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 any further details 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 studio head confirmed the same today.
Various theories about the possible events of Alan Wake 2 are already being built, since Remedy was low on details and completely immersed in work on the sequel.
When we last left Alan depends on how much you’ve played, as the main game, its final DLC, Alan Wake’s 2012 spin-off American Nightmare, and even the Control-related story reveal more about Alan’s current whereabouts. Alan. matter how vague they may be. The place where we see him in Control’s second DLC called AWE is chronologically assumed to be the last known location of him.
Apparently this place is still the Dark Place, a kind of metaphysical prison he dove into to rescue his wife Alice at the end of the original 2010 game. Since then, Alan has been looking for a way out and may get stronger as he finds a way out. In the announcement trailer for Alan Wake 2, Alan is armed with a magical lamp that emits light but isn’t plugged into the mains. As with his “clicker” in the original game, Alan appears to be able to imbue objects with power, though why and how remains to be seen. Since he’s been a “guest” to the Dark Place for a long time, chances are he’s got used to it and can now make it work in his favor.
Unfortunately, his strange and sinister counterpart, Mr. Scratch, doesn’t seem to lose his power either. You hear a lot about “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 he is with the idea of ”light versus dark”. At the end of the trailer, we seem to catch a glimpse of the game’s deadly 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 is in The Dark Place. .
What has Mr. Scratch been doing all this time? Assuming American Nightmare is still canon, he’s killed people at some point, though time seems to behave differently in The Dark Place, so it’s unclear how long Alan has actually been absent.
It can be assumed that in Alan Wake 2, gamers will again 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, it could justifiably apply here: “he’s going to be weirder than usual.”
