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Alan Wake 2’s Gamescom trailer finally takes us to the Dark Place
C
Craig Pearson
Alongside the release date reveal, new footage showed off the Dark Place—the horrific world that Alan has been trapped in all these years—and the powerful gaming technology that puts him and us there. So while we wait for the next chapter of his story to unfold, here’s everything we learned about Alan Wake 2 at Gamescom 2023.
It’s more than a game
We’ve finally seen where Alan Wake has been trapped all these years. Since the ending of the original Alan Wake, in which Alan sacrificed himself to keep the Dark Presence from spreading, he’s been trapped in the Dark Place. The realm has the power to turn fiction into reality, which is not a good place for a horror writer to be. Alan has been there for 13 years, attempting to write his way out.
The trailer begins with a few glimpses of a rain-slicked New York that shows off the wider world that Alan’s created. The city was his home before his disastrous move to the haunted town of Bright Falls. We see a real-world Alan hammering away at a typewriter in a wooden room, trying to stop himself from turning into both the victim and the monster of the story that’s trapped him in its clutches
What sort of world has he crafted? We got our first extended look at it during Gamescom through a new trailer that mixes live-action with gameplay footage—it's so interwoven that it's pretty hard to work out what’s real and what’s not. The big reveal was that the footage forms part of the game itself, and it’s not just a conceit for the trailer. There are extensive live-action sequences in Alan Wake 2, and it moves slickly between in-game content and this real-life video.
In the trailer, Alan’s doppelgänger bursts into the room and draws a gun; then, the trailer cuts to in-game footage of Alan watching live-action footage of himself on a TV show called “In Between With Mr. Door." He’s pitching his book Initiation, which is the story of a fictional writer who is trapped in a nightmare, desperately trying to recover the manuscript of a novel he’s forgotten he’s written. At this point, we wouldn’t be surprised if the entire text of that book is somewhere to be found in the game.
In a final montage of surreal imagery, the camera weaves between game footage and the real-world footage in surprising ways. Any time Alan looks at himself on a screen, it’s as if he’s looking across realities from the virtual to the real, and the camera zooms in and across the boundaries to take the viewer with it. An in-game projector screen shows the player-controlled Alan looking at real footage of himself, before cutting hard into the screen. It puts us in Alan’s shoes. It's no wonder he looks so confused all the time; watching this trailer is enough to make anyone want to have a lie-down in a dark place.
The Dark Place is New York via Bright Falls
In IGN’s footage of the game, we see him exploring Caldera Subway Station; in the original Alan Wake, he visits Cauldron Lake, which is the caldera of an ancient volcano. They say you should write what you know, and Alan has combined his own home city with the town that swallowed him up and trapped him.
As Alan patrols the streets, looking for a route back home, he can go deeper into the darkness, using a powerful flashlight that swaps between the dimensions in his own dream world. Shadows wraiths swarm him in the deeper, darker New York, like the creatures he fought off in the original game. He has to move between worlds in order to bypass obstacles—for example, entering a subway stop requires him to step from one reality with a garbage clogged entrance to one where everything is clear. It’s all a dream, but it has rules that we’ve yet to fully discover.
Lighting so good you’ll think it's real
One of the reasons it’s so hard to tell the real-world footage from the in-game footage is because Alan Wake 2 looks so damn good. Lighting is more than a game mechanic—remember, Alan fights off literal darkness with a flashlight—it also creates a level of immersion that only Remedy can strike.
Alan Wake 2 was chosen as a showcase for NVIDIA DLSS 3.5, in particular the ray-traced graphics that push the lighting to levels that, at first glimpse, can be mistaken for real-world imagery. Such immaculate lighting can come at a performance cost, but NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 as a whole will also boost performance, as you can see in their trailer.
Remember, Remedy’s previous game in their connected universe, Control, was also a showcase for early ray-tracing technology. Lighting figures heavily into their games, both as a mechanic and a core visual aspect.
Not long now
Our previous look at the game feels like it was a lifetime ago, but we’re now closing in on the release date. Check out first look at Alan Wake 2, which showcased the new player character, FBI Special Agent Saga Anderson, and the new Mind Palace mechanic that allows players to explore clues and make connections in the investigation.
Alan Wake 2 is available for pre-purchase now on the Epic Games Store.