In the first playable moments of Alan Wake 2, you control a naked, balding, middle-aged man stumbling in confusion around a forest. After a few seconds of staring at his hairy butt while I guided him around, it dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be your typical big-budget videogame.
Even by Remedy’s own quirky standards, Alan Wake 2 is idiosyncratic. You could call it self-indulgent, even, as it dives headfirst into its every strange idea. Weaving a winkingly meta journey through all corners of the studio’s lore, at times it feels like watching Remedy get high off its own fumes. Which is exactly what makes it so entrancingly brilliant.
The game picks up 13 years after writer Alan Wake’s disappearance at the end of the first game, following both his continuing attempts to escape the mysterious Dark Place—a dimension of psychological nightmare—and the investigations of new protagonist Saga Anderson, an FBI agent sent to the backwoods town of Bright Falls to find the culprits behind a series of ritual murders. You play as both characters, each following their own story threads that parallel and
