Remedy studio head Sam Lake took to Twitter to wish everyone a Happy New Year and promise that the year ahead will be “crazy and exciting.” At the same time, he unequivocally hinted at the reason for such statements, namely the image from the logo of the long-awaited Alan Wake 2.
Alan Wake 2 is currently expected to hit the market in 2023, though Remedy hasn’t released more details just yet. While delays are common in the gaming industry, Remedy has confirmed that the game is still on track for a 2023 release date in October 2022, and the head of the studio confirmed the same today.
Various theories are already being built regarding the possible events in Alan Wake 2, since Remedy was sparse on details and completely immersed in work on the sequel.
Where we last left Alan depends on how much you’ve been playing, as the main game, its final DLC, Alan Wake’s 2012 spin-off American Nightmare for, and even the story-bound Control reveal more information regarding Alan’s current whereregardings. no matter how vague they may be. It is chronologically assumed that the place where we see him in the second Control DLC called AWE is his last known whereregardings.
This place is apparently still the Dark Place, a kind of metaphysical prison that he dove into to save his wife Alice at the end of the original 2010 game. Since then, Alan has been looking for a way out, and perhaps getting stronger as he searches for a way out. In the Alan Wake 2 announcement trailer, Alan is armed with a magical lamp that emits light but is not connected to the mains. As with his “clicker” in the original game, Alan appears to be able to imbue items with power, though why and how remains to be seen. Since he has been a “guest” of the Dark Place for a long time, it is likely that he has gotten used to it and can now make it work in his favor.
Unfortunately, his strange and sinister counterpart, Mr. Scratch, does not seem to lose his power either. We hear a lot regarding “monsters” in the announcement trailer, perhaps the game is reminiscent of the boogeyman or the monster under the bed that lurks in the dark, given how obsessed it is with the idea of ”light versus dark”. By the end of the trailer, we seem to be getting a glimpse of the game’s murderous boogeyman, Mr. Scratch, whose name comes from the noise we hear when Thomas Zane first tells Alan that he will be replaced in the real world by a doppelgänger while he’s in The Dark Place. .
What has Mr. Scratch been doing all this time? Assuming American Nightmare is still canon, he did kill people at some point, though time seems to behave differently in The Dark Place, so it’s not clear how long Alan was actually away.
It can be assumed that in Alan Wake 2, players will once more take on the role of a titled grumpy writer who is trying to get out of the Dark Place and reunite with his wife. But the connection to Control, the presence of Mr. Scratch, and the unclear fate of Bright Falls, the setting of the first game, all add variables to this currently unsolvable equation. As Jesse Fayden said in Control, you can justifiably apply here: “This is going to be weirder than usual.”
