Alan Wake 2 Unveils an Unusual Twist on GTA 5’s Character Switching

Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing

Mike Mahardy
leads game objection and also curation at Polygon as elderly editor, testimonials. He has actually been covering home entertainment properly for greater than ten years.

From its off-the-books investigators to its time-hopping stories, Remedy Entertainment has a fabled background of damaging the policies. With Alan Wake 2, the upcoming survival-horror game including 2 lead characters and also an uncommon double story, innovative supervisor Sam Lake and also his group wished to maintain the custom going. And it’s confirmed to be a difficult procedure.

“We’re getting out of our comfort zone in so many ways,” Lake claims, being in a New York coffeehouse while rainfall batters the home windows. The evening prior to, he took a seat with horror director Mike Flanagan at Tribeca Festival 2023 to speak about the stressful procedure of composing a scary tale in which the gamer has a lot control. “I’ve been breathless along the way. I think there was this pent-up drive to just push everything forward. With the depth and layers of the story — just how it’s constructed, and how big it is…” Lake pantomimes swimming. “I feel as if my feet have not been touching the bottom.”

It’s been 13 years — both in the real life, which of Alan Wake — because the very first game finished with the titular writer caught in the Dark Place, an ethereal, nonstop nightmarescape of time loopholes and also evil-minded adversaries. Not desiring gamers to need to “do homework” prior to playing the follow up, Lake and also game supervisor Kyle Rowley chose the suggestion of a two-protagonist actors at an early stage. As an FBI representative sent out to examine disruptions in the Pacific Northwest, Saga Anderson is the suitable for beginners and also experts alike — she has equally as several concerns concerning the globe (and also the methods which it’s altered) as gamers will. Based on what we saw of her fifty percent of the tale at Summer Game Fest recently, we’re currently highly advised of Resident Evil 4 and also True Detective period 1, in which police additionally examined occult murders in backwoods.

Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing

The opposite side of Alan Wake 2’s narrative coin, in which gamers check out, and also attempt to get away, the Dark Place as the hurt writer, takes the kind of a foreboding, unique New York. Lake informed Flanagan that Taxi Driver worked as a significant impact on Wake’s ominous trip. “The neon-y, borderline gothic vibes” of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 work of art capture the metropolitan seclusion that Wake, as a New Yorker himself, brought into play in his in-universe criminal activity stories. “I inhaled American pop culture as a kid, and New York was the beating heart of it.”

We’ve seen games with several usable personalities prior to, though. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty tossed target markets for a loophole completely back in 2001 when it presented Raiden after just 2 hrs in Solid Snake’s footwear. The initial Assassin’s Creed maintained its contemporary phases and also 2nd lead character a secret right up till launch day. Grand Theft Auto 5 almost blew up the suggestion of several usable personalities in 2013, permitting gamers to leap in between Michael, Franklin, and also Trevor at will; most importantly, however, they required to proceed the guys’s private stories to simultaneous “plot gates” prior to continuing.

Alan Wake 2 is an effort at something various: a double tale in which the gamer can not just leap in between the personalities on an impulse, however additionally see one personality’s story via nearly till completion — without changing back to the various other whatsoever.

“Once you unlock both characters, you don’t have to go back to the other until very late in the game, if you don’t want to,” Lake claims. “In any game, you put the pacing largely in the hands of the player. [With Alan Wake 2], we wanted to go way further. You are free to choose, once we open it up, which side of the story you pursue, and how far. They are connected. There’s a lot of foreshadowing, a lot of mirroring between each other. They are kind of floating side by side.”

Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing

Lake claims that gamers can also desert examinations and also objectives midway via if they’re stuck, and also return to discover points right where they left them, hrs later on. In the capillary of several recent role-playing games, Anderson, as the “brilliant criminal profiler,” has accessibility to a symbolic “Mind Place.” This takes the kind of a space, full with ideas, images, leads, and also red string, which gamers can get in whenever they desire. It’s ideal to do it when the FBI representative remains in a risk-free setting, however — time will certainly proceed generally beyond the Mind Place, implying that neighboring adversaries are totally free to do as they please.

“Sometimes you see some sort of a vision in one character’s playthrough, and you’ll have absolutely no idea what it means,” Lake claims, trembling his head and also elevating his hands. “Then you play the game again, and you hop between the characters more frequently, or stick to one character for longer periods, and that same vision makes a little more sense. As players, and as humans, really, we’re always trying to find meaning. And we’re trying to invoke that idea here. It’s our longest game ever, and I’m sure players will make connections between Saga and Alan that we haven’t even fully considered. It’s exciting.”

 

Source: Polygon