![]() ![]() This element felt like one of the cornerstones of the whole experience, and it requires a fair amount of common sense and concentration. ![]() Doing this helps unlock story pieces and generally helps you understand where to go next. It's a nice little mental puzzle each time, and to prevent you from waywardly pinning things on the board at random like someone who wears a tinfoil hat, the game offers some subtle guidance about what goes where. Saga Anderson can mentally retreat to the "Mind Place," which looks like an actual large office complete with a filing cabinet and giant case board, where Saga can arrange clues she finds under certain categories tied to the case. Of the many gameplay elements I encountered within the respective missions of these two characters, one stood out the most: the ability of each to travel to a "place" within their own mind in real time (meaning don't do this while you're fighting) to organize and assemble the narrative pieces around them and build a path forward.īoth places are specially tailored to their characters. He's trying to stay alive, keep his sanity, and find his way out. Alan Wake, unfortunately, is stuck in a - dimension, I'd say - called the Dark Place and has been for a really long time. Anderson is a prodigiously talented FBI profiler investigating a manuscript page and some brutal happenings involving a cult that eventually lead her to a town (it feels like a village in size) named Watery. Our playtime was divided into two sessions, each featuring a different character: Saga Anderson and Alan Wake. but now we're going to get some Resident Evil, some A24-style horror and some "True Detective." Sure, there's still going to be that Twin Peaks, Stephen King-adjacent creative umami that makes a Remedy game what it is. Lake alluded to that tonal pivot opening a variety of doors that the designers were pretty eager to walk through. One of the other key takeaways Lake and the panel expounded on dealt with tone: While the original Alan Wake was a dark, oddball mystery action game, its sequel will lean into the elements of survival horror. That's about as on-the-nose an acknowledgement as one can get about the ties, however tight or loose, that bind Remedy's other games to the Alan Wake canon. who will be playing an agent from the Federal Bureau of Control. I feel like those games were preparing us for the mental storm that would be Alan Wake 2 - which we got to check out with other media folks at a recent hands-on event in Los Angeles.īefore the playing session, there was a panel discussion that included Lake and several of the actors you'll see in the game, including the combo of Ilkka Villi/Matthew Porretta (Alan Wake), Melanie Liburd (new character Saga Anderson), Shawn Ashmore (Tim Breaker here, but who was the protagonist Jack Joyce in Quantum Break) and a very game Janina Gavankar. Titles like Quantum Break and especially Control - one of my favorite games ever - have kept the door to the Alan Wake-verse (Wake's World?) ajar for the past few years. It helped make whatever Remedy did an event release. It was a portal into the collective mind of Sam Lake and Remedy, and it touched on energy we'd been seeking since the first Max Payne - and people were here for it. It's been 13 years since the release of Alan Wake, which squeezed the mind and senses while carrying out the amazing task of turning a bestselling author into an avenger against the dark and supernatural. Little did I realize that we were witness to the dawn of a signature mind-bending, freaky-fun miniverse from Remedy. I didn't have the benefit of context, but I had the feeling I was playing something that needed a living room, good sound, and time. That's an uphill battle for a dude in a tweed jacket shining a flashlight on people and then shooting them with a pistol. This wasn't a game that seemed to fit on a show floor, crammed into a noisy space where wham-bang, instant-energy games typically exist. I remember getting some hands-on time with Alan Wake at an E3 ages ago, and my first impression was. ![]()
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