One of my most cherished childhood memories was the whole experience of falling in love with gaming. They say that nothing in life is perfect until you fall in love with them, and that’s precisely how I felt, holding that controller in hand for the first time.
It doesn’t matter how many years have passed when I think of what gaming is for me; it’s being a little girl, lying on the world’s most scratchy carpet in my parent’s house, sticky controller in hand, and the feeling of loving something so completely that everything else in my life just faded away in comparison.
In the years since, I’ve been a sort of gaming addict, just chasing that first high in search of a game that had that same magnetic pull on my soul. Now, falling back into the moment was never part of the plan when I picked up Alan Wake 2, but that’s precisely what happened.
Don’t get me wrong, I love and hate loads of games – something I’m sure anyone who’s read any of my reviews is well aware of. At any given moment, there are games I can’t believe are even allowed to exist, and then there are games I can’t imagine living without.
However, loving something and falling in love are two very different things, and for me, playing Alan Wake 2 felt like falling off of an impossibly high building.
There were no warning signs or time to register what had happened. It was something entirely out of my control at the moment, a thrill-inducing rollercoaster I had to see through until I forgot I was falling.
The story is set thirteen years after author Alan Wake’s wife went missing from the small two of Bright Falls. Alan finds himself trapped inside a Dark Place that even he can’t write himself out of. Coincidently, I can’t put down into words just how incomparable the game is to anything else I’ve played.
At any given moment in life, we have two options. We can either step forward into the unknown or step back into safety. While both choices have merits, and there is something to be said for the comfort of the familiar, especially in the gaming space, stepping into the unknown is where the magic lies and man, oh man, does Alan Wake 2 use this to its advantage.
Alan Wake 2 is many things all at once. It’s a serious investigation game and a show-stopping musical with its own band, Old Gods of Asgard. It’s also a single-player adventure game that seamlessly shifts from a slow-burning type of psychological terror to a high-octane and frantic survival-horror action game.
Visually, the game combines gorgeously rendered graphics with striking, full-motion video to keep your eyes engaged and delighted about what’s unfolding and then, when you think it couldn’t possibly offer anything else, it’s also a sort of interactive album filled with the most amazingly haunting tracks that are just the culmination of every note that Alan Wake 2 hits so perfectly.
They say that time is relevant, and that’s never been more apparent to me than while playing Alan Wake 2. While the game is only 17 hours long, yet, it somehow felt like a lifetime and a passing moment all at once.
But one thing that the game never was, even for a fraction of a second, was confusing, despite being one of the most intricate stories I’ve ever unravelled, and I read all of the Dark Tower books.
Make no mistake, Alan Wake 2 is a horror game down to its bones. However, what the game does right is expertly bring together two very conflicting types of horror.
What starts in the present day with FBI Agent Saga Anderson being dispatched to the small lakeside town to investigate the latest victim in a series of ritualistic slaughters soon deepens when Alan Wake washes up onto the shore of Cauldron Lake, rambling about the Dark Place, surprised to learn that he’s been missing for the past 13 years.
I genuinely believe that love and horror go hand in hand because falling in love is one of the most terrifying things we can do. It’s not an act of will or even a conscious choice, and yet, every day, all around the world, people fall in love and welcome the fear and pain that goes alongside it.
And it’s in this state of confusion-based reality that Alan Wake 2 shines. After a while, the game’s perspective shifts back and forth between Saga’s search for the truth in Bright Falls and Alan’s desperate attempts to escape from the supernatural hellscape that is Dark Place, with both stories bleeding more and more into each other until they lead into one of the most well-crafted endings in video game memory.
It’s the in contrast that exists between the lakeside shores of Bright Falls, filled with stunning sunsets, glorious forests and the allure of small-time life and the neon-soaked New York plaza setting of Alan’s Dark Place that the game stands out from anything I’ve played before.
Alan Wake 2 is to the video game horror genre what Rocky Horror Picture Show was to film. The real horror isn’t in the obvious. Instead, it’s in the game’s rich atmosphere, haunting soundtrack, branching narrative, your imagination and the realisation that it will all be over before you know it, and, if you’re lucky, the experience will forever change you the same way it did when it made me fall in love with video games again.