After more than a decade in the development wilderness, Alan Wake 2 is finally (almost) ready for its closeup. So it’s fitting when we visit Helsinki to talk to the team making it that we start in a performance-capture studio. Here, we get to see Ilkka Villi (the face and body of the game’s protagonist) at work, as he makes an appearance on a late-night chat show. Meanwhile, we talk to Matthew Porretta, who supplies Wake’s voice. “This would never be done this way now, right?” Porretta says. “The person who mocaps it would voice it.”
But this unusual arrangement is rather apropos for a game built around themes of duality. It is, after all, two games – and stories – in one. One campaign picks up with Wake, who has spent more than a decade in the Dark Place, during which time his “terrified but cool” demeanour from the first game has deteriorated to “confused and vulnerable” (hence the wild-haired, wide-eyed expression on E388’s cover). The second casts you as FBI agent Saga Anderson, whose feet are firmly planted in our world, but who finds herself facing all manner of supernatural aggressors as the two realities bleed into one another.
It’s a dark, complex, and startlingly ambitious game, in other words – and as we talk to the actors and developers involved in bringing its two worlds to life, we begin to see why it’s taken so long, and why, of the five projects currently on the Finnish studio’s slate, it’s probably the most important of all. We uncover a string of new details in our expansive, 16-page cover story, which should whet your appetite ahead of the game’s October launch.
In E388 we also visit Media Molecule’s Guildford HQ to get the inside track on Tren, the studio’s triumphant swan song for Dreams, and highlight some of the very best of this remarkable creative toolkit’s user-generated works as MM hands over the keys to its community. Elsewhere, Jeremy Peel asks if silence is Gordon, questioning why the mute protagonist stills loom large over the landscape of firstperson videogames. In The Making Of, we talk to Blackbird Interactive about how it found the sweet spot between authenticity and fun in Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and discover how two unlikely resurrections helped bring Dambuster Studios back from the dead.
