Inside Alan Wake 2, the strangest game of 2023: “They’re going to be like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”
After 2019’s Control became a breakout hit, Remedy’s creative director Sam Lake has returned with Alan Wake 2 – his strangest game yet.
We are on the London Underground, somewhere between Tottenham Court Road and God knows where. It is one of those all-in-one weather days. Freezing in Helsinki at 5am, dropping bags in a muggy Soho at midday, at an East London game convention in the late-afternoon sun. (His forest-green velvet suit may have been a mistake.) Writing books was Lake’s original plan. I ask if he’s ever thought about doing anything else. Before he can answer, we are bustled off at our stop.
Games
Inside Alan Wake 2, the strangest game of 2023: “They’re going to be like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”
Sam Lake did not intend for any of this to happen. Thirty years making cult classic video games. Becoming the face of Max Payne. Adopting a new name. “It is all one big fucking detour,” he tells me.TRENDING VIDEO
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We are on the London Underground, somewhere between Tottenham Court Road and God knows where. It is one of those all-in-one weather days. Freezing in Helsinki at 5am, dropping bags in a muggy Soho at midday, at an East London game convention in the late-afternoon sun. (His forest-green velvet suit may have been a mistake.) Writing books was Lake’s original plan. I ask if he’s ever thought about doing anything else. Before he can answer, we are bustled off at our stop.
As creative director of Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment, Lake produces games that have a notoriously high-concept feel without the big budgets typically attached to cinematic single-player fare à la The Last of Us, Resident Evil and God of War. It has always been precarious – nigh on financially ruinous – to be an independent studio making technically and narratively ambitious games. It still is. This year alone, thousands of layoffs have hit studios such as the formerly impregnable Fortnite powerhouse, Epic. No games – especially not knowingly cerebral titles such as Remedy’s – are guaranteed moneymakers.
The studio has few analogues. One is Polish developer and The Witcher creator, CD Projekt Red – also
Games
Inside Alan Wake 2, the strangest game of 2023: “They’re going to be like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”
After 2019’s Control became a breakout hit, Remedy’s creative director Sam Lake realised he finally had a big audience for his weirdness. So he and the studio returned with Alan Wake 2, determined to make their strangest game yetBy Sam White
27 October 2023
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Sam Lake did not intend for any of this to happen. Thirty years making cult classic video games. Becoming the face of Max Payne. Adopting a new name. “It is all one big fucking detour,” he tells me.
TRENDING VIDEO
10 Things Andrew Garfield Can’t Live Without
We are on the London Underground, somewhere between Tottenham Court Road and God knows where. It is one of those all-in-one weather days. Freezing in Helsinki at 5am, dropping bags in a muggy Soho at midday, at an East London game convention in the late-afternoon sun. (His forest-green velvet suit may have been a mistake.) Writing books was Lake’s original plan. I ask if he’s ever thought about doing anything else. Before he can answer, we are bustled off at our stop.
As creative director of Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment, Lake produces games that have a notoriously high-concept feel without the big budgets typically attached to cinematic single-player fare à la The Last of Us, Resident Evil and God of War. It has always been precarious – nigh on financially ruinous – to be an independent studio making technically and narratively ambitious games. It still is. This year alone, thousands of layoffs have hit studios such as the formerly impregnable Fortnite powerhouse, Epic. No games – especially not knowingly cerebral titles such as Remedy’s – are guaranteed moneymakers.
The studio has few analogues. One is Polish developer and The Witcher creator, CD Projekt Red – also independent, also cutting edge, also outside the big development hubs of London and San Francisco. But while CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 cost upwards of £290 million to make, Remedy’s 2019 game Control was made with less than ten per cent of that. While Cyberpunk sold many millions more copies, its disastrous launch also required three years of fixes. Control received seven Game Awards nominations, was industry website IGN’s game of the year, and bagged a BAFTA for Finnish actor Martti Suosalo. Suosalo didn’t even know what a BAFTA was when Lake called to tell him the news.
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Remedy’s games are reminiscent of Brian Eno’s oft-quoted proclamation about the Velvet Underground: their debut album only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band. “I think it’s telling that so many stylistic flourishes from Remedy games have been adopted by other studios, but not quite equalled,” says Xalavier Nelson Jr, director of El Paso, Elsewhere. Nelson Jr’s indie darling paid homage to Remedy’s 2001 breakout hit, Max Payne, just this year. “Remedy works in the same genre and makes each expression of ideas feel new,” he tells me. “It’s the magic of video game development.”
It was the aftermath of Max Payne that led Remedy to Alan Wake. “It was the curse of the second album,” Lake tells me of its troubled road to development: “too much success, too fast.” It took the team two years just to nail the concepts, and a whole seven years passed without a Remedy game at all. When the game finally launched in 2010, Alan Wake told the story of a fictional writer who achieved huge success writing mass-market entertainment, but who wanted to create something deeper and more meaningful instead. It’s not a tricky metaphor to decipher. “He kills off his character. His cash cow,” says Lake. “And then suddenly, he can't write.”
Now 13 years after the original Alan Wake, the challenge of seamlessly blending film and game is greater than ever.
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This month, Remedy releases the sequel, Alan Wake 2. By all accounts, it should’ve happened sooner. The original stood askance to an era of hypermasculine, militaristic shooters and was (sort of) celebrated as such, becoming the most pirated game of 2010. Microsoft was hungry for a sequel, and loved Lake’s plan to bring more TV elements into the next game. There were even concepts for Alan Wake 3. But there was one stipulation: Microsoft wanted to buy the franchise rights, just as Take-Two and Rockstar had done years ago for Max Payne. Rather than lose control over Alan Wake, Remedy made Quantum Break: a big-thinking game that debuted to mixed reviews and middling sales on the beleaguered Xbox One.
Even by Remedy’s standards, Wake 2 is its most off-the-wall creation to date: a dual-protagonist supernatural horror, with live action blended with gameplay, custom songs inspired by Lake’s poetry, and cameos from a bizarro back catalogue of characters. “Coming back to it, I felt that there's almost been this kind of a dare,” says Lake as we arrive at Nopi, a laid-back Ottolenghi joint he likes to return to whenever he is in town. “I'm gonna just push this thing as far as I can.”
Half of the game feels like a forgotten season of True Detective – all VHS grime and ram skulls. It sees FBI agent Saga Anderson investigating a series of ritualistic murders in the misty Pacific Northwest. The other half has flavours of Taxi Driver and David Fincher’s Seven. In it, the game’s second lead, author Alan, is lost in a nightmarish version of New York called The Dark Place. “It's a story about reality versus imagined,” says Lake. “About who we believe we are and who we discover we are. Two people and two worlds that feel like opposites, but start to reflect each other.”
Those mirrors, inversions and dualities are everywhere. Light and dark. Up and down. Urban and rural. Man and woman. Wake 2 levels up its storytelling – from twists on classic tropes, such as physical manifestations of a plot board (in Alan’s world) and mind palace (in Saga’s), to live-action segments infused throughout. Its story is also supremely malleable: play whichever character you want, and the game will reshape itself until you reach its finale. “We have tried to be ambitious and move games as a medium forward in basically all aspects,” says codirector Kyle Rowley. “Not just one or two elements, but everything.”
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