminded, between hours of gunfights, that Payne’s mind is dominated by a terrifying grief whenever he’s given a respite from danger.

Remedy’s following games—Max Payne 2, the first Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control—all contained similar elements that showed Remedy’s artistic preoccupation with horror. The games acknowledged that terror and foreboding are an appropriate lens by which to portray dramatic moments of enormous import to its characters. It wasn’t until the creation of the recently released Alan Wake II, though, that the studio made a game entirely set within the genre.

In an interview with WIRED, Sam Lake, Remedy’s creative director and a frequent actor in its games, says that “it felt great” to finally make a full-on horror game after decades of telling stories where horror has appeared “naturally as part of the story” but wasn’t the entire focus of the game.

The first Alan Wake riffed on Stephen King and Twin Peaks to tell the story of Alan Wake, a successful but creatively frustrated New York-based crime novelist who heads to the Pacific Northwest with his wife in an attempt to overcome writer’s block. His wife soon goes missing, and he finds himself searching for her through a dreamlike version of the region where he’s hunted by shadowy figures, the difference between reality and fiction become unclear, and his words alter the world around him. Though the first Alan Wake was presented through a lightly frightening lens, Lake says that the game was, from Remedy’s point of view, intended as an action-adventure and not outright horror.

Now, many years later, Alan Wake II leans completely into the dread and fear that colored the margins of its predecessor. In part, this shift in genre was afforded by cultural changes, in the video game industry and in film and TV—namely, the increased success of mainstream horror film and TV in the time between the first and second game.

“One thing I always felt in the original Alan Wake that was a bit of a struggle, maybe, is that it ended up being Teen-rated [13 and up],” Lake says. Though the team always knew that it was working within the limitations of that age range, Lake explains that “some compromises were made” in telling the story.

“And it’s really interesting,” he adds. “We did some market research afterward and, at least then, the data we got back was that the game would have maybe done even better if it had been Mature-rated [17 and up] instead of Teen-rated.”

The gore in several of Alan Wake II’s scenes is definitely increased (in fidelity and sheer quantity) from the first game, but the greater freedom afforded by the change in genre is also evident in other, more important ways. 2010’s Alan Wake saw the protagonist struggle between the dichotomy of light and dark, both literally (shadowy enemies, for instance, are weakened by exposure to light) and through the metaphorical battle between Alan’s self-loathing and better nature, the presence of evil and good that he experiences and offers to the world.

The tonal darkness in the first game was more implied than shown, however, with a serial killer whose vile actions are never explicitly demonstrated and characters describing a fear that the player, romping through the coastal woods, doesn’t entirely share. Because of this, looking to horror aesthetics for a continuation of the same story—especially one that picks up from a point of despair for its protagonist—makes a lot of sense.

“The intention never is, with us, that we would do something for its [own] sake—like add horror just for the spectacle of it,” Lake explains. “Rather, it [was] just this feeling that now we can do whatever the story requires and go as far as the story needs to go. Which was a really, really good feeling.”

“Stepping into survival horror as a game genre gave us certain elements that really [served] Alan Wake as an experience,” he adds. “I like being more honest and truthful to what [the game] wants to be and needs to be. That felt good. I do feel that now, with [the sequel], we are closer to the potential of what an Alan Wake experience can be in many ways.”

Survival horror, a design subgenre defined by its use of character vulnerability and resource scarcity to amplify fear, is still a bit of a catch-all in a tonal sense. There are, for example, blood-soaked, monster-filled survival horrors, like the Resident Evil series, and eerier, psychologically disturbing survival horrors, like Silent Hill. Alan Wake II draws heavily from the latter series, swapping between the perspectives of FBI agent Saga Anderson, come to the first game’s bizarre town to hunt down those responsible for the opening scene’s murder, and Alan Wake, who is stuck within a nightmarish, logic-defying version of New York City that Lake calls an “impossible reality” constructed from Alan’s fears.

“I'm not a huge fan of slashers or splatter or extreme violence in that sense,” Lake says. “I’m much more interested in the psychological aspects of [horror].” He describes fiction set in worlds that are “disturbing, where something is wrong and off”—where the audience is “driven to understand and then, ultimately, when we do,” he laughs, “the horror is waiting for us there.”

“You know, some questions are better left unanswered,” he adds.

It isn’t a surprise, then, that Lake cites David Lynch—Remedy drew on his films and TV show Twin Peaks “a lot for the original Alan Wake”—as an example of this style of nightmarish mystery. (Lake calls Twin Peaks’ 25-year belated third season, The Return, “a wonderful gift” that he “enjoyed a lot.”) He also mentions Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, as well as Robert Eggers’ The Witch and The Lighthouse as examples of horror stylization he’s drawn to.

Elements of these films are present in the game, but Lake also brings up novels and authors whose work he has enjoyed—and whose influence can be felt in Alan Wake II. Lake describes Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, and the “postmodern nightmare” of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves as books he likes and which provide, along with the Stephen King books that helped inspire the first Alan Wake, examples of tortured and deeply flawed writer characters—sometimes versions of the author themselves.

Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel, which Lake calls “a favorite that I keep coming back to,” shows its influence strongly through both Control and Alan Wake II’s ever-changing, dreamlike architecture, and, more pointedly, in the inclusion of new in-game music, cowritten by Lake, from Danielewski’s sister, Anne, a musician who performs as Poe in Wake II.

These multimedia influences are apparent in Remedy’s blending of text, live-action video, and music. In Wake II, the in-game television and radio programs, scraps of written fiction, and musical interludes that were already prominent in past games are emphasized even further, resulting in a disorienting depiction of the cast’s confusion and fear that carries through to the audience.

“I like to use different mediums in our games,” Lake says. “I’ve always felt that they can be successfully used in various ways inside the game, in the game experience.”

The unique qualities of video games—the modes of direct audience participation the medium allows—are also centered in the game as a means to enhance fear. Lake says that games allow designers to entice players into entering dangerous situations, like solving the mysteries that propel Alan Wake II’s plot, situations they might otherwise yell at a movie character to avoid.

“Just the very fact of building a world around you and immersing you into it … if it does have a disturbing atmosphere, if it does have horror elements to it, you are there,” Lake explains. “You are. And that gives you a sense of vulnerability, especially [in] a survival horror game where the main character is not overpowered and is struggling with resources and all that. That brings the horror closer to you in some ways.”

In order to maintain that feeling of fear over Alan Wake II’s fairly lengthy runtime (it takes around 20 hours to complete) and throughout its more open environments, Lake says that Remedy sought to build a particular atmosphere that could be felt throughout the entire game.

“We didn’t want to create a wall-to-wall horror experience,” he explains. “We wanted to bring in other elements. There are majestic vistas in the Pacific Northwest. You [visit] small towns. There are daytime scenes. There is quirky humor. There are big personalities you get to meet.”

“I feel that, if anything, having these moments, having humor in there makes you like the world, makes you like the characters,” Lake says. “And then when everything is plunged into horror, it makes it even more scary. And you don't have a chance to get numb to it, but rather … because we change the atmosphere around you depending on the situation, then the horror can keep on being fresh through the whole experience.”

That quirky humor is a hallmark of Remedy’s work. Even within the darkest or most perilous moments of its past games, absurdity and wry, often metatextual, jokes are threaded throughout. The approach to tone calls to mind the gallows humor of fellow Scandinavian artists who find comedy within the most unflinching explorations of life, from the comedic moments in otherwise bleak films by Denmark’s Thomas Vinterberg, say, or the novels of Norway’s Erlend Loe.

Lake agrees that Remedy’s Finnish culture has informed its approach to tone. He says that the studio has “always been drawing from certain things that are very familiar to us and our culture, while still very actively drawing a lot of inspiration from American popular culture and that being the setting.”

“Tonally, you know, we are outsiders looking in and doing our own interpretation of it,” he adds.

Alan Wake II, which is set entirely within the United States, continues this tradition. It features the return of Control’s idiom-spouting Finnish janitor Ahti, played by actor Martti Suosalo. One of the game’s central locations, the small town of Watery, was founded by Finnish immigrants a century before the game begins. Finnish actor Peter Franzén portrays twin brothers Ilmo and Jaakko Koskela, who create TV advertisements for their many Watery-based businesses, from a coffee-focused theme park to a brand of beer meant to be enjoyed the Finnish way (covering your genitals in a sauna, for instance, or at home on the couch). Lake says the team has “purposefully drawn certain elements from Finnish folklore” in the Wake games’ take on the supernatural aspects of its folk horror. Rather than hiding its cultural identity, Remedy embraces it in a way that makes its work distinct and is all too rare in mainstream video games.

“Maybe there’s an aspect to it that, growing older, you start to appreciate your own culture more and more,” Lake suggests. “In Control, Ahti’s character certainly was, to me, a certain kind of a mental breakthrough. I wanted to do this quirky Finnish character that [embodies] a certain stereotype of a Finnish man, bringing those aspects in. Ahti turned out to be hugely popular. People love him and feel that he’s very unique.”

While Ahti and other characters from past Remedy games return in Alan Wake II, the game still manages to feel like both a departure from its past work and a continued refinement of concepts the studio has been exploring since the mid-’90s. The successful culmination, in Wake II, of each of its previous games’ horror influences demonstrates that the studio’s willingness to approach familiar concepts in original ways can yield exceptional results. In this sense, Lake’s comments on the ways the game continues to center another of his preoccupations—stories regarding doubles, doppelgängers, and mirrored worlds—provide insight into the cumulative efforts of a well-established studio.

“I feel that there are aspects and symbols and themes that are very, very interesting to me, and I tend to gravitate toward and keep finding new sides and new interesting things around them,” Lake says. “It doesn’t feel to me like, well, this subject, it’s now done and explored and there is nothing more to say about it. Quite the contrary. It seems that there is a possibility to keep on digging deeper.”