Alan Wake 2 is one of the greatest games that I have ever played.
While that may seem like hyperbolic praise, just looking at its review ratings and awards will tell you that if I am excessive in my praise, it isn’t by much. The game’s reception among critics has been phenomenal. Its lowest rating, 7.75/10 is an outlier in a sea of 4/4’s, 4/5’s, 5/5’s, 9/10’s, and 10/10’s. At The Game Awards (the Oscars of video games) Alan Wake 2 won the awards for Best Art Direction, Best Narrative, and Best Game Direction. In other words, the game was recognize as having the most visually stunning and immersive world of any game in 2023, the most compelling, captivating, and intricate storyline of any game in 2023, and the most “visionary leadership that guided the game’s development to extraordinary heights,” of any game in 2023.
So, what makes this game so terrific? Well, there is a lot. More than I think that I have space or time to really delve into here. Consequently, I want to focus in on three aspects of the game that I believe demonstrate what makes it such a stellar game – first, its storytelling; secondly its gameplay; third, and especially apropos here, its use of ritual symbolism to create meaning. Then I will conclude with some final thoughts on why someone should play the game.
The Story
This story is a monster.
Alan Wake, a bestselling writer of hardboiled crime fiction, ends the first game, 2010’s Alan Wake, having saved his wife at the cost of himself being trapped in a hellish alternate reality he calls the Dark Place. Portrayed in both Alan Wake games as an ocean made of chaos and darkness that is connected to the real world through Cauldron Lake, the Dark Place is populated by a singular, nigh omnipotent intelligence which Wake calls the Dark Presence (the Presence hereafter.) A unique feature of this reality is that anything written (perhaps even simply imagined) becomes real within it. It has no form or meaning of its own and can become anything. The Presence wants to escape into our world in order to remake our world in the Presence’s own image. The problem is that while it can have a limited effect on the nature of our reality in the vicinity where the two realities touch, it cannot fully enter into our world and possess it without someone using focusing its limitless power to create into a means of escape for it. For this purpose, the Presence has essentially kidnapped Alan and brought him to its reality in order to drive him so insane that he will write a story that will allow the Presence to escape into our world.
Alan Wake 2 opens thirteen years later.
Two FBI agents, Alex Casey (who just happens to share a name and job with Wake’s famous detective novels protagonist) and Saga Anderson, have come to Bright Falls, Washington, the site of the first game’s events. They are investigating the grisly, ritualistic murder of former FBI agent Robert Nightingale, who has recently been found with his heart ripped from his chest. As Saga, one of the two player characters (Alan being the other), autopsies the body back in the morgue, it gets up and begins to attack everyone around it. From here, Saga is drawn deeper and deeper into a horror story that is becoming real, overwriting the reality she knows with the details of the story. Not only does she have to face the Taken, people and animals possessed by the Presence, but she has to watch is terror as the memories of those around her are transformed by the story as it deletes more and more of reality. Even as she fights her way through the different game arears, working to prevent the story from coming true, it begins to alter her life in horrific ways.
At the same time, Alan is trying to escape the Dark Place, a Jungian nightmare where Alan’s Shadow runs wild and his Personal Unconscious is given tangible form. Because the Dark Place changes to reflect the mind of those within it, the Dark Place looks like a section of the dirty, dangerous, and crime ridden New York that exists in Alan’s crime fiction (and hence his mind.) Alan is trying to escape while keeping the Presence trapped in its own dark dimension and he is having a hard time of it. The Presence may be nigh omnipotent but it is not omniscient. It doesn’t know where he is or what he is always doing. But it is constantly hunting for him, sending out its dark shadow people to find him, trap him, and break him (literally and metaphorically.) Whenever it finds him, the Presence robs Alan of his memories and tries to force him to write the story it wants written. As a result of the horror and constant alien monstrosity that Alan is forced to confront on an endless basis, he isn’t exactly sane either. Between bouts of near total amnesia and insanity, Alan is struggling to tell what is real, what isn’t, what he wrote, what the Presence wrote while manipulating him, and trying to escape the perditious hellscape that he is trapped within.
At times during the game, Saga and Alan communicate with each other through thresholds/overlaps, places where the space between human reality and the Dark Place is thin enough that signals can make their way across. These communications are imperfect and often lacking context, but they can take place. As Saga is drawn deeper into the horror story, she learns that it is the result of the story that Alan has been writing in the Dark Place to try and escape. They team up, working from either end, to frustrate the purposes of the Presence and save the idyllic town of Bright Falls along with the entire world.
Gameplay
The tough part is hiding the bodies.
The basic combat mechanics of the game are based around using light to drive away the shadows that shield the Taken from harm and then applying your conventional methods of extreme violence (pistols, crossbows, shotguns, rifles, etc.) to destroy them. You know, simple stuff that makes up the core combat mechanics of most survival horror games. There is also a significant element of inventory management here as well. Because all but one means to increase your inventory space is locked behind completing a series of side quests that expose you to an ever increasing number of extremely dangerous Taken, you may elect, as I did, to not try and complete the quests.
It isn’t that the side quests aren’t worth it – they give you some stronger weapons in addition to information that expands the lore of the setting. I found the lore around the Nursey Rhymes side quest to be particularly disturbing. The main challenge though is that your ammo and healing items (as well as space) are limited. It may not be worth it to you to expend the ammo and healing items necessary to kill all the Taken that you will encounter completing all the side quests. This means you will largely stuck with the limited amount of inventory space you start the game with which will necessitate careful iventory management.
While these elements are nothing new to the genre, they are done quite well in Alan Wake 2. The system tries to keep track of how much ammo you have for each weapon and only give you a specific amount. The same is true for healing items. As a result, there were times where item boxes, places that I should have been able to get ammo or health items, were completely empty. The game had decided that I had enough, whether I liked it or not. Consequently, that means that the contents of item boxes change with each playthrough and while you can memorize where items boxes are, you can’t always be sure it will have what you need or, if does, the ammo or healing items you want. You might, for example, be focused entirely on using the shotgun and end up getting pistol ammo. This makes it even more important to be careful of how you use your items when playing the game.
The dual protagonists introduces some very interesting game play mechanics and storytelling. Namely, you don’t have to play the game linearly any longer. You can play all of Alan’s parts until his side of the story gets to the endgame section while ignoring Saga’s almost entire. On the other hand, you could do the same with Saga’s story and play all her chapters while ignoring Alan’s almost entirely. Or, you could do nearly any combination of switching back and forth between the two characters, progressing their different chapters in whatever order that you choose. This means that you do not have to experience the story in the same way that you choose and you have a greater ability to participate in the story and game in the ways that you want.
One of the ways that the dual protagonists which you can switch between mechanic effects the game has to do with the Mind Place and Writer’s room. While Saga’s Mind Place detective mechanic (which allows you to organize evidence and analyze the motivations and answers of suspects) is very interesting, I think my favorite is the Writer’s Room mechanic that Alan uses. Don’t get be wrong, Saga’s Holmesian ability to deeply analyze different suspects alongside the evidence we have from investigating during the game is a lot of fun. But in the Writer’s Room you actively construct the story that Alan and Saga are experiencing. Metafictionally, this also means that you are playing with the structure of the story of the game that you are playing as well since the entire game is caused by the story Alan is trying to write to escape the Dark Place. As Alan explores different parts of the Dark Place, he comes across different storylines and settings that fit within the story which Alan hopes to use to free himself and Saga from the horror story while also saving the world.
Each setting has multiple story hooks which you can use to transform the setting. And even the ones that don’t progress the story usually still have some interesting effect. For example, one of the earlier settings has Alan needing to alter a setting within a subway line. One of the story hooks that doesn’t work has to do with the death of an FBI agent. If you call this story hook up, you won’t progress the story, but you will manifest a Walkie-Talkie that belonged to the FBI agent over which you will hear him being sacrificed by a dark cult that may or may not be serving the Presence.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the way that Alan Wake 2 combines a whole host of media to create a new gaming experience for the player.
To quote The Washington Post’s video game reviewer Gene Park:
“Alan Wake 2” isn’t just a video game, it’s also episodes of a late-night talk show, a jubilant rock opera, an anthology of cheap, local TV commercials, a book’s rough draft, a serial network TV show, an art house short film, a tell-all memoir and a concept pop album. The game argues that everything, from advertising to subway signs, is art, and it matters in our world, regardless of how we pay heed.
…Today with mass media, literary and cultural archetypes like the “hard-boiled cop” or “protective mother heroine” (both of which “Alan Wake 2” employs in its two lead characters) hum in the back of our minds and memories, like an old TV jingle or nursery rhyme. “Alan Wake 2” interrogates how these ideas come into existence, how they flood our head space through media, how they change us and how we change them.
Like stanzas in a poem, chapters in a James Joyce novel, or verses of a surrealist Bob Dylan song, all these disparate moving parts and media formats complete each other’s meaning so thoroughly that this game can only exist and be consumed in totality. Even the sections with interpretive dance (yes, that’s here too) drip heavy with meaning and metaphor.
…Within “Alan Wake 2’s” sometimes impenetrable imagery is an obvious truth: Video games can encompass every form of art, and the act of creativity, no matter its shape or form, can lodge itself into our hearts and minds and never leave. It is about the untapped potential of the medium and the pains it takes to create such a piece. I’m reminded of a quote by legendary French filmmaker and critic François Truffaut: “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.” Here is something that houses both ambitions, a game of enormous depth, wit and passion. Remedy Entertainment created the game industry’s most vital work of 2023.
‘Alan Wake 2’ is the best, most creative game of the year
Meaning Making
This is the ritual to lead you on.
Theologian Dr. Frank H. Gorman, Jr. explained the nature and purpose of ritual:
Rituals are the performances of the members of a society and may be seen as their attempt to enact a meaningful order in human life. The social situation is the stage on which these performances take place and reflects in its own structure the cultural order – systems of meanings and the symbols that serve as carriers of those meanings. Rituals are thus means of holding back social confusion, indeterminacy, and chaos because they provide patterns for enacting an ordered existence. In this way, rituals regulate societal order by giving normative patterns for enacting and ordered existence. In this way, rituals regulate societal order by giving normative patterns for maintaining order and constructive patterns for restoring that order when it has been lost. As such, ritual is a performed an enacted system of meaning.
The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time and Status in the Priestly Theology, pg. 29
It is in the living of rituals in our lives that people derive individual meaning, discover purpose, and bring order to society. Rituals defeat chaos and bring order to the individual life as well as the communal life. Society is impossible without rituals to create and enact the shared identity that brings the society together. And it is through participation in ritual that chaos is defeated, order brought into existence, and harmony maintained.
Ritual, thus, becomes a means by which humans participate in the ongoing order of creation. Their existence is made meaningful as they participate in the never-ending drama of creation in ritual. This is why ritual must function as a means of ‘manipulating’ the orders of creation. It is the means by which the categories of ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ can be negotiated. Ritual thus must be seen as the enactment of the world — it is the bringing into being and the continuation of the order of creation.
Ritual becomes a means of interaction with the world and cosmos.
…Ritual was not only a way of acting, it was also a way of thinking, speaking, and creating.
The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time and Status in the Priestly Theology, pgs. 231, 234
The pattern of water as a symbol for chaos and the power of ritual to to defeat chaos and create order be seen no more dramatically than in the biblical account of Creation:
When God began to create the sky and the earth, the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and He called the darkness “night.” Evening came and then morning: the first day.
Then God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters, separating water from water.” So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse “sky.” Evening came and then morning: the second day.
Genesis 1: 1-9, HCSB. Utilized alternate translation found in footnote d.
Before the beginning, everything was darkness, chaos, and empty – which is not to say that there wasn’t stuff, but that this stuff was formless and without meaning. This chaos was the abode of cosmic evil and, as Asaph the Psalmist explains, it was by this act of creation that God conquered and banished the evil monsters of chaos:
God my King is from ancient times,
Psalm 74: 12-14, HCSB
performing saving acts on the earth.
You divided the sea with Your strength;
You smashed the heads of the sea monsters in the waters;
You crushed the heads of Leviathan;
You fed him to the creatures of the desert.
And God does this through ritual incantation, by speaking. Notice the repetition in Genesis 1 of God saying, “Let there be…” to see the ritual pattern. By His Word the darkness is rebuked by light, chaos is sundered as symbolized by the separation of waters, the monsters and evils of chaos are crushed, and order begins to come to existence.
It is also no accident that all four New Testament Gospels record the story of Jesus walking on water. It isn’t merely a cool trick that Jesus could do to display His power. By walking on water, Jesus was displaying for His Apostles that He, as Jehovah Incarnate, had absolute power over the chaos that the waters represented. He was identifying Himself as the God of Genesis 1 to the Apostles in a manner that would have been unmistakable to them. Through His power He had defeated chaos and its proper place was literally beneath Him. And, as He showed Peter, He can give us that same power to conquer chaos as well. Likewise, when John records seeing blood and water expelled from the side of Jesus when He was stabbed while hanging upon the cross (John 19:34), John is not simply giving us a medical explanation for the cause of Jesus’s death (a literal broken heart.) John is also telling his readers that Jesus, through His Sacrificial Atonement, was able to defeat and expel sin (the blood) and chaos (the water) from the lives of His disciples forever.
The point summarized: Ritual conquers chaos. This truth is one of the most fundamental aspects of the story of Alan Wake 2. This is more evident in Alan’s storyline than Saga’s, but it is essential to both.
The first quest that the player completes as Saga is to perform a ritual that will open an Overlap so that she can face the monster inside, defeat it, and find out more information about who (or what) is creating Taken. In order to do this, she has to place the heart of a sacrificed victim (whose murder she is investigating) in a specific location related to the Presence and speak a specific incantation which sacrifices the heart to the Presence. Then the Overlap opens and she can go in. Twice more during her storyline, Saga has to complete these elaborate rituals in order to enter the Overlap, find out needed information, rescue people, fight monsters, and communicate with Alan in the Dark Place.
In addition these rituals, as you explore the large open areas that Saga is in you discover Nursery Rhyme rituals. The rituals are being created by a scientist, a Dr. Campbell of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC). The FBC is a governmental agency tasked with investigating, preventing, and protecting humanity against paranatural events or entities, such as the kind that are taking place in the video game. Campbell has been experimenting with the reality warping effects that take place around the town of Bright Falls. He has been doing this by having an unknown young girl write nursery rhymes which are actually incantations and recording what happens when these incantations are fulfilled. While he has had limited success you, as Saga, complete the rituals and alter reality. The results are usually a charm which gives you some special effect – such as granting more health, making you faster, or even rescuing you from death. But there is a cost.
When you call upon the ability of the Dark Presence to alter reality, as Campbell is inexpertly and unknowingly doing, you invite it or its agents into reality. This effect becomes worse the less complete and more holes in the story that exist. The more holes in the story, the more power the Presence is able to leak into our reality to alter it to be like its own. As a result, when the incantations are completed by the player, Saga gets an item that gives her a bonus but she almost always has to fight Taken in order to get it. Completing the simplistic nursery rhyme ritual provides a way for the Presence to leak an aspect of itself into our world and Saga now has to confront it.
Leak, by the way, is the optimum word here. As mentioned previously, the Dark Place is portrayed as an ocean made of chaos and darkness into which Alan is falling deeper and deeper as he goes crazier and crazier. Whether purposeful or not, this presentation of the Dark Place hearkens back to the biblical presentation of existence before Creation, not as a void in the Norse myths but as a place of oceanic discord what must be ordered through the act of language driven Creation. The connection to the biblical pre-Creation chaos is made explicit in the This House of Dreams poems, a collection of side media connected to Alan Wake and Remedy’s other in-universe games.
In Poem 12 the author, Thomas Zane (an important character in Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2 for his connections to the story and Dark Place), describes the Dark Place using biblical ideas:
E can’t see it. He’s view is too narrow, limited. It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean, darkness before the act of creation, before the Big Bang, darkness upon the face of the deep, upon the face of the waters, before light, before the primeval atom, before the word, before THE POEM.
More Shoebox Poems, see the handwritten note on image 4.
The Dark Place then is a place where Creation has not taken place. It is the primordial chaos from before God spoke order into existence in a poetic manner. The Dark Place is therefore the pandemonium where monsters rule. And can anyone deny that the Dark Presence is anything other than a monster? Without order the Dark Place is antithetical to life itself and it appears that only the Dark Presence has developed within it and all other life has kidnapped from the real world through Cauldron Lake. As a place of all-possibilities at once, i.e. chaos, it can be shaped and remade by those within it, but only if they have a strong enough will and only if they know how to create in a way that won’t give the Dark Presence the power to change their story for its purposes.
This ties directly into at the larger problem that faces Alan as he is trying to escape the Dark Place through his story. He can’t simply write, “And then I escaped and lived happily ever after. The End,” because such an abrupt and unearned ending would leave too many plot holes through which the Presence could continue to invade and assault our reality. Given such opportunities it would eventually find someone else weaker than Alan who would fit its purposes and unleash it wholly upon our reality. The whole story has to work as a singular act of creation, a complete tale within its own genre and come to a happy ending in order for Alan to escape and the Presence to be defeated. Which brings us to the rituals that Alan is using to try and free himself and save the world – his story.
I was sort of fibbing earlier when I implied that there is less ritual in Saga’s storyline than Alan’s storyline. There is actually more ritual in Saga’s story, but that only becomes evident much later in the game. Near the end of the game you discover that Saga’s storyline is Alan’s ritual coming into existence and reordering existence to make his escape from the Dark Place and the defeat of the Dark Presence into reality.
Alan is trapped in a dimension of primordial chaos, assaulted on all sides by the monsters and horrors living in the unbroken darkness, trying to maintain his sanity, and find some way to escape so that he can reunited with his wife again. And how does he assert control of the chaos of the Dark Place, where anything can happen and nothing has form? Alan does it through the logos, through the power of the word. His storyline consists of you travelling into the Dark Place, which now looks like a setting from Alan’s novels, to force it to conform to the story that Alan has written which, once completed, will form the ritual by which he will defeat the Presence and lock it away in its own reality, freeing him to return home. As he does so, the Presence fights back by trying to seize control of the ritual by taking possession of Alan and forcing him to unknowingly write a horror story that will liberate the Presence and ensure it is able to invade our world.
As you transverse the Dark Place, Alan’s story take on more and more of the form of a ritual. Certain aspects of it are repeated every time you start a new chapter. You find literal Words of Power that enhance your abilities. As you enter new areas in the game you fit them within the plot of the story that you are building. The story is about a cult carrying out a dark ritual to summon Scratch (Alan’s chaotic evil double/id run rampant and a euphemism for the Devil himself) and by writing the story (and trying to edit it where the Presence has corrupted it) Alan is taking the utter chaos of the Dark Place and through ritual language and repetition is forcing the Dark Place, is forcing chaos, into a definitive form that can be combated, defeated, and overcome. Alan is forcing the Dark Place to become the Leviathan so that he can crush its skulls in. This story also constitutes the basis for Saga’s storyline as she is combating a cult, the Cult of the Tree, which is turning people into Taken in service of the Dark Place. Saga’s defeating of the Taken is Alan’s crushing of the Monster of the Dark Deep.
Thus, both stories really constitute one great ritual by which to defeat the Dark Place and its Dark Presence, to defeat the primordial chaos through the power of artistic ritual creation.
The apogee of this for me is the Dark Ocean Summoning scene in Saga’s storyline. (Lyrics video here, if you’re interested.) Avoiding as many spoilers as I can, during this scene a live production of the song Dark Ocean Summoning is performed by The Old Gods of Asgard. The band members themselves have ritually become the gods of Asgard through their musical performances and the assumption of new/old cultic names – Odin, Tor, and Balder. The setting of the performance is evocative as it takes place within the dark tidal waves of Cauldron Lake at night. The lake is the the place where “our” reality ouches the reality of the Dark Place as crossing between the two is possible. Its inky black waters and the deep starless night conjure the image of the primordial Nightless Night that existed before Creation occurred. So prepared in the perfect place to invoke the Dark Place, the Old Gods begin to play.
As the music rages, Dark Ocean Summoning is used by Saga and her allies to ritually transform the ocean of darkness that is the Dark Place into Cauldron Lake so that can be transversed by Alan, allowing him to escape the Dark Place and come back into our world. The song calls Alan from “the city of dreams” – his version of New York in the Dark Place – and banishes the lies that label him a “Servant of Night” – rebuking the Dark Presence’s attempts to possess him and corrupt him – and calls upon Alan to “come save your soul…new and whole” from the damage done to it by the Dark Presence. The ritual’s ultimate purpose is to summon Alan by name and return him “to the Light.” In addition to an utterly epic power metal song, it is a stunning display of the power of ritual to conquer chaos through the power of words to create and order the universe.
For my Latter-day Saint readers, the ritual echoes here should be interesting. The idea of ritually assuming a new name and identity, as Odin and Tor do, and then reenacting that identity through a visual and audio presentation that features the defeat of chaos through creation and ritual action (including standing, speaking, and dress) should all sound and feel very familiar.
Final Thoughts
Alan Wake 2 isn’t just a video game. It is a work of art. And by being so, it demonstrates the power of video games to utilize multiple forms of media at once to produce not just interactive experiences, but interactive artistic experiences. It has earned every accolade heaped upon it and far more. The gameplay is fun and perfect for the game. There is depth to the story and its symbolism that will richly reward those who plumb its depths. The music is absolutely incredible. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack on repeat since completing the game. And at 25+ hours, you really get your money’s worth. It really is everything that makes a game no just into something you play, but something you experience.
It is well worth the purchase.
And with that, I think its time that I started it all over again.