After over a decade since enjoying the first Alan Wake, and having recently played Control (about which I was very lukewarm), I was skeptical about Alan Wake II. A lot about taste can change in a decade, and so much about Remedy's most recent game rubbed me the wrong way.

I am really glad I gave this game a chance!

Alan Wake II totally nails the atmosphere and a bonkers layered story that somehow manages to be follow-able, with a cast of sympathetic characters who have a surprising amount of depth. The game is visually stunning and weaves between real-time in-engine rendering and "FMV" style cutscenes seamlessly -- it's the kind of thing you might expect to be jarring but it feels completely natural. The FMV cutscenes are truly something special and are probably my favorite part of this game.

And I won't spoil it, but the "Initiation 4" chapter is one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time.

Since I played Control very recently, I couldn't help but note the contrast in the character writing. Where Control's characters were (for the most part) boring, or in the case of Jesse, annoying as hell, Alan Wake II was a breath of fresh air. Alan and Saga are both characters I enjoyed getting to know better (and by the way, I have a hard time thinking of another game where you play as a mom). There's no "well THAT just happened"-style quips here.

Don't get me wrong, Alan Wake II is at least as bonkers (if not more so) as Control, and it's goofy as hell. But its characters take the world seriously, and I never felt like they were winking at the camera asking me to GET A LOAD OF THIS.

Despite my distaste of much of Control, I did enjoy the tie-ins to the FBC, and I'm intrigued to see where Remedy takes their expanded universe in the future.

The story feels like a bit of a pretzel - you get the gist of it through one playthrough, but there's so much going on here and it feels so layered that I could see a second playthrough being quite rewarding.

Now for the not-so-great, I do have a few complaints with the game.

Firstly, the gameplay isn't actually very fun. It's not BAD, it's just... pretty mid? Nothing very exciting, and the difficulty feels very off in my opinion. After a couple of hours I decided to turn the game down to "story" difficulty, expecting the fights to be trivial. Strangely, bosses still have a surprisingly large health pool on story mode and it's still pretty easy to die during a boss fight. The regular enemies can be taken down in 1 or 2 hits on story mode, which feels correct, but I'm not sure what's going on with the boss fights. It makes me wish they had included the granularity that Control's difficulty settings have. That said, I appreciate that combat isn't such a big part of this game.

As I said earlier, the game is visually very beautiful, but it's also very DARK. Combined with the fact that there isn't a mini-map (there is a map but it has to be opened full-screen), navigating some of the levels can be a little confusing, and I did get lost in some of the game's maze-like areas because of this.

My final bone to pick here is that the game is graphically demanding. I played on an RTX 3080, which is a pretty decent card, but even at 720p on the lowest settings (which still look amazing) my framerate dipped pretty regularly. It's a minor complaint for me because it was still completely playable but I really wish it hadn't been the case.

In the big picture though, I'm only taking a half star off for my complaints because I enjoyed it so much. Alan Wake II was a fascinating genre-mixing experience that does things I've never seen before in a video game, and it does them successfully.

I got the ultimate edition and I haven’t played the expansions yet so this will just cover the base game.

The vibes are so, so excellent. Honestly one of the coolest spaces to explore in a video game. Feels like a mix of The Backrooms, House of Leaves, and Annihilation. Extremely fucking cool.

Jesse’s powers feel awesome, but the gunplay is pretty generic. The difficulty balance feels off here too - even with all of the health upgrades it is extremely easy to die to normal enemies, and retrying those portions isn’t the fun part of the game. Also, enemies will respawn if you leave a room and come back which is very annoying.

There are various assists you can turn on in the settings to tweak the game difficulty, and honestly I should have at least turned on aim assist since I played on a controller. I can partly blame my own stubbornness and perfectionism here but the game also mildly shames you if you do turn on assists with something like “are you sure? Control was designed to be challenging” or some such, which left a bad taste.

Finding the bits of lore scattered around really adds to the experience, especially the videos and voice clips. Some of the side missions are also pretty interesting and sometimes funny.

….Which is good because Jesse is SO BORING. She’s basically a generic action hero with no emotions or personality except for that fact that she’s constantly talking to herself (sorry I mean Polaris) mostly in smarmy little quips. The rest of the cast is fine but also pretty boring, with the exception of Dr. Darling who really stands out.

The enemies themselves are also pretty boring! You mostly fight normal people who’ve been infected by The Hiss, so they mostly just look like kinda messed up humanoids and they all look approximately the same during combat. Weirdly you only really fight bosses if you do the side missions, but those are actually pretty cool and interesting.

Also “The Hiss” is a stupid name.

The actual story is fine. Didn’t hate it, didn’t love it. I kept waiting for there to be some twist that never happened, so I was a bit disappointed. The way the story is revealed tends to be by Jesse explaining what’s happening out loud and I frequently was like “how does she suddenly know this?”

Overall I enjoyed playing this but was disappointed on quite a few marks as well. I’d still recommend it if you want something super atmospheric or like supernatural stuff, and turn on assists if you get annoyed.

A gorgeous game with fun and rewarding gameplay. Feels like some kind of blend of Zelda and Dark Souls, in a very nice way.

The difficulty level is a bit inconsistent, but for the most part I found it to be a nice level of challenge. The game (almost) never feels unfair. The doors (checkpoints/portals) are frequent enough, and you don't lose anything from dying, so even sections where I was dying frequently didn't feel too frustrating.

Progressing feels great, when you unlock a shortcut there is a real feeling of accomplishment. The puzzles are not very difficult but are fun and engaging.

The reason I took off a half star is the final section of the game, which is a very long boss fight with multiple phases. It was a big difficulty spike and was very drawn out. I like what they were doing here in theory but I desperately wished for a checkpoint every couple of phases so I could stop redoing the same boss phases over and over.