Alan Wake 2 takes GTA 5’s character switching to a weird new place

From its off-the-books detectives to its time-hopping plots, Remedy Entertainment has a storied history of breaking the rules. Of Alan Wake 2, the upcoming survival horror game with two protagonists and an unusual double story, creative director Sam Lake and his team wanted to continue the tradition. And it has been proven to be a tricky process.

“We get out of our comfort zone in so many ways,” Lake says as he sits in a New York coffee shop as the rain beats against the windows. The night before, he sat down with horror director Mike Flanagan at Tribeca Festival 2023 to talk about the nerve-racking process of writing a horror story where the player has so much control. “I’ve been out of breath on the way. I think there was a pent up drive to just push everything forward. With the depth and layers of the story – how it’s built up and how big it is…” Swimming pantomimes in the lake. “I feel like my feet haven’t touched the bottom.”

It’s been 13 years – in both the real world and Alan Wake’s – since the first game ended with the titular novelist trapped in the Dark Place, an ethereal, never-ending nightmare landscape of time loops and evil enemies. Not wanting players to “do homework” before playing the sequel, Lake and game director Kyle Rowley came up with the idea of ​​a two-protagonist cast early on. Saga Anderson is an FBI agent sent to investigate disturbances in the Pacific Northwest and is the ideal deputy for newcomers and veterans alike. She has as many questions about the world (and the ways it has changed) as players do. Based on what we saw of her half of the story at Summer Game Fest last week, we’re already being strongly reminded of it Resident Evil 4 And Real detective season 1, which also saw law enforcement officers investigating occult murders in the countryside.

The other side of Alan Wake 2‘s narrative coin, in which players explore the Dark Place and try to escape as the haunted novelist, takes the form of an ominous, surreal New York. Lake told Flanagan that Cab driver served as a major influence on Wake’s sinister journey. “The neon-y, borderline gothic vibes” of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece captures the urban isolation that Wake, as a New Yorker himself, sought in his in-universe crime novels. “As a child I breathed American pop culture, and New York was the beating heart of it.”

However, we have already seen games with multiple playable characters. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty threw the audience all the way back in 2001 when it introduced Raiden after just two hours in Solid Snake’s shoes. The original Assassin’s Creed kept current chapters and second protagonist a secret until launch day. Grand Theft Auto 5 the idea of ​​multiple playable characters almost exploded in 2013, allowing players to jump between Michael, Franklin, and Trevor at will; crucially, however, they had to develop the men’s individual storylines into simultaneous “plot gates” before they could move forward.

Alan Wake 2 is an attempt at something different: a dual story where the player can not only jump between characters on a whim, but also see through one character’s story almost to the end – without switching back to the other at all.

“Once you’ve unlocked both characters, you don’t have to go back to the other until very late in the game, if you don’t want to,” says Lake. “In any game, you put the pace largely in the hands of the player. [With Alan Wake 2], we wanted to go much further. You are free to choose, once we open it, which side of the story you pursue, and how far. They are connected. There’s a lot of foreshadowing, a lot of mirroring between each other. They kind of float next to each other.”

Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing

Lake says players can even investigate midway through and abandon missions if they get stuck, then come back hours later to find things where they left them. In the vein of several recent role-playing games, Anderson, as the “brilliant criminal profiler,” has access to a metaphorical “Mind Place.” This takes the form of a room, complete with clues, photos, leads, and red thread, that players can enter whenever they want. However, it’s best to do this when the FBI agent is in a safe area – time will pass normally outside of the Mind Place, meaning nearby enemies are free to do as they please.

“Sometimes you see some sort of vision in a character’s playthrough and have absolutely no idea what it means,” says Lake, shaking his head and raising his hands. “Then you play the game again and jump between the characters more often, or you stay with one character for a longer period of time, and that same vision makes a little more sense. As players, and actually as people, we are always trying to find meaning. And that’s the idea we’re trying to evoke here. It’s our longest game ever, and I’m sure players will make connections between Saga and Alan that we haven’t even fully considered yet. It is exciting.”