Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Steam Deck Compatibility?: Verified
Rrp: £5.99 (Epic), £6.19 (Gog.com, Humble and Steam)
This game is a pretty short experience, lasting about five hours or so if you’re just playing through the story. It’s certainly a much more action orientated title and feels a lot more ‘video gamey’ in its mechanics than than its predecessor. A prime example of this being that you can unlock weapon cases found in the game by collecting a certain number of manuscript pages. I’m somewhat conflicted with that because while I’m glad there’s a mechanical benefit to finding manuscript pages I would have preferred it to be something like collecting the pages improved Alan’s health a little or provided a little armour. Getting access to weapons like an assault rifle or combat shotgun loses all of the horror that the previous game worked hard to establish.
A few new enemies have been brought in, perhaps as a way to make the Taken more threatening since you have such an arsenal available. They also come at you in greater numbers, in the original game you’d usually only see three or four Taken at once but in this it’s common to be attacked by five or more.
There seems to be some debate on the canonicity of this game. I can’t speak on it myself because I’ve yet to play Alan Wake 2, but according to Sami Antero Järvi (otherwise known as Sam Lake), who was a writer on Alan Wake and was the Director and lead writer for Alan Wake 2, this game is canon. Having played through the game I’m not sure how, but perhaps when I play Alan Wake 2 I’ll come to understand how.
