Developer Remedy Entertainment has been on a long journey to tie together each one of their offbeat shooters - from Max Payne to Alan Wake and Quantum Break to Control - in a metatextually linked Remedy Connected Universe. But head honcho Sam Lake says it's too early to even think about how it's all going to end.

Remedy games always had easter eggs and mysterious references to other stories in the studio's gameography, but the connection was made 'canon' in Control's AWE DLC, which either stands for Alan Wake Expansion or Altered World Event depending on who you ask. Last year's excellent Alan Wake 2 then fleshed out that interlocked story further, and even informally (for probably legal reasons) tied it back to Max Payne and Quantum Break - both of which are owned by Rockstar Games and Xbox respectively.

But when asked about if there's an endgame in sight - an Avengers Endgame type of conclusion, if you will - Sam Lake told IGN that the studio are "just getting started" and "it's too early to start talking about an endgame."

"I love tying these things together," he said. "I love making it deeper and expanding on the lore. It really feels like this kind of opportunity to take these strands that we have put there, expand, entertain different ideas. It feels really exciting. And the way we are looking at it is, every game needs to be enjoyable on its own and stand on its own feet, but then, for our fans, for people who have been playing other Remedy games, we want to put in a lot of content for them to discover for the ongoing universe story."

Lake also explains that newcomers can jump into any of their games, and then hopefully dip back into the other, older Remedy games to "dive deeper into that rabbit hole."

For now, Remedy will continue tugging at these threads in its first ever co-op shooter FBC: Firebreak coming next year, paranormal sequel Control 2, and maybe even with its Max Payne 1 and 2 remakes in collaboration with Rockstar Games.

Check out more upcoming games of 2025 and beyond to not miss a single beat. 

Remedy's Sam Lake has told investors he wants to make commercially successful games — just never at the cost of his or the studio's creative expression.

Remedy reported earlier this month that it had recouped "most" of its development costs with Alan Wake 2 sales more than a year from launch. That doesn't necessarily make the game a flop, as it's very possible it'll have a long tail that eventually turns more and more of a profit, but it also doesn't make it a guaranteed commercial success.

Speaking during Remedy's Capital Markets Day on Tuesday (1:44:50 here), Lake addressed the presumably challenging art of balancing creative freedom with market viability.

"Games require long, complex productions. Games are cutting edge technological achievements. Games are business. We strive to create commercial hits," he said. "All of this is true, all of this is needed, all of this must be in balance for us to succeed. What else is true? Games are ambitious, passionate, works of creative expression. Games are high quality entertainment. What we create at Remedy is special, and we must never lose that."

As a massive fan of Remedy's catalog, I'm comforted by Lake's commitment to preserving what makes the studio's games special despite thus-far lukewarm sales, and doing so in a room full of investors who are counting on the commercial success of his games no less. It's also worth noting that Alan Wake 2, undeniably Remedy's weirdest, most Remedy game yet, is also its fastest selling game ever.

When I caught up with Lake just ahead of Alan Wake 2's launch last September, he told me he was emboldened to make "crazy" games by the positive response to Control, which in its five years since launch has sold 4.5 million copies and made Remedy more than €100 million in net revenue against a €30 million budget — proof that Alan Wake 2 still has time to prove itself to Remedy's investors.

If they need any more convincing, just remind them Alan Wake 2 is on our list of the best horror games and they'll come around.

As work on Alan Wake 2 wraps up with the arrival of its final DLC, The Lake House, writer and director Sam Lake describes the "long and winding road" to the award-winning horror game sequel's completion.

Speaking in a recent post online, the developer first discusses a song he wrote for the DLC - End of an Era. "End of an Era, the final song of the final DLC chapter of Alan Wake 2, beautifully composed by Petri Alanko and sung by Amelia Jones," says Lake. "I wrote the lyrics thinking about this long journey, from 2010 on, trying to get the sequel made, being very aware that in life nothing is guaranteed."

The lead continues: "Many times it seemed the game would never get made. It was a long and winding road. We lost wonderful friends along the way. No one knows about the future. But here we are and we made this, and no one can take that away from us. That's worth celebrating." Lake then closes his statement, writing that he hopes the community can "enjoy Alan Wake 2, now that with The Lake House, it's finally complete."

His message is heartfelt, to say the least, and it seems to be reaching quite a few fans. One commenter tells Lake his post "encapsulates so much of this journey you've taken us down, and also your personal journey through it all." Others speculate about what his reference to the "future" could mean, writing that they "can't wait for what's next." There's no telling just yet - but it certainly is exciting to consider the possibilities.

If you loved Alan Wake 2, here are some of the other best horror games around to play right now.

Oh Alan Wake 2, how I love and loathe you. Prior to last year, I'd never been able to reach the credits on a single survival horror game. But after reading our Editor-In-Chief Josh West's preview from Gamescom 2023, I was hopelessly sold on developer Remedy Entertainment's ambitious reality-bending narrative – jump scares or no. I tore through the first Alan Wake voraciously, then tip-toed through its much scarier sequel as soon as it launched; every fraught nerve and embarrassing yelp worth the hours spent devouring lore. I suspect my heart would prefer I grab a handful of crackling live wires before stepping foot in Valhalla Nursing Home again, but against better judgment, I've returned to Bright Falls for Alan Wake 2's equally-terrifying DLC The Lake House.

The Lake House is just as petrifying as I feared – lanky paint monsters tend to have that effect – but I've found myself almost enjoying those moments of tension, chuckling after jump scares rather than sitting in stunned silence. Rather poignantly, Alan Wake 2's final DLC is proof that Remedy has opened my heart to horror – besides coming back willingly, in the last year I've played through both Resident Evil 2 Remake and Dead Space, games once considered off-limits due to cowardice. But even more surprisingly, The Lake House has left me pining for Control 2 in a way that Control itself never quite managed.

Reaching my threshold

Say what you will about the Federal Bureau of Control, but it's got character. The clicky-clacky '90s computers. Custom-made elevator dings. Little jingles that play before each of the Bureau's charming home-made PSAs and video logs. Yes, there is an alarming lack of precautions around its meddling in powers unknown, but I'll take style over safety any day of the week.

The Lake House, the Bureau's lab for researching Cauldron Lake's supernatural Threshold, is no exception. You're here as FBC agent Kiran Estevez, who – upon finding that Lake House has been overrun by monstrous art brought to life – manages to keep her seen-it-all-before attitude in the face of sentient walls of screaming paint. Her goal is to stop this wayward experiment, but my goal is to scour the place for lore. I adore Remedy's brick-by-brick approach to worldbuilding: information is fragmented across discarded documents, projected videos, and email chains, adding up to create the larger Remedy Connected Universe we know and love. Lake House scratches this itch – yes, there's a very amusing HR disaster involving nut allergies and pie, but we also get a deep dive into how the Bureau works outside of The Oldest House, and see the events of Alan Wake 2 from their perspective.

Through this, The Lake House feels like a bridge for Alan Wake fans to cross into Control territory ahead of the sci-fi shooter's in-development sequel. That includes me. Following Alan Wake 2, I was keen to learn more of Remedy's meta-bending universe, which meant playing Control several years too late. I predictably loved hoovering up the FBC's every case file, but didn't gel as much with its awkward soulslike checkpointing or slightly-floaty shooting mechanics. When it comes to combat, Lake House has its feet in both worlds: guns feel as weighty as they do in Alan Wake 2's base game, but the DLC also draws from Control's wave-based ambushes to create more challenging fights. It's a slick pairing that's left me excited to see how Control 2 evolves from here. I don't expect it to drop everything and go full survival horror, but I do hope that it takes cues from Lake House's more grounded texture.

From a narrative perspective, Lake House raises so many questions about the FBC that I hadn't even thought to ask. When an experiment like this goes wrong, who's watching the watchmen? How deep does the Bureau's unethical streak run? What other dangers exist beyond the Oldest House and Cauldron Lake? With Alan Wake 2 and its DLC setting up events that reach far beyond Wake's personal stake in matters, Control 2 seems best-placed to explore the Remedy Connected Universe at a much broader scale. If Alan Wake is Remedy's spin on Stephen King's small town America, Control is the studio's answer to the author's Dark Tower series: a meta-bending knot of strings that ties its entire universe together. We don't know everything about the Oldest House – and we likely never will – but Lake House shows that there's so much value in moving beyond the FBC's original stomping ground.

But on a shallower level, it's Lake House's supernatural bureaucracy that makes me want more Control. Unleash the bloodthirsty horrors in office cubicles. Give me more puzzles that require combining dates on the break room calendar with reference numbers for cursed paintings to crack computer login passwords. Dull gray elevators that lead to impossible floors? Don't mind if I do! Lake House is the best bits of Control combined with Remedy's learnings over the last five years, and because of it, I'll be counting down the days until I can enlist with the FBC once more.

Why not follow up The Lake House with one of the best horror games you can play right now?

Before Alan Wake 2 came out and shook up the 2023 GOTY conversation, director Sam Lake wasn't satisfied with his character's death scene because in his view it wasn't sufficiently bloody.

According to Lake, Alex Casey's death scene in the Initiation 2 (Casey) chapter of Alan Wake 2 originally wasn't very bloody at all. It wasn't until Lake stepped in and insisted his character's death be more violent that we got the scene as we know it today.

"There was hardly any blood in the first iteration of Casey dying in the alley," Lake said, adding that he "politely" asked for "a LOT more" blood in the scene. He even had the cheek to put an innocent angel emoji in the tweet. Sam Lake, you devil, you.

The actual murder of Sam Lake's character isn't seen, but you can hear him fighting for his life off-screen, and it indeed sounds pretty darn violent. It would be a little awkward if there was no blood at the murder scene. Basically, I'd say Lake made the right call when he asked for more evidence of what sounded like a pretty brutal struggle.

You also have to sympathize with the developers in this situation who were asked by their boss to make his death scene even more gruesome. I can only hope there's a screenshot somewhere of that conversation that was saved as evidence that Lake himself asked for this. It's not every day you get to destroy our own likeness, or your boss's. 

Alan Wake 2's second and final DLC, The Lake House, is expected to arrive sometime in October.

Are you one of the few fans that noticed these neat Alan Wake 2 audio cues the devs are thrilled to finally see discovered?

The Alan Wake TV series from AMC is no longer moving forward, GamesRadar+ can confirm, as Remedy Entertainment partners with Annapurna to develop and produce Control and Alan Wake adaptations for film and television. "We have moved on from AMC amicably as their rights to Alan Wake expired. Annapurna is now leading the charge to take Control and Alan Wake to film, TV, and beyond," Thomas Puha, Remedy's communications director, tells me.

Alan Wake, Control, and Max Payne developer Remedy Entertainment announced that AMC – the company responsible for Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead – had acquired the rights to develop a series based on the critically acclaimed Alan Wake series back in 2022. There's been precious little news on the project since, outside of word that Jon Jashni and Jeff Ludwig had joined the earliest stages of its development as executive producer and producer, respectively. 

With AMC's claim to Alan Wake's rights expiring, Annapurna has stepped in to help bring Alan Wake beyond video games. Little is know yet, although Remedy creative director Sam Lake said the following in a press release: "I'm absolutely thrilled by this opportunity to expand the story of Alan Wake and our whole Remedy Connected Universe to mediums beyond games, and to build all of this in close collaboration, games, film, TV, and other mediums as well, as one unified vision. I trust Annapurna are the perfect partner for us to make this dream come true." It's understood that Remedy remains in control of the rights to the franchise. 

Remedy isn't working with Annapurna to solely bring Alan Wake to other mediums though. The video game developer has also confirmed that Annapurna will be co-financing development of Control 2, allowing Remedy to retain executive control and publishing rights over the highly anticipated sequel – it was originally in development with publisher 505 Games, who helped get the original release out the door back in 2017, although the studio announced that it had acquired the full rights to the Control franchise earlier this year. 

Which is all to say that this is an exciting time to be a Remedy fan. While the demise of the Alan Wake AMC series is certainly disappointing, given its pedigree in the drama genre, news of a close collaboration between Remedy and  Annapurna is exceptionally promising. Alan Wake 2 landed in October 2023 to critical acclaim, and I know I certainly praised Remedy for the way it was able to blend live action film seamlessly into its core play in my Alan Wake 2 review. What this video game studio could achieve in close partnership with one of the most intrepid production companies of the modern era only ignites the imagination.

This is exciting in part because Alan Wake 2 is easily one of the best Remedy games.

It turns out some of the biggest story moments in Alan Wake 2 are hiding in plain, uh, sound, from pretty early on in the game, and one Remedy developer is just happy people are finally taking notice.

There will be major story spoilers discussed in this piece, so turn back now if you haven't beaten Alan Wake 2 yet.

Alan Wake 2 launched back in October to rave reviews, and although it's my personal GOTY for 2023, I'll admit to never having noticed this fascinating detail about its audio until now. In a tweet from one player, it's revealed that the origins and whereabouts of the sequel's main antagonist are heavily hinted at early on in the game in The Mind Place, the room inside co-protagonist Saga Anderson's mind where she examines clues and evidence. 

As evidenced in the video below, if you hover over Alan Wake's profile picture in The Mind Place, you'll hear the Dark Presence that possessed Mr. Scratch and turned him into the psychotic doppelganger at the center of Alan Wake 2's mystery. It's unlikely you'd make that connection playing the game for the first time, but it's a thoughtful way to foreshadow what's arguably the most significant reveal in the story.

Alan Wake 2 senior sound designer Josh Adam Bell confirmed that this was "100% on purpose" and said he's psyched "finally someone noticed."

I booted up an old save in Alan Wake 2 to see/hear this for myself, and it turns out it isn't limited to just Wake's profile. If you hover over the Anderson brothers, who formed the Viking power metal band Old Guards of Asgard and famously performed during the absolutely wild musical chapter in the game, you'll hear a stringed instrument. Meanwhile, if you hover over the Oh Deer Diner waitress Rose Marigold, you'll hear the faint sound of dishes in a sink, and Alex Casey's profile seems to make the sound of static. Nightingale sounds like he's underwater when you hover over his profile card.

Alan Wake 2 is very much Sam Lake's passion project, dialing up the mind-bending surrealism Remedy's known for to 11, and there are so many subtle details showing a rare degree of care and artistry at every level of the game. It might be Lake's story, but it's a Remedy game, through and through.

After all, there's a reason it's high on our list of the best horror games to play today.

Night Springs, the first DLC expansion for Remedy Entertainment's hit survival horror game Alan Wake 2, has arrived and it contains new art by fan favorite comics artist Christian Ward.

Ward, who recently wrote and drew the three-issue Batman: City of Madness limited series for DC, confirmed on his Twitter account on June 8 that he was the creator behind the art, sharing the below page as an example.

The title Night Springs has many different connotations within the world of Alan Wake. It's the name of a fictional TV show and media franchise that's very clearly inspired, in part, by The Twilight Zone. There are several locations with that name and there's even a song of the same title tied into the new expansion.

Most intriguing, however, is the fact that Night Springs is also the title of a previous Alan Wake comic, published back in 2011. That short story was written by Sam Lake and Mikko Rautalahti, with art by Amin Amat and Gerry Kissell, and colors by Shari Chankhamma.

The new DLC is split into three episodes in which players control transformed versions of familiar characters. In 'Time Breaker' you play "The Actor" - a performer who looks eerily like Bright Falls sheriff Tim Breaker. 'North Star' allows you to play as "The Sibling" - a character who may well be Jesse Faden from a different Remedy game, 2019's Control. Finally, 'Number One Fan' casts you as "The Waitress" - a character based on Rose Marigold.

Alan Wake II: Night Springs is out now. A second DLC is currently in development.

You can check out some of Christian Ward's beautiful art for Batman: City of Madness here.

Remedy Entertainment has taken to the stage at Summer Game Fest 2024 to reveal the first Alan Wake 2 DLC, and better yet: it's releasing for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X on June 8. If you paid close attention during Alan's spiral through the Dark Place, you'll know that the the author collaborated on a brand new season of Night Springs with host Warlin Door – the enigmatic Parautilatarian who spends much of the runtime leading poor Alan Wake down increasingly perilous paths. 

Alan Wake 2: Night Springs will let you explore three episodes of the season, the scripts penned by Wake in a failed attempt to write his escape – each act inspired by echoes of characters that slipped through the veil of his reality in the Dark Place. Each episode runs about an hour in length and will give you the chance to play Night Springs variants of previously known characters: The Actor, played by Shawn Ashmore and based on Tim Breaker; The Sibling, played by Courtney Hope and based on Jesse Faden; and The Waitress, played by Jessica Preddy, based on Rose Marigold. 

Here's a synopsis of each of the Alan Wake 2: Night Springs DLC episodes, and then we'll touch base with Remedy to get some exclusive details on the expansion. 

• Time Breaker – The Actor, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Bright Falls sheriff Tim Breaker, is a multiversal hero in the game "Time Breaker." His character must track down the Master of the Many Worlds and prevent him from murdering the multiversal hero’s different selves across parallel universes.
• North Star – The Sibling, an unknown woman who bears a striking resemblance to FBC Director Jesse Faden, is trying to find her missing brother, who is being held captive at Coffee World.
• Number One Fan – The Waitress, who bears a striking resemblance to Oh Deer Diner waitress Rose Marigold, must save her idol, the writer, from the danger he finds himself in. To do so, she must confront the Writer's critics, and the Bad Boy who is the Writer's evil twin. 

Let's get weird with it

Let's start with Time Breaker, the episode that focuses on a 'multiversal hero' played by one Shawn Ashmore. I asked Alan Wake 2 game director Kyle Rowley how far Remedy can reasonably take its Quantum Break nods before Microsoft starts knowing at their door. "Erm, where's legal?" he laughs, before giving some more detail on how Night Springs is being framed. "These aren't the characters from the actual stories of Alan Wake and the other games that we've made. They're Night Springs echoes of them, so there's nothing directly connected to any of the stuff that we've done in previous games lore-wise or name-wise or anything like that." Lead writer Clay Murphy adds: "These are characters inspired by the real people that Alan Wake has seen visions of in the Dark Place, a process we established in the main game." 

Okay, so we're no closer to Quantum Break becoming a part of the wider Remedy Connected Universe. Nor are we any closer to seeing FBC Director Jesse Faden make second contact with Wake in the Dark Place – I wager we'll have to wait for the second Alan Wake DLC (The Lake House) or Control 2 for that one. Still, Alan Wake 2: Night Springs will offer up the opportunity for more action-focused experiences, with these self-contained levels set across warped areas from the base game with a focus on letting those heavy combat systems shine. 

"We have a lot of Night Spring twists on a lot of our mechanics," says Rowley. That will come through in a variety of ways across the three episodes, but perhaps Number One Fan paints the most obvious example of a well-intentioned shift. "The core combat loop in the base game was very much a survival horror, more tactical with resource management. But in the episode you just saw, the mandate was: we don't care about resources, let's lower the health, and make this a power fantasy of the waitress who has the awesome weapons she needs to blast away and save her hero."  

"It's actually been really refreshing for us, and a fun creative challenge," says level designer Nathalie Jankie. "In the main game, we really lent into this feeling of vulnerability. But in Night Springs, it's been fun to subvert a lot of those themes, and explore some of the other themes established in the main game – some of the silliness and the wackiness."

For me, that point is actually why I'm so drawn to the prospect of the Night Springs DLC. If you read my Alan Wake 2 review, you'll know that I was pretty blown away by the core experience – the strength of its mechanical design, the immense visual fidelity, and the ambitious narrative framework which sought to blur multiple layers of reality. It was an incredible improvement over the original Alan Wake, although I did miss some of that game's off-beat humor and style – the absence of Barry Wheeler in the sequel was notable. 

While there's no confirmation on whether the free-wheeling agent is returning here, the general shift towards something more absurdist is something I'm exceptionally excited to dive into.  These episodes offer Remedy a chance to do what it does best: be creative, push boundaries, and produce moments of explosive action interspersed with ideas which twist the reality of worlds and characters we thought we once knew. "It's been nice to be able to creatively stretch our legs," says Murphy, "especially after making something for so many years that is quite dark, and it's been fun to push tone in extreme directions and see what comes of it." 

Alan Wake 2 was widely celebrated when it launched on October 27, 2023 – I called it a "strange, imaginative, and truly ambitious sequel that never fails to upend your expectations" in my Alan Wake 2 review. But if there's one decision that drew consternation from the wider community, it was Remedy Entertainment's decision to roll with a digital-only release. Eight months later, the studio has decided to reverse this decision. 

Revealed at Summer Game Fest 2024 alongside the first Alan Wake 2: Night Springs DLC, Remedy announced that Alan Wake 2 physical editions are coming – with pre-orders set to begin on June 8, 2024. Speaking to GamesRadar+, communications director Thomas Puha says that the team "wanted to prioritize quality above everything else" for the October release, and that the decision to skip physical editions was a result of wanting to take "more time to polish the game… quality always comes first for us, and we wanted to maximize the development time we had."

Two Alan Wake 2 physical editions of the game are coming to shelves this year: a Physical Deluxe Edition for $79.99 / €79.99 / £64.99 which includes the base game, as well as all Digital Deluxe Edition items that include cosmetic items for Alan and Saga, an expansion pass for the two DLCs, and a code for Alan Wake Remastered Digital Edition. There's also an Alan Wake 2 Limited Collector's Edition – created by the folks over at Limited Run. Set to retail for $199.99, this massive pack includes everything in the Physical Deluxe Edition along with an exclusive Collector’s Edition box, Alan Wake’s Angel Lamp replica (functional with a light), Ocean View Hotel keychain and key (room 665), Coffee World pin set, and an artbook. 

Given that Alan Wake 2 is one of the best Remedy games the studio has created, it's great that it's going to land in a physical format to help ensure its longevity into the future – it's funny to think that the journey to get this sequel off the ground after 13 years was kickstarted after Remedy acquired the IP rights to the franchise from Microsoft Gaming, following the original being temporarily pulled from the Xbox Store due to lapsed music licenses. Anyway, if any of you need me I'll be trying to justify how I can carve $200 out of my bank balance for that Collector's Edition… I probably don't need electricity when I've got Alan's Angel Lamp to light my way.  

The team behind Alan Wake 2 has confirmed that the game is in "full production" and "is playable from start to finish". 

Remedy Entertainment updated us on its progress in its most recent Investors Report. Whilst acknowledging a "revenue decline" in the last quarter of the 2022 financial year, the studio says that "the extended scope and budget related to the development of Alan Wake 2" should make for better results this year.

"Alan Wake 2 is in full production. The game will soon have all content in place, and it is playable from start to finish," said CEO Tero Virtala.

"We will then move onto polishing the experience. Alan Wake is a unique brand that holds high value for the company today. Alan Wake Remastered has not yet generated royalties. However, we expect the sales to increase as the release of Alan Wake 2 becomes imminent and fans and new players want to experience the original story on new generation consoles."

The report didn't bring us any closer to a release date - or even a release window, for that matter - but it did reveal that Control 2 has "detailed concepts on the game vision and all creative areas including the gameplay, narrative, and art", whilst its secret live-service game, Codename Condor, "remains in the proof-of-concept" stage.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, Alan Wake 2 game director Kyle Rowley confirmed that players won't need to have played Remedy's other games – including the first Alan Wake game or the remastered version – in order to enjoy Alan Wake 2. 

"When we were creating the concept for Alan Wake 2, it was very much on our mind that we wanted to create an experience that was welcoming to all," Rowley says, "both new players who may not be familiar with Alan Wake or the Remedy Connected Universe and our fans, who have been on the journey with us and enjoyed earlier Remedy games." 

"After 13 years trapped beneath the suffocating depths of Cauldron Lake, Remedy Entertainment is about to break Alan Wake free of the darkness that has taken ahold of his mind," wrote Josh in his excellent Big in 2023 feature, After a decade of dreaming, Remedy is finally ready to write Alan Wake 2 into reality.

"After such a lengthy departure, few expected to see Alan Wake 2 to be written into reality – thankfully, creative director Sam Lake never lost faith that we would, one day, once again wield the light. 'I feel like I never left Alan Wake behind. There was always the full intention to return to him; there was always more story to tell, and the characters and the setting were too precious to be forgotten. 

'The story kept growing and evolving through the years, and we created a new concept between every project. This time, after Control, everything finally clicked into place'."

Alan Wake 2 is set to launch sometime later this year in 2023 and is scheduled to release on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. 

Here are the upcoming games of 2023 we really just can't wait for.

Alan Wake 2 promises to seriously dial-up the series' horror chops, offering Remedy's full-fledged take on the genre.

Speaking to GamesRadar+ for our Big in 2023 Alan Wake 2 preview, game director Kyle Rowley spoke about the changes being made from the original game, which was more 'action game by way of Stephen King' than a true horror experience. While Rowley says the team isn't yet "ready to reveal too much" about its shift of genre, it's certainly aiming to put its own mark on things.

"What I will say is that we very much want to put a stake in the ground and say we are creating Remedy's take on the survival horror genre. Gameplay, narrative, atmosphere, music - it's all singing from the same hymn sheet, and that was very important for us from the outset."

While we don't know much about how all that will look, it does sound like we'll have a little more to play with than Alan's supply of lithium batteries. Remedy's certainly had plenty of time to nail a creepy atmosphere, having been building on the world (and vibe) of Alan Wake through 2019's Control.

That's been a long journey, but Remedy seems to think the thirteen-year wait will have been worth it. Already billing Alan Wake 2 as its "biggest project yet," creative director Sam Lake says the studio spent years waiting for things to "finally click into place," and that he "never left Alan Wake behind."

Keep an eye on Alan Wake and more, as we run down our list of new games 2023.

Alan Wake 2 has effectively been in development ever since the launch of the original game 13 years ago - at least, it's been in the back of creative director Sam Lake's mind for all that time - and it's become developer Remedy's "biggest project yet".

"I feel like I never left Alan Wake behind," Lake tells GamesRadar+ in a new interview about the development of Alan Wake 2. "There was always the full intention to return to him; there was always more story to tell, and the characters and the setting were too precious to be forgotten."

Lake says that Alan Wake's story "kept growing and evolving through the years", even as Remedy continued to create new games with original concepts. But games like Quantum Break helped seed the idea that all Remedy's games are part of a single universe, and Control's AWE DLC took what were once Easter eggs up to the level of a full-on crossover. Lake says that "after Control, everything finally clicked into place."

Lake tells us that the intervening years have only made the plans for Alan Wake's return bigger. "You keep the dream alive when you keep actively dreaming it, and make a constant effort to keep it fresh and exciting. If anything, through these years, the dream of Alan Wake 2 has grown more ambitious and more unique. A game project like this is a very complex undertaking - it's our biggest project yet - and a lot of different things need to come together. Not only the concept itself, but the timing and the right partners as well."

Alan Wake 2 is one of the biggest new games for 2023 - you can follow that link for a big breakdown of what else is coming.

Remedy may have given us a teeny glimpse of Alan Wake 2 during a presentation detailing their new development tools, sending fans into a frenzy.

The developer recently released a lengthy video on Universal Scene Description and its implementation into the studio's in-house engine, Northlight. But as Reddit user Sir_Galehaut highlights, it might also include a teaser for Alan Wake 2. Around four minutes into the video, an image shows an early build of an unknown game. The scene is pretty barebones, with just the virtual skeleton of a character holding a gun and a large room containing a staircase and stone archways.

alan_wake_2_game_interior_leaked from r/AlanWake

"This image seems to be from a new project because it doesn't match any location from their existing games," says the Reddit user on the Alan Wake subreddit. The file name for the image is "NationalLibrary", and as the Alan Wake 2 trailer featured a rainy shot of New York City, this prompted the user to do a web search for libraries in New York, and up popped the New York Public Library.

A side-by-side comparison of Remedy's creation and an interior photo of the library shows just how strikingly similar they are. "When looking at pictures of the Astor Hall, we realize that it perfectly fits with the layout seen in-game," says Sir_Galehaut. "The stairs, pillars, and arches are almost identical to the real building."

Just what Alan Wake could be doing there remains a mystery. Is he hunting some otherworldly being or simply wanting to catch up on some reading? As other users point out, there's also the possibility that the build might not be from Alan Wake 2 or, indeed, a work-in-progress game at all, but simply a test space built by Remedy to try out new tools in its engine. 

Alan Wake 2 was revealed in a gloomy cinematic trailer during The Game Awards 2021. The sequel will seemingly offer a lot more scares than Alan's trip to Bright Falls, with the studio's creative director Sam Lake describing it as "Remedy's first survival horror game." It's set to launch on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC sometime in 2023.

In the mood for more frights? Take a look at our pick of the best horror games to play right now.

An Alan Wake TV show is officially in the works, developer Remedy has confirmed. 

In an anniversary video celebrating the series and giving fans updates on its highly anticipated sequel Alan Wake 2, creative director and writer Sam Lake also said: "We were, quite a while ago, talking about the Alan Wake TV show. Well, AMC, the wonderful, wonderful home for absolutely brilliant TV shows has bought the rights for Alan Wake." Lake also revealed that Remedy has been collaborating with AMC to make the show happen. 

Unfortunately, there’s "nothing more to share at the moment" Lake added, but he did promise that: "We will certainly let you know when there is something to announce." If you weren’t aware, AMC is responsible for the likes of The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, and lots more. So it’s safe to say that the Alan Wake TV show is in good hands. 

As we’re sure you’re already well aware of by now, this isn’t the only video game film/TV adaptation currently in the works. Over the last year or so, we’ve been hearing about a number of upcoming projects including The Last Of Us TV show which is actively filming at the moment, as well as the recently announced American McGee’s Alice TV show adaptation and both a movie and TV adaptation of Hazelight’s It Takes Two. 

This wasn’t all that was announced during the Alan Wake celebration video either. Earlier on in the video, Lake also revealed that Alan Wake Remastered is officially coming to Nintendo Switch this Fall. This announcement wasn’t entirely a surprise as there have been rumors of the action-adventure game coming to the Nintendo handheld for a few months now.  

Wondering about all the other video game adaptations you may have missed? Take a look at our upcoming video game movies list to find out what else is coming our way soon. 

Developer Remedy Entertainment has announced that Alan Wake Remastered is coming to Switch this fall, but previously planned reveals for Alan Wake 2 this summer have been pushed back.

Alan Wake Remastered was confirmed as part of an anniversary video released today. Director Sam Lake says "we'll let you know once we have the actual release date," but for now you can look forward to a vague fall launch. Remedy confirms in a press release that this will be a digital-only release, but it will run natively on the Switch hardware - this won't be a cloud port. The devs will show more "in the coming months."

The remaster launched on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S in October 2021.

Remedy previously announced plans to show more of Alan Wake 2 this summer, but those plans have fallen through. Don't expect to see the sequel during the E3 2022 schedule, or as part of any of the events rising to take the show's place this summer.

"To create a proper, polished demo or a trailer takes a lot of effort, and it’s several months of work that could take away from development," Lake says. "We feel that we have momentum going, and we want to make sure we are creating the best, and first, survival horror game for Remedy. We don’t want to take the team away from that focus, so we’re going to keep going and making a great game experience, and unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for a demo and trailer."

Lake notes that "everything with Alan Wake 2 development is going really well. We are deep in production, have a lot of material, and a great deal of the game is playable." The game is still set to launch in 2023, and a few bits of concept art were shown in the video.

Remedy announced back in 2018 that an Alan Wake TV show was in the works, and the project is still alive. The studio also confirmed in today's announcement that AMC has picked up the rights.

For more new games in 2022 to keep an eye on, you can follow that link.

Alan Wake 2 will maintain the third-person perspective and bring back Matthew Porretta in the titular role.

Just below, you can see a tweet from Remedy Games studio head and writer/director Sam Lake publisher earlier today on December 14. In the tweet itself, Lake reveals that Alan Wake 2 will maintain the typical third-person camera perspective used by Remedy Games, as well as recruiting American actor Matthew Porretta once again for the role of Wake.

Neither of these details are ultimately a massive surprise for Alan Wake 2, but it's nonetheless solid confirmation of what to expect from the forthcoming sequel. Porretta returning for the role of Wake is a treat, especially after his absorbing turn as Doctor Caspar Darling in Control, where he stepped into the role of the character in a live-action turn.

It's also a relief that Remedy is sticking with the third-person camera, considering how brilliantly their last few games have played. Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control all employed an 'over-the-shoulder' camera perspective for their adventures, and the result was some enthralling action in each game, especially in Control, which ultimately won Gamesradar's Game of the Year award for 2019.

Remedy just unveiled Alan Wake 2 for the first time earlier this month at The Game Awards 2021 in L.A. Unlike the original game, this sequel is going full survival horror, with a gritty trailer revealing a bloodied Wake. From the sounds of Lake's new tweet, it appears like we'll be waiting a fair while yet before we hear anything more of the highly anticipated sequel.

Check out our Alan Wake 2 story theories feature for more on what to expect from Remedy's upcoming game.

Alan Wake 2 has been unveiled with a gorgeous cinematic trailer debuting during The Game Awards 2021.

The trailer gives fans a fresh look at the titular protagonist more than 11 years on from the launch of the first game, and it sounds like the troubled writer's story is far from finished. We see a pretty grim crime scene in the woods before moving over what looks to be an abandoned city as Wake warns "monsters wear many faces."

In contrast to the first Alan Wake, which definitely has horror elements but is more of an action game, Remedy creative director Sam Lake describes Alan Wake 2 as a full-blown survival horror game.

"Alan Wake 2 is Remedy's first survival horror game," Lake says. "Our take on the genre. Our opportunity to truly connect the gameplay and the story. It is a deep, layered mystery."

Over on the PlayStation Blog, Lake explains that Alan Wake 2 has been in development for more than a decade in between other Remedy projects. Apparently, Lake and the development team came up with several different visions for how to approach the sequel and ultimately landed on the one we saw make its debut today.

Alan Wake 2 is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC sometime in 2023. Lake also confirmed during tonight's show that the studio is "going dark" for a while, but will return in Summer 2022 with another trailer and some new info on the sequel.

For everything coming next year, check out our guide to new games of 2022.

Update: Alan Wake has received two more ratings for the Nintendo Switch, this time from the ESRB and PEGI. 

An Alan Wake Nintendo Switch release is now looking more likely than ever after the game was rated for the Nintendo console not once but three times  - first by the Brazil Advisory Rating Board and now by the ESRB, which rates releases for the US and Canada, and PEGI, which does the equivalent across Europe. 

These two ratings have got fans speculating even more that perhaps developer Remedy has plans to bring Alan Wake to the Nintendo Switch via the Cloud, similar to the studio’s other hit game Control. There’s been no official word from Remedy yet though, so don't start preparing for pre-orders just yet. 

Original: Alan Wake Remastered could be coming to the Nintendo Switch if a new rating of the game is anything to go by. 

According to VGC, the Alan Wake remake has been classified by the Brazil Advisory Rating Board for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Although the majority of those consoles have already been confirmed to get an Alan Wake release, the news that it may also be coming to Nintendo Switch is new. 

It’s possible that the studio behind the remaster could be planning to recreate what it did with another one of its games, Control. Rather than release the game in the same way as they did on other consoles, Remedy opted to instead release Control Ultimate Edition for Nintendo Switch as a cloud version. 

This meant that you’d need a reliable internet connection to stream the game on your Nintendo Switch rather than just insert a cartridge or download it onto your console. However, let’s not make too many assumptions yet as it still hasn’t officially been confirmed that Alan Wake is even coming to Nintendo Switch, let alone if it will be a cloud version or not. 

Alan Wake was originally released on Xbox 360 and PC back in 2010. The action-adventure game follows the story of Alan Wake, a best-selling thriller novelist who is trying to uncover the mystery behind his wife’s disappearance. In typical Remedy fashion though, this isn’t as simple as it sounds as Wake will also encounter events from the plot of his latest novel, one that he can’t remember writing. 

Alan Wake Remastered has been confirmed to release on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X on October 5, 2021. For now, we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed that it’ll also make its way to Nintendo Switch soon. 

Want to know what else is on the way this year? Take a look at our new games 2021 list. 

The Alan Wake final boss fight is as confusing as it is challenging, as you find yourself battling against a massive tornado entity within the Dark Place. Upon first encountering this twisting foe, there's no obvious weak point to aim for or obvious strategy for dealing with it, so it's understandable that you'd be looking for an explanation of what to do next. Fortunately, when you know how to approach this face off it's actually not too difficult to clear, so here's the best strategy to follow and a clear plan for beating the Tornado final boss fight in Alan Wake, so you can earn the Tornado Wrangler Achievement or Trophy.

How to beat the final Alan Wake Tornado boss fight

To beat the Alan Wake final boss fight, players will be dependent on their flare gun, which is the only weapon they have powerful enough to do damage to the Dark Presence directly. However, you need to fire it from a close range, otherwise it won’t have an effect. The tornado itself is trying to force you back, using detritus and objects swept up as a makeshift barrier. As a result, you need to do the following:

• Walk towards the Tornado hanging over Diver’s Isle
• The bridge will be blocked by possessed objects. Use your flashlight to destroy them.
• Keep moving towards the Tornado. Pick up the flare gun ammo in the crate (there’s an unlimited amount).
• Jump over the gap in the bridge. Time it carefully, objects will sometimes swirl through this bit to try and knock you into the void.
• At this point you should be able to see the heart of the Tornado, surrounded by a shell of moving objects.
• Get as close to the edge as you can, and start using the Flare Gun to destroy the objects protecting it. You need to be close, or this won’t work!
• Swarms of birds will attack you at times, but the game usually highlights them. They shouldn’t do too much damage, but they might knock you off the bridge into the void if you’re not careful. It’s safer to destroy them.
• Once the shell is destroyed, keep firing flares into the heart of the Tornado. It’ll be clear if it’s being damaged, with huge bursts of light and audio cues. Three to five shots should destroy it.

It’s a surprisingly easy boss, especially considering some of what Alan’s gone up against so far, but serves as a fitting enough climax to the story and has a sense of spectacle to it. Beat it and you’ll get the final cutscene of the game, as well as the “Tornado Wrangler” Achievement or Trophy.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The Alan Wake ending is likely to leave you scratching your head, as like much of the storyline it's cryptic and difficult to explain, favoring narrative and emotion over simple reason and logic. If you're not sure what actually happened then the conclusion probably isn't going to leave you satisfied, however there is an explanation for the final cutscene sequence of Alan Wake that will hopefully clear things up, so we'll run through that below in detail.

It should go without saying, of course: major spoilers ahead! We’ll be discussing the Alan Wake ending in detail and referring to events both back and forth through the game. Read on at your own risk.

What happens in the Alan Wake ending?

The final sequence of the Alan Wake ending has Alan willingly jump into the lake to save Alice, who was taken by the Darkness much earlier. It’s worth keeping in mind that a lot of what happens here was made to occur by Alan himself, when he wrote his book/prophecy during the week-long blackout at the start of the game. 

But because Alan needed to create art that he believed in, that had some narrative strength and realism, he couldn’t just write “and they all lived happily ever after with free cake.” It wouldn’t feel like an honest ending to what’s been a very dark story. So while a lot of what happens doesn’t make logical sense, it does feel appropriate by the standards of a written story.

This power is how Alan uses the Clicker (the little trinket from his childhood) to destroy the Dark Presence and Barbara Jagger. Because he wrote in his story earlier that it had that specific power, it now does. However, Alice is still trapped in the alternate dimension known only as the Dark Place, and after beating Jagger, Alan goes to save her. This is where things get tricky.

Why is Alan Wake trapped?

Alan Wake is trapped in the Dark Place, the shadowy dimension with a doorway deep in Cauldron Lake. The Dark Place has the power to turn artistic creations into reality, and is the origin for the evil Dark Presence that torments you throughout the game.

Alice is taken by the Dark Presence to that dimension at the beginning of the game, and Alan writes an escape for her, in which he dives in, defeats the Darkness and gets her back to the real world, not to mention seemingly cancelling out all of the Dark Presence’s influence on Bright Falls. However, because of the limitations of this writing power, mentioned above, Alan’s ending means that he’s trapped in the Dark Place himself, presumably because he couldn’t write a completely happy ending that he found artistically convincing.

This means that Alan Wake ends with Alan choosing to trap himself in the Dark Place. He finishes Departure, the book he’s spent the whole game writing, and ends both the written and playable stories in one go. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s no more to follow or be explained.

“It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean” explained

The very last line of Alan Wake is a deeply cryptic one, with no clear explanation as to what it means. As far as we know, Remedy has never commented on the exact meaning, leaving it wholly up to interpretation until further information is available. 

It’s possible that Alan means that the Dark Place is far larger than he first realised, either in size or power, or that he’s admitting he’s not likely to escape, as the scale of what he’s up against is so massive. Or perhaps it’s intended as an obscure teaser or hint of what might come in future Remedy games? The developers originally stated that there wouldn't be an Alan Wake 2, though we now know that's coming soon, and the character does feature in AWE, the second Control DLC, with a great many implications that we’ll see him again in the now-confirmed sequel. Not only that, but we have some hints as to what he’ll be doing owing to the original game’s DLC.

What happened in the Alan Wake DLC?

The two downloadable story expansions for Alan Wake, The Signal and The Writer, both carry on Alan’s story somewhat, explaining in greater detail what he experiences in the Dark Place. In both expansions he’s confronted with unstable or dangerous aspects of his own personality manifested into other beings by the Dark Place’s power. Alan defeats them - or rather, becomes whole with them - and the stories conclude with him starting to write a new story that will enable him to escape, titled “Return.” However, because he's only starting that story, we don't know if he's going to be successful, only that he's trying.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

If you arm yourself with some Alan Wake tips before you embark on your adventure in Bright Falls, then you'll have a much better change of survival against the shadowy figures and animated objects that repeatedly attack you. These foes can be surprisingly brutal, particularly if you're not sure how to deal with them, so we've prepared some tips and tricks to improve your combat strategy and help you deal with the Darkness in its various forms. We've also covered some other essential pointers, and made sure that there are no story spoilers here, so you can follow through these Alan Wake tips without worrying about reading the final pages early.

1. Fight at range to live longer

This is the most basic fact: Alan is a far better fighter at a distance than he is close up, and most of your battles will be spent holding back melee-focused fighters before they can chop you in half. You don’t even have a melee attack yourself, though your torch beam helps slow opponents, while items like flares are designed to give you space and temporarily drive them away. Enemies will throw things at you regularly, so you should never get complacent, but on the whole it’s better to keep a healthy distance.

2. Learn to dodge and avoid attacks

Speaking of which, dodging is very important as a skill. You pick the direction you dodge when you trigger it, so a poor choice of evasion can still put you in danger, sending you lurching out of the path of one scythe and into another. That means developing situational awareness in battle is important, as you need to see where the attacks are coming from. Once you’ve dodged, hit them with the intensified torch beam or use weapons to push them back for that precious breathing room. 

3. Don't forget to break enemy defences before attacking them

It sounds obvious, but in the heat of battle, it can be easy to forget that you need to remove the enemy’s shields with light. Bullets will do absolutely nothing to opponents still protected this way, and it’s not always easy to tell who’s protected and who isn’t. Enemies who are still protected won’t be that upset by any light that does touch them, likely just covering their face and pressing on, but there’ll be a fizzing noise and a shrinking circle of energy on their bodies when light does hit them. Once that circle shrinks to nothing, there’ll be a sudden flash that shows they’re now open for real damage. Use that opportunity to start racking up headshots, with your torch beam to show where you’re aiming.

4. Listen for extra warnings when you can't see anything

With so much of the game being dark and foggy, audio cues can be as important as visual ones, listening for footsteps, manic chatter or exertion noises. There’s also a rising note that plays when focusing your torch on an enemy, to go with the visual indicator, and animated objects will often announce themselves with an ominous noise, to let you know you need to deal with them fast. Subtitles aren’t strictly necessary, but they can inform you when an enemy is chattering to himself in a hedgerow nearby.

5. Activate and use environmental lights against enemies

Some areas will have lights and lanterns, including those that you can turn on yourself manually. These work just as well as your flashlight and the enemy AI is often happy to walk through them, so by positioning light sources between you and the enemy, you can really burn through them with little effort.

6. Don’t be afraid to switch batteries as you'll have plenty

Your flashlight uses battery power like ammunition, burning through energy when you intensify the beam. It’ll slowly recharge on its own otherwise, but there’s also an option to swap in a fresh battery immediately if you’re in danger and need the light. 

While it’s tempting to try and go as long as possible without using them, the reality is that you shouldn’t be too worried about trying to preserve batteries. You’ll find a lot of them along your journey, and even if you run out, that just sets you back to recharging over time - which you’d be doing anyway if you were preserving them.

7. There's a secret stamina meter, so don't over do it

Being a mediocre airport novelist and not an action hero, Alan Wake isn’t the most physically fit character. The game isn’t too quick to inform you about this, but sprinting and dodging burns stamina (though there’s no on-screen indicator). It’ll recharge over time, but if you exhaust it, you won’t be able to do either for about fifteen seconds or so, a state marked by Alan doubling over in exhaustion. Try not to use either ability unless you need to, otherwise you risk being tuckered out when a power drill leaps for your neck.

8. You can't run and don't try it

Many survival horror games or similar will allow players to try and escape rather than fight. Alan Wake isn’t really one of those, as unless there’s some sort of light source in their way, the Possessed will usually be able to follow you, and a great deal many of them are faster than you are. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be mobile or make the occasional tactical retreat, but simply running away from the fight altogether doesn’t usually work well.

9. Find the light to progress if you're lost...

A lot of Alan Wake takes place in dark forests where the path isn’t always obvious. The general rule, when lost, is to look for sources of light. Even if it’s something small, like a car headlight or a control panel, it usually marks the progression path (assuming it’s not one you’ve been to already). 

If you can’t see any lights, your best option is to look for man-made structures: roads, paths, buildings, devices, anything non-natural. These tend to be the usual location for set-pieces, enemies and plot points, so look for humanity in the environment, assuming you want to move forward.

10. … but explore the shadows for secrets and resources

Of course, there’s also benefits for heading into the wilderness. Though the game provides you with enough ammo and resources on the critical path to survive, you can find a lot more by diverging away from it. Look for tunnels, abandoned buildings, less obvious paths, many of which will have resources and collectibles (though probably some enemies as well).

You should also keep an eye out for the yellow paint markers that only appear when your flashlight shines on them. These painted marks reveal secret routes to hidden resources that can really help in future combat encounters.

11. Find and read the collectible pages

Early on in the game you’ll start to find a new collectible, optional pages from a book that detail events in your own story. While some of these just expand on plot and narrative elements, some can actually help you with future encounters, revealing enemy weaknesses or alerting you to ambushes before they happen. Admittedly, most of them won’t do this, instead building on character or filling in plot holes, but it’s worth checking those you find, just in case. They might be what save your life.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

A new Alan Wake Remastered comparison trailer shows the original game next to the upcoming new-gen version.

You can take a look at the comparisons yourself in the video above. Initially, the most apparent change stems from the environments. The remastered version of Bright Falls is more colourful and detailed, with far more fidelity than the original console version, and better, more varied lighting. Later on, however, as the trailer shows off the enhanced cutscenes, we also get a look at vastly improved character models, including Alan Wake himself, his wife Alice, and retired metalhead Odin Anderson.

Over on the Alan Wake website, you can check out some of those comparison shots yourself, with a helpful slider to make it even easier to check out the remastered visuals right alongside the original images. Particularly interesting are the apparent changes to the HUD - Alan's health bar takes up significantly less space in the corner of the screen, and several of the mission descriptors are entirely absent. The six comparison shots are also excellent at showing off just how much extra detail is on offer in the updated version of the game.

The trailer above shows off Alan Wake Remastered as it'll appear on Xbox Series X, but the game is also heading to PC, and, for the first time, PlayStation consoles via PS5 and PS4. Remedy announced its return to Bright Fall earlier this month, ahead of a planned release on October 5.

Feeling spooky as October draws near? Here's our list of the best horror games.

Remember all that less-than-subtle product placement in Alan Wake; the Verizon billboards, the Energizer batteries, and even the limited selection of cars Alan could see? Well, there's good news for those of you who might have been put off by the brazen in-game advertisements; the ads will all be removed in the remaster.

​​An unnamed PR representative for Alan Wake Remastered reportedly told Screen Rant that the upcoming remaster will not feature any of the branded ads and will instead "be replaced with generic in-universe branding".

While it might not sound like a big deal, many of the branding partnerships at the time played an integral part in the game, such as Alan's Energizer flashlight and accompanying batteries. For some, it helped ground the horror game in our everyday reality, while others found the audacious ads a touch off-putting. Now, it sounds as though Wake can use any old batteries he finds, as the advertising agreements have all now expired and will not be honored in the remaster.

There's also good news for those of you who enjoyed the songs and TV shows, too; all of those will remain intact. Yay!

Alan Wake Remastered is coming to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC (via the Epic Games Store) on October 5, a touch later than therumors which came to light a few weeks ago.

Talking of rumors; the highly-anticipated Alan Wake 2 has now reportedly moved into "full production". If you remember, reports that Alan Wake 2 was reportedly planned for development at Control studio Remedy Entertainment first began to circulate back in April, but nothing's been confirmed as yet, even though it ties in with Remedy obtained the publishing rights to the franchise from Microsoft in 2019. At the time, however, the studio was busy with Control, which featured that awesome full Alan Wake-related expansion.

Remedy has also confirmed that it's working on a new game set in the same universe as both Control and Alan Wake, too, which may be an entirely new IP. Here's hoping we'll hear more sooner rather than later, eh?

Here's why we think Alan Wake remains one of Remedy's best and most memorable games.

The Alan Wake Remastered release date is officially October 5, as Remedy confirmed in the first trailer for the gorgeous remake. 

After a brief announcement earlier this week (following a cheeky leak slightly before that), Remedy brought a full-fat trailer to today's PlayStation Showcase. This being a faithful remaster, the trailer can't help being a bit of an anticlimax for those who've played the original. Without wishing to spoil, our hero Alan finds himself alone in the unnerving town of Bright Falls in search of his missing wife Alice. Remedy-grade horror ensues; use your imagination. 

Fortunately, because we already know Alan Wake's got some serious horror chops, we're free to gawk at the modernized graphics, which is the real star of this trailer. The moon is somber, the fog is lingering, and most importantly, the flashlight is crisp and wonderfully reflected. And just look at Alan's hair. The rule for remasters is generally that you want them to look as good as you remember the original game looking, and Alan Wake Remastered has flown right past that bar with some stellar lighting and effects updates. It looks like a lovely, loving touch-up, and we can't wait to play through again come October. 

Alan Wake Remastered is coming to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC (via the Epic Games Store).

As our own Josh West writes, Alan Wake remains one of Remedy's best and most memorable games – a story begging to be replayed and deserving of much more than its status as a cult hit. 

Alan Wake is about to discover if there's any value in exposure. It's a question that every struggling writer must confront at some stage of their career, and the New York native turned Dark Place hostage would certainly have reason to believe that his ten-year strain of writer's block is about to be broken because of it. With Alan Wake Remastered, the writer will be put on the stage he always deserved to stand on – but he didn't get here alone. 

The author made a surprise appearance in developer Remedy Entertainment's Control, working alongside Jesse Faden as part of the fantastic AWE expansion. The 2020 release not only helped to establish the Remedy Connected Universe – officially intertwining the worlds of Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control – it also exposed the character to what is surely his largest audience yet. Control has been played by over 10 million people and released on no fewer than seven platforms. Conversely, Alan Wake launched as an Xbox 360 exclusive back in 2010, had slow enough sell-through that a sequel never made it past pre-production, and ultimately spent a spell in limbo after expiring music licenses forced the game to be pulled from digital storefronts. 

Alan Wake's appearance in Control showed that there's still plenty of stories for the author to tell and plenty of people out there that are excited to hear them. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrated that there's still a mass of players out there who deserve to experience 'Departure' for themselves – that's the mysterious horror manuscript that Wake has no memory of writing but has otherwise sprung to life and enveloped the sleepy town of Bright Falls in a nightmare it cannot wake from. 

The story continues

I was always disappointed that Alan Wake became a cult classic. In a parallel timeline, it may have propelled Remedy toward being one of the most sought-after action developers of its generation, those qualities reflected in Alan Wake's intuitive gunplay and evocative scenario design. Instead of waiting a decade for Wake to make a return in a cameo role, perhaps we'd have further explored the depths of Bright Falls and Cauldron Lake with little more than a flashlight in hand. Maybe we'd have followed Wake into the scripts of Night Springs, the in-universe Twilight Zone-style TV show that explores unexplainable phenomena. Or into the pages of his Alex Casey novels, an action thriller series that revolved around a hardened New York City cop that definitely wasn't Max Payne. 

There's reason to believe that we may see some of these adventures in the future, but for now it's worth getting excited over the prospect of seeing Bright Falls rendered in 4K. To experience one of the best adventures of the Xbox 360-era again with the sort of lighting, particle, and atmospheric effects that were so impressively presented in Control's next-gen update. Remedy has also confirmed that the return of Alan Wake will include its two fantastic expansions – The Signal and The Writer – although its 2012 spin-off, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, won't be part of the package. 

That was confirmed to GamesRadar+ by Remedy's communications director, Thomas Puha: "AWAN [Alan Wake's American Nightmare] was a digital-only release, a slightly more arcade-y follow-up to Alan Wake in 2012. That is a separate standalone game and not part of the remaster experience." That's the bad news. The good news is that Remedy has confirmed that "the music is exactly the same; all of the music from the original 2010 game is in the remaster" so expect the likes of Roy Orbison, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Harry Nilsson, Poets of the Fall, and David Bowie to make a return to help punctuate the opening and closing of the game's chapters. 

Alan Wake being treated to a full remaster always felt inevitable. It's an iconic piece of Remedy history; it always deserved a larger audience. Remedy made that possible when it secured the publishing rights to Alan Wake from Microsoft in 2019, leading to Alan Wake's appearance in Control. But it was the two-game publishing deal with Epic Games announced in 2020 that has likely secured Alan Wake's future. Let's return to a statement issued by Remedy at the time: "The first project is Remedy's most ambitious one yet, an AAA multi-platform game already in pre-production. The second is a new, smaller-scale project set in the same franchise. Both games are being developed on Remedy's proprietary, state-of-the-art Northlight game engine and tools."

The second of those two projects, one could surmise, is Alan Wake Remastered. A smaller-scale experience designed to reintroduce Alan Wake to the world – to get younger players and PlayStation owners caught up with the pulpy, supernatural goings-on in Bright Falls. What of that first project, then? Remedy isn't talking just yet, but that ambitious new game, one that is "set in the same franchise" as the smaller project? Well, this is just me trying to flip to the next chapter of a story that's still being written, but I'd guess that Alan Wake 2 is closer than you might think to becoming a reality. 

Alan Wake Remastered will launch in fall 2021. It's being developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Epic Games, and will land on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One.

The Alan Wake Remastered release date has been confirmed by Remedy Entertainment, and it's arriving pretty soon.

Announced via fan site The Sudden Stop, Alan Wake Remastered features the original 2010 game as well as both its The Signal and The Writer expansions, all in newly-rendered 4K visuals. Die-hard fans will also be able to experience the game with commentary from director Sam Lake.

The original game was released exclusively on the Xbox 360, with a PC launch following some time later. Alan Wake Remastered, however, will launch on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC via the Epic Games Store, as well as PS4 and PS5, marking the first time that the game will be available to play via PlayStation consoles.

Remedy is yet to confirm a release date for Alan Wake Remastered beyond "Fall 2021." The good news is that Fall is pretty much upon us, but the even better news is that the launch date may have already been leaked - a Taiwanese retailer recently listed the game, attached to an October 5 release date.

As well as a return to Bright Lake, Remedy has plenty more on its plate. The project thought to be Alan Wake 2 is reportedly in full production, meaning horror fans might soon be spoilt for choice. The studio is also working on two follow-ups to Control - a multiplayer spin-off and a "future, bigger budget Control game." With Wake himself showing up within the world of Control, it'll be interesting to see how Remedy handles its rapidly expanding universe - this remaster might be just the start.

Spooky season starting early? Here are the best horror games you can play right now.

Alan Wake Remastered has popped up on a Taiwanese website with a release date of October 5, 2021.

Without definitive proof, all we can do right now is chalk this up as another Wake-flavored rumor, but industry insider Wario64 (thanks, WindowsCentral) spotted that a remaster of the fan-favorite horror game has reportedly appeared on Rakuten Taiwan with an October release for PS4, PS5, and an unspecified Xbox console.

That's all we know right now, but if true, we should hopefully get official confirmation from developer Remedy sooner rather than later – after all, October is not that far away!

While we're on the subject of rumors, Alan Wake 2 has now reportedly moved into "full production". 

Remedy Entertainment's recent investor report teased that both games included in its two-project publishing deal with Epic Games are progressing well, with its "AAA game project" – widely thought to be that highly-anticipated Alan Wake sequel – moving into full production, while its second "smaller-scale game" remains in "full production mode".

"I am happy with the progress we have made so far in 2021," Remedy CEO Tero Virtala said during the financial presentation. "Our financial position is stronger than before. Our multi-project model is continuously developing and we are approaching a phase where we can launch new games more often and more regularly. We are on track to reach our ambitious long-term growth objectives."

Reports that Alan Wake 2 was reportedly planned for development at Control studio Remedy Entertainment first began to circulate back in April when reporter Jeff Grubb told viewers that "I've heard that Remedy is going to be making Alan Wake 2," with Epic Games acting as the project's publisher. 

It also ties in with Remedy obtained the publishing rights to the franchise from Microsoft in 2019, but at the time, the studio was busy with Control, which – coincidentally enough – featured a full Alan Wake-related expansion.

Remedy has also confirmed that it's working on a new game set in the same universe as both Control and Alan Wake, too, which may be an entirely new IP. 

Here are all the new games of 2021 (and beyond).

Rumor has it that Alan Wake 2 has moved into "full production".

While it's chiefly all speculation and a healthy dollop of fan excitement right now, Remedy Entertainment's latest investor report has teased that both games included in its two-project publishing deal with Epic Games are progressing well, with its "AAA game project" – widely thought to be that highly-anticipated Alan Wake sequel – moving into full production, while its second "smaller-scale game" remains in "full production mode", too.

It also reminded us that Remedy signed a co-publishing and development agreement with 505 Games for a "multiplayer spin-off game of the award-winning Control", plus "collaboration terms for a future, bigger-budget Control-game were also agreed," the report says, albeit not specifically clarified.

"I am happy with the progress we have made so far in 2021," Remedy CEO Tero Virtala said. "Our financial position is stronger than before. Control continues to reach new players, expands into new games, and is a strong proof of our ability to create category-defining games and brands. Our multi-project model is continuously developing and we are approaching a phase where we can launch new games more often and more regularly. We are on track to reach our ambitious long-term growth objectives."

Reports that Alan Wake 2 was reportedly planned for development at Control studio Remedy Entertainment first began to circulate back in April when reporter Jeff Grubb told viewers that "I've heard that Remedy is going to be making Alan Wake 2," with Epic Games acting as the project's publisher. 

It also ties in with Remedy obtained the publishing rights to the franchise from Microsoft in 2019, but at the time, the studio was busy with Control, which – coincidentally enough (or not as the case may be) – featured an Alan Wake-related expansion.

Remedy has also confirmed that it's working on a new game set in the same universe as both Control and Alan Wake, too, which may be an entirely new IP. With so much still up in the air and the subject of so much speculation, here's hoping Remedy confirms one way or the other soon, eh? 

Here are all the new games of 2021 (and beyond).

Alan Wake Remastered has been referred to on the Epic Games Store database.

Earlier today on June 18, VGC first noted that EpicData, a tracking website which pulls new items listed on storefronts, featured a new item codenamed "Heron." Upon further inspection, this item actually refers to "AlanWakeRemastered" in its source files, as well as game developer Remedy Entertainment.

This is a pretty strong indicator that a remastered version of Alan Wake is actually coming at some point in the future. Right now though, there's been no comment or confirmation on the matter from either developer Remedy or Epic Games, so we'll have to wait and see whether the listing actually turns out to be accurate.

If this is true, however, it wouldn't be Remedy's first collaboration with Epic Games. Last year in March 2020, Epic Games announced that they were forming a new publishing label, which would be signing future games from several publishers around the world, including Playdead, Gen Design, and Remedy Entertainment.

Over a year later, we don't yet know what this new game from Remedy actually is. However, last month in May 2021, Remedy revealed in a financials briefing that the game developed in partnership with Epic Games would be "soon moving into full production." 

Remedy currently has four games in the works (that we know of), including the project in collaboration with Epic. Most likely to launch first is CrossfireX, the single-player portion of Smilegate's online shooter, which is currently slated to launch at some point this year. Then there's a free-to-play multiplayer game called Vanguard, and, finally, there's an unnamed fourth game in production, which Remedy previously revealed was smaller in scope than the game developed with Epic.

The Finnish company sure has plenty of projects up in the air. Could they also have room to remaster Alan Wake, an action-based survival horror game that is now well over a decade old? Or has this mysterious remaster been outsourced to another developer? Either way, we're glad to potentially see the Twin Peaks-inspired cult favorite returning. 

If you're after the best setup to get your games looking as good as possible, head over to our Prime Day TV deals guide for more.

Alan Wake 2 is reportedly planned for development at Control studio Remedy Entertainment.

In a recent Twitch stream, reporter Jeff Grubb told viewers that "I've heard that Remedy is going to be making Alan Wake 2," with Epic Games acting as the project's publisher. Grubb went on to say that the game "should kind of be the follow-up that fans of that series want," but that there's little extra information and no word on an official announcement.

In 2019, Remedy obtained the publishing rights to the franchise from Microsoft, opening the door for new projects, but the studio said that its focus at that time was on Control. Now that development on that game appears to have come to an end - complete with an Alan Wake-related expansion - it's possible that a full game could be next in line.

 Remedy has already confirmed that it's working on a new game set in the same universe as both Control and Alan Wake, but that could be an entirely new IP. Meanwhile, Epic announced back in March 2020 that it would be releasing new games from Remedy, as well as titles from Inside developer Playdead and The Last Guardian studio Gen Design. 

The original Alan Wake released in 2010 on the Xbox 360, and established itself as something of a cult hit, but was never offered a fully-fledged sequel - a standalone spin-off released for Xbox Live Arcade in 2012, but a potential sequel was scrapped, with the idea eventually being redeveloped into Quantum Break.

With no official word from Remedy or Epic, it's worth remembering that even if there are plans for a long-awaited sequel, they may never see the light of day. That said, the success of Control and the enduring interest in Alan Wake could make this a great time for a return to Bright Falls.

Here's what Remedy had to say about its biggest releases and its canceled games last year.

When Sam Lake was a kid, he spent his summer holidays on an apple farm in Raasepori in the south of Finland. One day, while exploring the rundown outbuildings, he stumbled across a treasure trove of junk. Among it was an old light switch. He called it his "clicker".

"To me, stuff like that always felt particularly mysterious and magical," he tells us. "I love old rusted machine parts that you can't quite figure out, old telephones and radios." The switch became one of his favourite toys, a magical totem with secret powers.

It wasn't until the little boy grew up and became the lead writer at Finnish video game developer Remedy Entertainment that he realised what the clicker was really for. In Alan Wake – a game about a horror novelist's attempts to save his wife from a supernatural power – the clicker becomes a metaphor. Terrorised by an evil force using his own fiction against him, Wake is trapped between waking reality and nightmare.

Follow the light

"A light switch felt like the perfect symbol," Lake explains. "In Alan Wake's world, the monsters that your imagination conjures up in the dark come true, but they are still destroyed when the lights are turned on. Darkness equals madness and terror, nightmares and death; light equals sanity and safety." The clicker had revealed its true power.

"Follow the light" is the most basic instruction in Alan Wake. When Wake's wife disappears, the player goes on a terrifying journey to rescue her. Wandering through dark, empty forests, deserted saw mills and creepy diners, you encounter the Taken – possessed townsfolk who inhabit the shadows and can only be banished by light – flashlights, flares and the odd UV spotlight.

"Lighting is probably the most important technical aspect in Alan Wake," says Oskari Häkkinen, the former head of franchise development at Remedy. "Light is a weapon but it's also thematically important throughout the game.

We wanted the player to really feel different emotions depending on the amount of light that was present – safety, fear, insecurity, resolution – and to have the feeling of being either totally lost or having a sense of direction by following light. There are so many layers to it that there weren't any off-the-shelf solutions for the lighting. Building the tech allowed us to fulfil the creative vision."

For Remedy, journeying into the light wasn't simple. Development took five years, with more twists and turns than Wake's stumbling, midnight sprints through the woods. A PC version was started then scrapped, and an episodic XBLA release was mooted then abandoned. Had the team realised how long it would take to escape the darkness, they would have reached for the clicker themselves. 

Shifting goals

What really delayed Alan Wake for so long? "The biggest mistake we made," Häkkinen says, "was following a sandbox design. It did not fit with our story-driven focus." Originally, the game was an open-world experience set across a huge map with mist-shrouded forests, an eerie lake, power plants and a Twin Peaks-style town that players could explore.

Like novelists, game designers need to create their worlds and populate them. Unlike novelists, though, game designers also need to create every tree, shrub and rock that world requires. With that in mind, Remedy sent a research team through Oregon and Washington State and across the border into Canada. They took photos of mountains and lakes, diners and motels, visited the Washington locations where horror movie The Ring was shot, and camped out in the Pacific Northwest's woods.

Even after they returned to Finland with 60,000 photos on their hard drive, they still sent the odd request to their publisher's Seattle offices asking Microsoft to fill in some gaps, according to Häkkinen. "We asked them to take reference photos of shrubs and trees, or to go out into the woods to record ambient sounds – at night!"

The research fed into the team's tech, including a proprietary world editor featuring a number of procedural tools that evolved out of Max Payne's MaxEd level editor. With only 55 on-site staff at the peak of production, a surprisingly small number for such a sprawling game, Remedy needed to generate environments quickly.

"An unconventional game requires unconventional tools," Häkkinen explains. "We spent lots of effort in the early stages of development creating biotypes that meshed together, based off the research photos we took. Now, if we place a road in the middle of the world, for instance, the system automatically knows not to put trees or grass on the road. It also automatically generates sprouts of grass coming through the edges of the tarmac and [ensures that] the grass type is in line with the vegetation surrounding the road. In addition to that, it'll add gravel and a ditch on the sides of the road. The effort put into making these systems work saved us time later as no post editing was needed, and they allowed our artists to work very efficiently."

As the team built its sandbox prototype, though, it was apparent that something was missing. The freedom to go anywhere robbed the story of its purpose. As any good horror novelist will tell you, the slow creep of dread requires careful pacing. When players can abandon the search for their wife and go off logging instead, it's hard to maintain the requisite atmosphere.

"A thriller is very much like a rollercoaster," Häkkinen says. "You need those build-ups to make the plunges feel all the more exhilarating. We just weren't getting this in a sandbox design because all the game-istic things you need were detracting from the story being the focal point."

Although ditching the sandbox was frustrating, the game benefited. The open-world engine gave this now-linear horror story an agoraphobic feel. Häkkinen: "Because the environments were naturally much larger, we could make reference to things that could be seen in the distance and so foreshadow events. We could create landmarks so the player always had a sense of direction."

It gave a sense of a unified geographical space rather than a collection of separate levels. "Having flexibility within the environments also gave us the opportunity to make any given path as wide or as narrow as we pleased," Häkkinen explains. "It allowed us to play around with gameplay – narrow stealth areas like when the cops are chasing Wake, and wider areas to allow exploration and that sense of: 'Oh shit, I'm lost... what's in the woods?' So, yeah, it resulted in a much better game and it removed the linear feeling on the whole." It also, on a different level, made perfect dramatic sense: a game about a writer should feel authored rather than emergent.

Tortured soul

Not many games have an author as their protagonist, let alone a horror novelist suffering writer's block. Dishevelled and unshaven, Wake's an unlikely video game hero. "He's a bit of a rock star," Lake suggests. "He's troubled, he has this darkness inside him; he has a temper, he's not entirely in control. In the earliest drafts he was more of a victim, but along the way he grew stronger, more active; he got some attitude, and clear flaws. That makes a character interesting."

Ignoring the usual process of sketching concept art for the character, Remedy's design team instead hired actor Ilkka Villi to play Wake in a series of photoshoots and the inevitable motion-capture sessions. Yet the character's essential trait wasn't so much his look as his voice.

For Lake, who'd previously written the Max Payne games with their hardboiled monologues, Wake's profession made him unique. "I wanted to find a natural storyteller who could tell his own story, and that made me think about a writer. In a way you are playing the story Wake has written, the mysterious manuscript of a novel, Departure, where he himself is the main character."

With its episodic structure, cliffhangers and 'previously on' recaps, Alan Wake makes more than a few nods to TV shows from Lost to Twin Peaks. But it's also a supremely literary game. Stephen King is an obvious inspiration, although there are other influences including Mark Z Danielewski's House Of Leaves – a disorienting, interleaved novel about a strange house in Virginia that's told by a variety of different voices.

"It's one story, but it's many stories at the same time," says Lake, who counts House Of Leaves among his favourite novels. "While those different stories come in different forms and styles, the book still manages to feel like one whole. That's how I see a game. A game is a large entity, and you can fit many things inside it: manuscript pages, radio shows, TV shows, fictional bands and their music, and so on. And they all mirror each other and the main plot, and form one whole."

What difference does it make to have a writer as the hero? Apart from the late sequence where we journey into Wake's imagination, nouns replacing objects onscreen with surreal menace, the game is less about the act of writing than simply surviving. Wake isn't a soldier or space marine; he wears hoodies and elbow-patched tweed jackets, not power armour. He's vulnerable, and that ups the horror stakes. Encounters with the Taken – inky shades that whisper menacing nonsense such as "You're going to miss your DEADline!" – frequently demand flight, not fight.

As you're sprinting blindly towards the next light, the camera often pulls back to reveal a Taken hot on your heels. No wonder Wake's most useful response is his duck'n'dodge move, a slow-mo animation that reinforces how much danger the hero's in. It gives the player an incredible sense of physical peril. Even when you master the core combat mechanics – an innovative combo of using light and projectile weapons – to kick some ass, you rarely feel as powerful as, say, the Master Chief.

The game's horror is more than just visceral chills, however. It's character-driven, too, with a cast of memorable Bright Falls residents emerging from the cutscenes and in-game narrative, from Rose, the over-eager diner waitress with a thing for writers, to the Anderson Brothers, former heavy-metal rockers suffering from dementia.

Then there's Barry, Wake's agent, who's never less than utterly OTT. "We had a saying at the office while working on the game," Lake explains. "'Adding Barry to any scene will make it better.'" 

He's a fantastic piece of comic relief, a character who can flag up all the craziness that's happening within the game. "It gets awfully gloomy for the player to be stuck in Thrillerville for ten or more hours, and the same is true for the developers," Häkkinen suggests. "Barry is Wake's sidekick, his friend, his literary agent and a New Yorker who hates small towns. On top of that he's got allergies to dust, pollen and grass, so you already see how we created this fish out of water by putting him in Bright Falls. He's a character that you either hate or absolutely love." The Remedy team loved the character so much that they named one of their HQ's meeting rooms in his honour.

Reflecting on release

Alan Wake was released in May 2010, an Xbox 360 exclusive that billed itself as a psychological action thriller. Its release slot was scarier than anything Stephen King could come up with, hitting shelves on the same day as Red Dead Redemption in the US. Initial sales reports showed it selling just 145,000 copies in North America in its first two weeks – compared to RDR's May sales of 1.51 million – a fact described by one online news outlet as a "US sales nightmare".

Was it really that bad? "It certainly was a competitive [release] window," Häkkinen says. "We talk about 'bloodbaths' all the time when referring to a window, but there were about six titles that launched on the same day as Wake."

But Alan Wake eventually crept over the one million worldwide sales mark, a progression paced at much the same speed as its slow-burn narrative. "Word of mouth definitely carried Wake through, and it's nice to see people still talk about it as a must-play," Häkkinen notes. It's a game that, like its hero, has survived despite the odds.

Remedy isn't a company willing to run from its fears. After all, as Lake believes, legging it never solves anything. "Whether it's writer's block or some other crisis in your life, it doesn't really matter where you go or don't go, because that old log cabin is your head and the dark waters of the lake that surrounds it are the depths of your subconscious mind," he tells us. "The demons that surface from the lake will come knocking and the only way to banish them is to face them and shine a light on them." With Alan Wake's American Nightmare following in February 2012, Remedy demonstrated that it was willing to step back into the darkness again, ready to light it up.

This feature was first published in Edge Magazine #236. Subscribe to Edge Magazine for only $9 for three digital issues and show your support for long-form game journalism.

Alan Wake rejoined the Microsoft Store sometime in mid-December of last year, more than two years after it was removed due to expiring music licenses.

In May 2017, Remedy pulled the title from both Steam and the Microsoft Store because a number of music licenses were near-expiration. By a number, I mean all of them, including songs that were hand-picked to lay during each individual episode's finale. The game's soundtrack was great, featuring music from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Roy Orbison, and The Black Angels - but that greatness was ultimately its demise. At the time, Remedy looked into relicensing the tracks, which it eventually did, re-adding the game to the Steam store in October 2018. At the time, it was 80% off when it re-joined Steam, selling for just $3 for a few weeks. 

But for some reason, Alan Wake never rejoined the Microsoft Store's listings, which meant Xbox One players could only enjoy the game by purchasing a physical copy. A VG247 article about Alan Wake reappearing on Steam stated that it was coming to Xbox "soon". Well, 15 months later and it's here, according to TrueAchievements.com, and it's listed on the Microsoft Store for $19.99. 

It's incredibly rare to see this kind of thing happen in the gaming industry, at least when it comes to music licenses. Back in January 2018, all Transformers games were pulled from digital marketplaces after Hasbro's licensing agreement with Activision expired. Activision is somewhat familiar with this process, however, as they lost the James Bond license in 2013 and had to pull Blood Stone, GoldenEye, and Quantum of Solace from stores. The company has also had to remove Marvel and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle games. 

It's great to see Alan Wake back, and here's hoping music licensing won't take it from us again in the future. 

Oh, and a Control movie by Rogue One writer Gary Whitta has Remedy's approval, so get ready.  

UPDATE: When reached for official comment, a representative from Remedy Entertainment confirmed to GamesRadar that while the studio does now own the publishing rights to Alan Wake, the studio's focus is on finishing Control. "The only thing we want to clarify, now that Remedy owns the publishing rights, is that we could bring Alan Wake to different platforms if we so choose. We have nothing to announce for now. We are fully focused on Control releasing on August 27th." Of course, this does also seem to suggest that the publishing rights only extend as far as letting Remedy bring Alan Wake to other platforms (such as PS4) but that approval for a full sequel would ultimately be in Microsoft's court. 

ORIGINAL STORY: Remedy Entertainment has obtained the publishing rights to cult-classic action game Alan Wake, the studio announced this morning in a message to investors. But what this will mean for the future of the series is still up in the air, especially when it comes to topics such as a potential Alan Wake 2 or Alan Wake PS4 release. 

To recap, Alan Wake released back in 2010 as an Xbox 360 exclusive and has remained a fan-favourite ever since. While the game sold an estimated three million copies, this wasn't enough to convince Microsoft – the original holder of the IP – to greenlight a full sequel, despite an Alan Wake 2 prototype once existing in pre-production. Of course, we were later treated to two DLC packs that extended the story of Alan Wake, as well as a digital-only standalone spin-off American Nightmare. 

Over 4.5 million games have been sold in the franchise to date and this could be set to increase dramatically as the publishing rights revert to Remedy. This move greatly increases the chance that Alan Wake and American Nightmare could make their way to the PS4 for the very first time, although it would likely be a little ways off were that to be the case. While Alan Wake later appeared on PC, the game was developed using an in-house proprietary engine that incorporated the Havok physics system, so that would need to be optimised to work on PlayStation systems for this to be a goer. Perhaps Remedy could even look into porting Alan Wake into Northlight for a future remaster. Northlight, for those who may not know, is Remedy's current in-house engine that was used for Quantum Break, which was later optimised to work on PS4 in anticipation of Control, which is launching on PC, PS4 and Xbox One this August. 

This news comes as Remedy announced that it has received a "one-time royalty income from previously released games" to the sum of 2.5 million euros. Remedy has noted that this "one-time income" won't impact its financial results for 2019, although it sounds like this will be used as part of the company's push to "invest in developing new games" – a charge being led by the development of Control. It's talk like that which makes us seriously question the viability of Alan Wake 2, at least in the near future.  

Microsoft and Remedy is yet to comment on the news or offer any concrete reason as to why the publishing rights have reverted back to the firm now. This could, however, likely be a result of what occurred back in May 2017, where Alan Wake was temporarily pulled from online storefronts as the music licenses began to expire. Microsoft surprised many when it renegotiated the licenses (the original soundtrack included songs from The Black Angels and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) which ensured that the game could once again become available for purchase in November 2018. The good news is that if you want to try out Alan Wake for yourself, the game is now also available on Xbox One via backwards compatibility. 

So you're going to need to sit tight. This news most likely points towards Remedy publishing Alan Wake and its various DLC on other formats, although there's no timeline for that just yet. In the meantime, the studio is hard at work on getting Control over the finishing line and on developing parts of the story mode Korean shooter, Crossfire X. 

Read more about Remedy's latest action game in this Control hands on preview, which is taking the fight to Death Stranding to be crowned the most unusual action game of 2019.

Rejoice, Alan Wake fans: the cult classic horror game is coming back to digital stores over a year after it was unceremoniously pulled from sale. Developer Remedy Entertainment announced its triumphant return on Twitter earlier today, adding that Alan Wake is already back on Steam and will come to Xbox "very soon." 

The studio also briefly explained how this was made possible. For the unfamiliar: back in May 2017, Alan Wake was pulled from physical and digital stores because the licenses for some of the music in it expired. At the time, Remedy said it was looking into relicensing the music but had "no time frame" in mind. Fortunately, Microsoft has now stepped in and renegotiated the rights to the music so Alan Wake can be sold again. Not only that, the game is back with all the same music. "Nothing has changed," Remedy confirmed. 

Alan Wake is currently available for $3 on Steam - a full 80 percent off its normal $15 price. The discount is good through Thursday, November 1, and Remedy did say the game will come back to Xbox soon, so hopefully Xbox players will also be able to cash in on the cheaper price. And if you missed this odd duck of a horror game the first time around, you really should give it another look. It's not going to wow anyone graphically, but its story and characters still hold up after all these years. 

Looking for more scares this Halloween? Here are our picks for the 20 best horror games of all time.  

Before it finally arrived back in 2010, Alan Wake - one of the hottest, most anticipated Xbox 360 games - had drift into myth territory. Since its unveiling in 2005 many other massive 360 exclusives graced the console - Gears of Wars came and went, Halos came and went, Project Gothams came and went, and Alan Wake stayed… silent. Until, ultimately, many believed the psychological horror was just vaporware and empty promises. However, over in Finland, Remedy’s ambitious project was just starting to come together – and it was changing all the time. Alan Wake was completely removed from Steam recently, making it unavailable to buy on anything but disc, and that kickstarted a renewed interest in the game. If you're one of many people who picked it up, read on for the fascinating story of its creation...

In Remedy’s eyes, the only myth concerned with Alan Wake was talk about delays and inordinate development times. As writer Mikko Rautalahti explains, Remedy Entertainment wasn’t a studio equipped to churn out titles year after year. “It sounds like a really long development time when you look at the years but that’s not really a great way to measure the amount of work involved. It really comes down to man hours. We’re a very small development studio by modern standards. There are studios that put out a game every two years, but they typically have at least two or three times as many people on staff as we do.”

Remedy isn’t just any old small outfit - it’s one that created its own tech. “When we revealed Alan Wake in 2005,” begins art director Saku Lehtinen, “it was clearly in the preproduction phase and the technology was very much in the works. We continued refining everything around 2006-2008, and during this time we also explored and changed many fundamentals of the game. After taking out the time spent on preproduction and tools development, the actual game’s production time was not that exceptional in terms of overall time: a bit over two years.”

Although Remedy stresses the project didn’t overrun its planned production window, there’s one factor which undoubtedly contributed to a chunk of that time: the abandoned sandbox roots. For years we all believed Alan Wake was a cross between Silent Hill and Grand Theft Auto, but in reality the open world was dropped long ago.

“It really came down to the storytelling,” says Rautalahti, dispelling any thoughts of technology troubles. “We make story-driven action games here at Remedy. And yeah, at one point, it was also supposed to be an open world game, with the free roaming, sandbox, and whatever other buzzwords you would care to throw in. That was certainly the trend at the time, and we began experimenting with it.

“Unfortunately, it just didn’t work for us. From a narrative point of view, it’s a very, very challenging game type, especially for a thriller. If you look at what we do in Alan Wake with the environment, the atmosphere and the music, try to imagine that in an open world setting – let’s say you’re going to that meeting with the bad guy at Lovers’ Peak. The soundtrack fires up, the fog starts to roll across the hills, there’s something rustling in the undergrowth. But then the player decides that what he really wants to do right now is some logging missions. So what do we do? Do we stop building the atmosphere and reset the environment? I mean, we can do that. It’s not difficult from a technical standpoint, but the atmosphere just isn’t gonna survive that. We learned that the hard way.”

Even though you never have the opportunity to explore it freely, the open world still exists in the background. “We still have a continuous area of about 10x10 kilometers that is outlined to various levels of detail and follows the original philosophy of a condensed Pacific Northwest experience,” confesses Lehtinen. 

“If it ever puts the story integrity into jeopardy, I do not see us doing the open world quite the way that people are accustomed to. However, creating smaller sandbox-styled sections in our own way to designated areas that stay within the boundaries of the story is not off the table.”

What could have been?

The sandbox world wasn’t the only feature that didn’t make it onto the retail disc. Every scene and element in Alan Wake needed to justify the time investment in order to make it happen – a practice no different from production in any other title – and as you’d expect, not everything made it. Bickering Sheriff Deputies Mulligan and Thornton – two team favorites – suffered that fate, although echoes of their existence live on in the police radio transmissions. “We like those guys, we’d really like to do more with them sometime,” Rautalahti says.

An entire dream sequence was chopped from Alan’s missing time in the trailer park as well. “Wake went from one disturbing scene to another, typically seeing and hearing things that stemmed from his own insecurities and fears – he saw Sheriff Breaker and Agent Nightingale plotting against him, and both Doc and Dr. Hartman diagnosing him as an insomniac alcoholic who exists in a state of perpetual denial and delusions. It was a very fun sequence, but it was also a lot of work, and it wasn’t doing our pacing any favors.”

The best chapter left on the cutting room floor originally lived just before the trailer park. “We had a tour of the gameworld - a seaplane ride where we went to another location on the coast to do some investigating. The seaplane had a very chatty pilot who talked about local events and locations, constantly interrupting Barry as he was trying to talk about the stuff he’d uncovered. Once they landed, there was supposed to be a sudden storm, and the whole thing culminated with this desperate run to the lighthouse.” Sadly it felt like too much of a detour from the main story and so suffered the same fate as the dream sequence.

As Special Edition owners who have played through Alan Wake with the commentary switched on will know, more scenes came close to the snip. Both the trailer park and New York apartment were candidates for the scrapheap. “As far as the New York scenes go, that wasn’t really a question of whether they got axed, it was more a question of whether they got made at all. A lot of time and effort went into creating the New York apartment. There was a lot of justified concern about putting work into what’s essentially a couple of very short scenes,” reveals Rautalahti. “The trailer park was far closer to being cut,” adds Lehitnen, “as it was pretty difficult to script reliably and we kept getting poor feedback from play test results for quite some time.”

Remedy’s concerns proved to ultimately be all for nothing. Both the apartment and trailer park areas functioned as welcome breaks from the intense forest exploration. The negative feedback forced Remedy to look at the playtesting method itself. Playtesters were being asked to trial individual sequences at a time, so Rautalahti deduced it wasn’t surprising to discover the more sedate areas were getting less enthusiastic responses.

“If the only thing you play about episode two is the Sheriff’s station sequence, you’re probably going to think that it’s not very exciting; it’s just people talking. But when you see it in the intended context, as a build-up for the things that happen in Elderwood after that, it’s a whole different thing. Suddenly, it becomes an episode with a nice degree of variety. It was a great example of how much context and pacing matter.”

One of Rautalahti’s most surprising revelations is how the team originally prioritized daylight sections over night. In those days the Taken weren’t just confined to the shadows. “At one point the light worked only as a multiplier. The light didn’t really do anything to the Taken by itself, but you could do more with a little gun in the light than with a hunting rifle in the dark.” But the enemy types didn’t work during the day. “Our enemy concept was very much the I Know What You Did Last Summer-styled man: a dark avenger, whose eyes and thoughts are obscured.”

Remedy experimented with armed Taken but the guns didn’t sit well with the team. “We did not want distant shootouts where the player would try to snipe the enemies from (afar). Enemies had to be able to get on your skin.” The possessed items, however, had a very different origins story: they were birthed from a simple physics issue. One buggy, jittery object was enough to sell the idea of poltergeists to the team, and so Alan’s second major foe was born.

Reawakening Alan for a sequel?

If Remedy was to have a second chance at Alan Wake’s development, Rautalahti is totally clear as to what he’d do differently. “Well, I would never, ever mention the words ‘open world’ in public, for one thing. We have had to work very hard to try to dispel that image during the past year – that’s just a very difficult thing to do. “And there’s always going to be stuff that you didn’t have the time or the resources to work on. The manuscript pages are a great collectible, because they really are an integral part of our story. I wish we could’ve done something comparable with the thermoses.”

The thermoses are an interesting collectible. They were always designed to be basic collectibles, but during the early days they could have filled another role. “Rather than thermoses per se, coffee was actually suggested to be one candidate for a source of player health, if we ever needed one,” admits Lehtinen.

Any regrets will likely remain with the developers, sadly. Alan Wake 2 was definitely on the studio's mind back in 2010, but it shows no sign of ever being created. “There will be more Alan Wake, if we have anything to say about it,” muses Rautalahto, back in 2010. “It’s a bigger story than just one game, and we want to make it very weird and scary and wonderful. I’d like to say that if our offices were wiped off the face of the Earth and all you ever got was that first game it would work just fine as a standalone product. I know some people don’t see it that way, and I don’t necessarily blame them for that, but it’s not intended as a huge cliffhanger, it’s an ending to that story. Obviously, we also set things up for what’s to come, but it’s definitely an ending. It’s not a situation where the bomb is about to explode and you don’t know if they’re gonna make it, or something. We have a very definite story arc and the weird and horrible things that happen to him, and what he needs to do in the end to put things right. Then he needs to do something else. We’ll get to that when the time comes.”

Will the time for more Alan Wake ever come? Seven years after the original release, and one Steam removal later it seems... unlikely. But stranger things have happened, and long dormant franchises like this rarely sleep forever.

Alan Wake's journey through the night is going dark. Developer Remedy Entertainment revealed that the game will be removed from all physical and digital retail channels as of Monday, May 15 due to expiring music license rights. Remedy's planning a special 90-percent off Steam sale starting on Saturday so as many latecomers as possible can start hoarding batteries and blasting shadow zombies.

If you already own Alan Wake or buy it before it's delisted, you should still be able to download it whenever you want - and yes, it's backwards compatible on Xbox One. This change just applies on the purchase side. Remedy said on its official forum that it's "looking into relicensing the music for Alan Wake" but it doesn't have any timeframe for that yet.

Best to treat the delisting as indefinite and - if you haven't played Alan Wake yet - buy it so hard. It's a very competent action-horror game built into and around the best storytelling that Remedy has ever done. And I'm saying that as a massive fan of Max Payne's self-aware, film-noir inspired comic cutscenes. Plus, the questionable DLC epilogue (which contains Alan Wake's "true" ending) isn't all that aggravating now that the whole thing is so cheap.

Alan Wake's American Nightmare, a standalone downloadable followup, won't be affected by this change. Remedy explained that it did the negotiations for American Nightmare's soundtrack but not for Alan Wake's - that was likely handled by original publisher Microsoft. And it is quite a soundtrack, spanning Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" to Poe's "Haunted", not to mention two bespoke songs by Poets of the Fall (performing as fictional elderly rockers Old Gods of Asgard).

Read our list of the 25 greatest video game soundtracks of all time for more surprisingly sweet tunes.

If you played all the way through Remedy's Alan Wake, you know it has one of the biggest twist endings in video games. But if you stopped once you reached the credits, you've missed out on some pretty big revelations that occur in the game's duo of DLC epilogues, dubbed "The Signal" and "The Writer." Well, now's the perfect time to revisit the story-within-a-story thriller, since both The Signal and The Writer are currently listed as free on the Xbox store.

There's no word whether this is a permanent change, a limited-time offer, or what. Either way though, it's free stuff, so I say grab it while the grabbin's good. And like I said, while they're not vital to the overall enjoyment of the game, I'd say these DLC are pretty important. Think of them like a post-credits tease at the end of a movie - the movie's still good without it, but watching will give you new context for the plot.

Alternatively, if you're a Remedy fan, you could pick up the studio's newest game, Quantum Break. Every copy comes bundled with Alan Wake and both DLC at no extra charge. Win-win.

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

Xbox One received another backwards compatibility update today, making Alan Wake, Pac-Man, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night playable on Microsoft's latest console. With the exception of Pac-Man, it's a decidedly spooky selection of games (though I guess you could have a phobia of brightly-colored ghosts, in which case Bandai Namco's arcade classic would be just horrifying for you).

If you're not familiar with any of the above, let me break 'em down for you real quick: Alan Wake is a game about a horror writer whose tales of fiction seem to be coming to life, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the tale of Dracula's son fighting the forces of evil, and Pac-Man is about drug addiction and being haunted by the mistakes of your life - just kidding, it's about collecting dots while avoiding colorful ghosts. Seriously, it's Pac-Man.

Despite its newfound playability on Xbox One, I might suggest holding off on buying a copy of Alan Wake for the moment. Developer Remedy's new game, Quantum Break, comes out April 5, and comes with a free digital copy of Alan Wake plus all of Alan Wake's near-essential DLC. Pre-order Quantum Break through participating retailers and you'll also get pseudo-sequel Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which is similarly backwards compatible on Xbox One.

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

Alan Wake's future has been shrouded in mystery and darkness for years, and not the kind that goes away when you point a flashlight at it. But with Quantum Break just weeks away from its release date, it looks like Remedy Entertainment is starting to shine some light on Alan Wake's Return.

No, really, "Alan Wake's Return" is the name, according to a European trademark application apparently filed by Remedy on Tuesday and spotted by NeoGAF user ekim. And yes, it does share its title with the new book Mr. Wake begins at the end of the final (DLC) chapter of the original game. The trademark is specifically for "games software", so don't worry about it just being a cheeky novelization of the in-game story (which I would still totally read at this point).

The trademark application also lines up with a website domain name first staked out way back in 2007 by Remedy's usual registrar. The alternative spelling alanwakereturns.com was snagged back in June 2015 by the same company, indicating some renewed interest.

Every copy of Quantum Break will come with a downloadable, backwards compatible version of Alan Wake (his story even appears as an overt Easter egg in the game). Alan Wake's American Nightmare tied up a few loose ends back in May 2012, but there's still an ocean of possibility for the insomniac author to navigate - hopefully this all means Remedy will let us dive back in soon.

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

Released five years ago this week, a remarkable weight has always pressed down upon every aspect of Alan Wake, both in-game and upon the production itself. Firstly, the weight of expectation: between its May 2005 announcement and May 2010 shipping, a new console generation had landed and firmly bedded in, with the five-year window seeing huge single-player experiences like BioShock, Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect and Uncharted not only emerge but all spawn sequels.

While Alan Wake didn’t underwhelm upon release, delays served to diminish some of the impact it could have had coming a few years earlier; the marketplace was more crowded, benchmarks had shifted, and while graphics showed improvements with each yearly revision trailered, the 2010 game didn’t dazzle in the way its 2005 teaser had, simply by virtue of the competition catching up.

Expectation presses down on Wake himself, too: he hasn’t written for two years, a once dependable well of ideas long dried up. Everyone - his fans, his agent, his friends, his wife - expects him to come up with the goods, increasingly insistent as time drags on. Upon arriving at their island vacation cabin midway through the first episode, Wake’s wife Alice shouts for him to come upstairs for a surprise, her jeans suggestively draped over the landing banister. To his dismay, the surprise turns out to be not in the bedroom, but in the study: a typewriter. Creatively impotent and unable to perform for the page, he storms out, frustrated. Wake has buckled under the weight of celebrity - his drive stalling as his profile soars. Though lapping up the trappings, he detests the traps of fame, purportedly struggling with substance abuse, barely tolerating encounters with fans, and least one paparazzi scuffle is alluded to.

Remedy Entertainment, which started out with MS-DOS top-down vehicular combat racer Death Rally (one of those “How can they give away this much great game for free?” shareware gems that took up residence on my Pentium 75’s hard drive in the mid-‘90s) created a monster with its follow-up game, Max Payne. With the first of two great sequels and a Hollywood adaptation already on the scene when Alan Wake arrived, Payne was a hard act to follow: a gaming celeb famed for hard-boiled violence, swapped out for an altogether more reticent, trigger-unhappy prospect.

Max Payne parallels feature in-game in the form of Alex Casey, protagonist of Wake’s bestselling thriller series, a headstrong character the author fears he cannot hope to match up to when imaginary threats become corporeal. A collectible manuscript page reveals: “I was filled with doubt. I was nothing like the hero in my books. Alex Casey had gone through his life with single-minded determination, never wavering from his goal.”

The weight of the world rests on Wake’s modest shoulders - time and again, he emphasises he’s all that stands between Bright Falls being consumed by the Dark Presence. Driven by desperation, with a keen sense of responsibility, Wake is an essentially decent guy, and though he can be a jerk at times, stroppy and spoilt, prone to lashing out, such flaws mean that, five years on, he’s still one of the more complex, relatable characters action games have offered up - believably fazed by the horror unfolding around him, he seems as scared as the player. Wake’s weaknesses and asshole tendencies lend him a rare depth, and helped expand the dynamic range of a fundamentally ‘good’ character, laying groundwork for the ground-breaking depiction of moral ambiguities in The Last of Us.

Remedy switched structure early in development, with an initially planned open-world streamlined into linear checkpoints for the sake of storytelling and event scripting. The game’s sandbox origins live on in its custom-built engine, however, with sprawling maps dotted with landmarks visible miles in the distance, and detailed vistas winding way beyond accessible areas. The beaten track is well-camouflaged, enabling a sense of location discovery rather than an obvious path, and the game offers just enough undergrowth to delve into and optional avenues to explore to maintain the illusion of a wider world going about its business as Wake confronts the darkness. I’ve never felt ‘hemmed in’ by Alan Wake, thanks to a lack or arbitrary boundaries, with impassible regions typically defined by geographical features such as rivers, sheer cliff sides and collapsed bridges, and cut scenes seamlessly kicking in to guide progression just before I can stray too far.

The game’s composition may be the result of early compromise, but others since have recognised that carving wider roads for players allows for a more believable sense of passing through worlds instead of being pushed, while avoiding the tonal inconsistencies which can plague true sandboxes - lengthening the leash, rather than removing the reins entirely. Comparable later titles such as 2013’s Tomb Raider and The Last of Us feature areas which allow for multiple approaches, or exist simply to flesh out the universe, visits rewarded not with progression but with a deepening of experience. Players are temporarily free to roam within an invisible perimeter, while compulsory bottlenecks to pass through ensure the story plays out exactly as and when the developers intended. 2011 FPS Rage, which like Alan Wake, offers players the option of jumping behind the wheel for long-distance travel, has been described by id Software’s Tim Willits as “open, but directed”. Such subtle hybridisation of structures has become increasingly commonplace since Remedy prototyped it by chance.

While criticisms of samey combat are valid, the one-two punch ‘eat light/eat lead’ mechanic still stands up - every encounter is fraught, a life-or-death burst of quick improvisation, micromanaged resources, and exploited opportunities. Crucial for a self-styled “psychological action thriller,” the player always feels vulnerable, deft pacing, a restrained, contextually realistic weapon selection and a lack of upgradable stats ensuring Alan Wake doesn’t suffer the curse of an overpowered endgame. The game doesn’t offer precision control response, but that’s half the point - Wake is a man out of his depth, physically unremarkable, not especially unfit but hardly an athlete either. He’s an everyman, albeit one blessed with a gift for churning out page-turners.

Every sloppy movement has real bodyweight behind it, every unballetic action a commitment to the momentum that follows. You know in Dark Souls, when your character isn’t yet strong enough to wield a big sword but you take a swing anyway, and the weight of the weapon carries along you with it? There’s a hint of that improficiency in every movement Wake makes - even the camera seems too heavy for our hero, carrying through perceivable momentum when repositioned.

Wake’s physical shortcomings and inability to outrun enemies serve to give him a unique physical presence, offering the sensation of inhabiting a real body with limitations rather than a generic gun on legs. In dialing down superheroic attributes, many recent action games have similarly cast players as initially less-capable characters. Both the rebooted Lara Croft and The Evil Within’s Sebastian Castellanos are maimed within minutes - players handed damaged goods from the outset, susceptibilities immediately highlighted.

As Wake is thrust into his first combat experience, Lara too must make her debut kill, while run-of-the-mill detective Castellanos’ shaky hand is gradually steadied through upgrades. Perhaps the days of the out-of-the-box badass - the likes of Max Payne - are numbered, thanks in part to Wake. Even the phenomenally competent "B.J." Blazkowicz is no longer impervious, gravely injured during Wolfenstein: The New Order and incapacitated for 14 years, powerless to act as the world is ravaged around him.

Other criticisms leveled at Alan Wake over the years have included characters behaving unbelievably given their circumstances, and mood-breaking product placement. I maintain both are intentional design choices. Wake is oblivious to the clearly possessed waitress serving him sedative-laced coffee, and later agrees to get blind drunk in the midst of a living nightmare, because that’s precisely the kind of daft decisions characters make in the schlocky horror the game homages. Let’s not forget that the book manuscript supernaturally triggering the game’s events has been written under immense pressure and with the guidance of a sadistic editor, with subtlety going out of the window as Wake crams in clichés with a tight deadline looming.

Key influence David Lynch has said product placement in film “putrefies the environment”. With its glaring cell phone ads and branded batteries, Alan Wake intentionally soils itself, slapping on a layer of absurdity and tackiness which screams of cheap network drama, a notion it further parallels and plays with via multiple clips of trashy, in-universe TV show Night Springs. Remedy’s reverence for its source material shines through everywhere, from overt author namechecks to in-car cutscenes in which the game engine emulates a shoddy rear projection effect.

The developer had already demonstrated a keen self-referential streak with Max Payne 2’s in-universe cop show Dick Justice riffing on its predecessor’s plot, but Alan Wake takes this to a new level by throwing the concept of Payne as a celebrated icon into its melting pot of influences: it’s the simultaneous celebration and subversion of genre tropes that works so well, pushing video game postmodernity to a sophistication still yet to be matched. Using Lynch’s Twin Peaks as just one stylistic springboard, Alan Wake achieves a comparable uncanny, undefinable genre quality all of its own.

Perhaps the heaviest weight pressing down on Alan Wake is that of its legacy. With its back-to-back TV episode stylings, the game’s innovative format now feels prescient in the wake of Netflix binges - indeed, lead writer Sam Lake has said DVD boxsets were the structural model. Episodic gaming was still finding its commercial feet five years ago, after decades of piloting, and Alan Wake’s distinct segmentation, with its cliffhangers and recaps was - and remains - a bold design decision. However, its execution is flawed.

The game was followed by two episodes of DLC - both of high quality - which complete the story arc and feel essential to the Alan Wake experience. The disparity in delivering the bulk of the game in one on-disc chunk and then the final act as later, optional downloads seems in hindsight obligating to expectations of the industry at the time (“there must be DLC!”) rather than benefiting the game’s overall presentation. The skewed separation of episodes smacks of compromise, a middle ground between all eight installments being compiled and playable from the get-go - as 2012’s PC port offers - and Remedy releasing each episode individually, maybe one every three weeks, which would have covered the period from mid-May until mid-October 2010, when final episode The Writer eventually appeared. Perhaps Alan Wake, already delayed so long, could have benefited from being delayed just a little longer to see the dawn of the DLC season pass.

Despite positioning the game as the first ‘season’ in an ongoing show, a full-blown continuation has not yet come to pass. Remedy last month released prototype footage of an abandoned sequel, elements of which eventually found their way into 2012’s standalone LIVE Arcade spinoff Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. Meanwhile, rumours of an Xbox One remaster of the original game were sparked thanks to a passing mention on a pre-order survey for the next Remedy title.

With studio focus shifted to Quantum Break (which, given Remedy’s pedigree, looks to be the exclusive which finally convinces me to stump up for an Xbox One), it remains to be seen if another Alan Wake adventure is on the cards. I’ll be downhearted if the enjoyable-but-lightweight American Nightmare is the last we see of him - Bright Falls remains one of my favourite destinations of the last console generation, and is well worth revisiting today. Long after Remedy’s original rockstar Max Payne signed to a major label for a third outing (a label whose own Red Dead Redemption, launching within a week of Alan Wake, obliterated it in terms of sales), Wake remains the studio’s cult quasi-hero, a conceptual trailblazer who suffered the odd misfortune of somehow arriving both too late and too early.

It’s never fair when someone shows you something you could have had, but that’s exactly what original Alan Wake and Quantum Break devs Remedy has done. A prototype for Alan Wake 2 from back in 2010 has been released and in an interview with Polygon, creative director Sam Lake has talked about the original plans for the sequel and the potential future of the noir franchise.

Built on the Alan Wake engine, the prototype is an impressive and tantalising taste of what could have been. Remedy clearly had a strong vision of the future of the series and many of the characters and locations eventually found their way into the much smaller scale Alan Wake's American Nightmare in 2012.

"I, for one, happily killed almost every character in Max Payne. That proved to be a challenge when making the sequel.” says Lake in the interview. “That taught us that with Alan Wake and everything we do, the idea of a sequel and sequels has to be there from the beginning. For Alan Wake, from the get-go, we assumed there was going to be a sequel and we mapped things further out when it came to character, story, details and focus changes."

“Definitely what we have mapped out is a longer thing than the first game and a sequel; there is more to it," he says. "In many ways, we see the universe as a bigger thing. Alan Wake is a very central character, but we have other characters around him like [friend and agent Barry Wheeler] and his wife Alice and Sheriff Sarah Breaker and other characters there. We feel this is a big universe to develop and explore in many ways."

Given that it sold 4.5 million copies on Xbox 360 and PC it also made financial sense for there to be a follow up and Remedy developed the above video - amongst others - to pitch the themes and style. However discussions with Microsoft on the project eventually transformed into the creation of Xbox One exclusive Quantum Break now due in 2016.

Lake isn’t afraid to discuss the future of the Wake franchise even though Remedy is currently working on Quantum Break. “The team and the work is very much focussed on Quantum break,” he says. “We are living in Quantum Break land and enjoying ourselves but at the same time we are in a place where we are starting to look into the future and starting to have discussions about what is next.”

“Among other things, we are discussing the possibility of an Alan Wake sequel with multiple partners but nothing has been decided.” This prototype is no mere sketch or loose idea. It clearly contains a world that Remedy wants to explore further and with Lake also praising the episodic storytelling of developers like Telltale Game, this is a hopeful sign that somewhere down the line we’ll get the Alan Wake sequel we deserve.

Alan Wake is the subject of the latest Weekly Humble Bundle. But along with pay-as-you-like savings on the first game, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and previously unreleased materials including videos and comics, series developer Remedy offers its condolences.

Remedy's Quantum Break was one of only a few new games showcased at Microsoft's Xbox One reveal on May 21; it's an exciting new project, but it also means the studio won't be working on an Alan Wake sequel for quite some time.

That's Creative Director Sam Lake (who you may know better as the original face of Max Payne). Quantum Break is evidently the new project he teased near the end of 2012.

The news may be a disappointment to eager fans, but a straight-talk video and previously unreleased content is a good way to break it.

When Max Payne studio Remedy Entertainment moved on from the adventures of a hardboiled cop to insomniac author Alan Wake (who also shoots stuff), gamers let forth a collective "hm." But almost three years later, the unique horror shooter has carved out a comfortable niche.

"We've moved over two million copies--that's including PC," Oskari Häkkinen, Remedy's head of franchise development, told CVG. "So after a slow start it's turning into something really positive. It's definitely had legs. I think narrative experiences just have a tendency for that."

Alan Wake finally hit PC in February. A year before that, downloadable exclusive Alan Wake's American Nightmare enjoyed a warm reception. Häkkinen said Remedy is hopeful about its original franchise's future.

"Alan Wake is definitely very close to our hearts. It's our IP--we own it. It's not something that we're going to forget very easily."

We'll soon see if another Alan Wake is among the studio's current projects, given this tweet by Remedy Creative Director Sam Lake:

Alan Wake is a man as mysterious as his first game, an enigmatic title that ended its long development with a release that was impressively ambitious. Of course, not all those ambitions were fulfilled, but the creepy adventure was successful at telling a story that left a dedicated audience clamoring for more. The writer’s second adventure (not necessarily a sequel) may be a smaller XBLA-exclusive downloadable, but Alan Wake’s American Nightmare builds wonderfully on everything the first game did so well. We just wish it didn’t have to repeat itself so often.

American Nightmare’s plot starts oddly enough, mostly due to the original title (and its downloadable epilogue) giving few answers and little closure. Taking place some time after the last game, Wake finds himself spit back into reality (or is it?) to chase after his evil double, Mr. Scratch (or is he?). This drops him in the arid desert of Arizona (or is it?) where he needs to use his reality warping powers of creativity to save himself and a trio of women he meets along the way (or does he?).

A mysterious air hangs over the entire plot, as you aren’t sure just how real everything is, or if Wake is merely trapped in a clever Twilight Zone homage called Night Springs. That conceit makes for a much different tone than the original, as the Stephen King-inspired grey emptiness of a quiet mountain town is replaced with a dangerous, rocky desert filled with enemies. Dense forests being replaced for big open spaces is one of the many ways AWAN differentiates itself from its predecessor.

The tone is also thankfully lightened compared to the (at times) too serious first game, as Wake’s hushed tones about the power of writing and other philosophizing have been mostly replaced for the better. The game is now narrated by the Rod Serling-type that introduced the Night Springs series, framing the adventure in an entertaining way. Even Wake’s voiceover for his manuscript pages are more pulpy and fun. As a result, there are fewer frights and disturbing moments, but this tonal shift mostly pays off for Wake.

Similarly, Wake’s interactions with other characters is improved too, as the once confused hero now knows his purpose and has many of the answers he once was fumbling for. The morose leading man, once unsure of so many things, knows what he’s fighting for and won’t give up so easily. It makes him more likeable, and thankfully this new clarity for Wake also means the game doesn’t have to waste as much time reintroducing concepts like the combat.

Story and the power of narrative are still paramount to Wake, but AWAN indulges itself by truly embracing its exciting gunplay. Gone is the awkward platforming and other strange diversions, as the main focus of the gameplay is blasting away a steady stream of the darkness-covered Taken that are lurking behind every rock and abandoned car. Much like the rest of the game, the gunplay is greatly improved by a renewed focus on fun.

Though some will miss the inventive use of words becoming reality from the previous title’s finale, the shooting is more engaging this time around, partly thanks to a deeper armory. Hunting rifles and automatics are replaced by combat shotguns and machine guns that fit with the pulp fiction vibe. You unlock new weapons based on how many pages you collect, giving more value to the plot-enhancing collectible. The battles are further enhanced by a number of new enemy types, including giants that split into smaller men when hit with the flashlight and a creepy fellow that transforms into a flock of birds when you least expect it. This variety keeps the combat interesting for the many times you’ll have to fight your way out of somewhere.

The already exciting shooting has been so improved upon that it’s easily good enough to support its own mode. Called Arcade Action, the wave-based single player side game drops the player into a map, seeing if they can survive the time limit, and how many kills can be racked up in that time. Its complete removal of any plot might rankle some Alan Wake fans, but this variation on Horde was a great extra that proves the franchise’s gameplay is strong enough to stand on its own if it has to.

Those same fans bothered by the lack of plot in Arcade Action will be similarly disappointed if they expect the equivalent of a dense novel in this downloadable. Much like its Twilight Zone inspiration, this tells a smaller story, a brief interlude in Wake’s bigger narrative. Yet, even understanding that concept, the story lets us down occasionally, mostly due to repetition and a reliance on fetch quests.

Wake is constantly running back and forth to complete very similar goals. Finishing these tasks occasionally borders on monotony while simultaneously revealing that each area is much smaller than it first appeared, at times diminishing our enjoyment of the setting. Each location gets reused extensively to lengthen the game, but it ends up periodically stretching the content a little too thin.

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare ends up being more inviting than ever to new players, with a clearer plot and goals. The game knows what it does well and highlights it instead of trying too many hit or miss concepts. Despite the sometimes limited scope of its world and objectives, it’s a great downloadable that hopefully will introduce a whole new audience to one writer’s unique world.

Alan Wake is a little over a week away from living out his "American Nightmare" on Xbox Live Arcade, which could be why Remedy is ramping up its promotional efforts with a new Mr. Scratch trailer and details on Nordic Games' port of the original Alan Wake for PC.

Fans of the series will recognize Mr. Scratch as Alan Wake's psychotic doppelganger. In American Nightmare, Mr. Scratch will play a more prominent role, stepping out of the shadows to make Wake's life even more of a living hell. Watch him take shape in Remedy's live-action teaser:

Nordic Games also dropped the details of its incoming Alan Wake Collector's Edition for PC. Over and above the original game and its DLC releases, The Signal and The Writer, the disc will ship with features like The History of Remedy, The Making of Alan Wake, The Making of a Thriller, several Old Gods of Asgard music videos, and several more trailers showcasing the game's art and storyboards. As for non-digital content, the special edition will include The Alan Wake Files, a book delving into the mysteries of Bright Falls; a copy of the game's 13-song soundtrack; six post cards, depicting iconic scenes; seven stickers; and a double sided poster.

Rest assured, those who opt for the standard edition will also get Alan Wake and all of the original DLC, plus the aforementioned stickers, poster, postcards, and soundtrack.

Downloadable versions of the standard edition and collector's editions are scheduled for Steam on February 16, while the retail versions with all the physical extras are expected to arrive March 2.

More interested in the sequel? Alan Wake's American Nightmare will be ready for download on XBLA February 22. Watch what's been going on behind the scenes in Remedy's latest developer diary:

If the makers of Lost or Twin Peaks were to come out with a new series' worth of storyline, released for download-only and far more action-oriented than usual, you'd want to know how this came to be (and probably be quite happy that it did). So Alan Wake, which wears its influences on its sleeve, has some 'splainin to do regarding the shooter-flavored spinoff, American Nightmare. What's the deal, Remedy?

So in short, Remedy is just as prone as anyone else to putting on a grindhouse DVD and yelling at the screen, and it wanted to share that enthusiasm while giving Mr. Wake another outing? Good enough for us. Due on Feb 22, Alan Wake's American Nightmare will run you 1200 MSP and, as you can see, allow you to shoot at least that many enemies...

Many, including us, had a love-hate relationship with Alan Wake. We loved the ambition, but hated waiting five years for it. We loved that it tried to raise the bar of writing in games, but hated when it occasionally fell short of its high standards. And we loved that it took inspiration from Stephen King and David Lynch, but hated when the references were incredibly obvious. Despite all those complaints, we were saddened to see the series go quiet following a DLC epilogue, and thankfully the series has finally awakened from its rest with Alan Wake's American Nightmare.

The XBLA-exclusive download comes out early next year, and we got a chance to sit down with it last week. Right from the start we caught an entirely different vibe from the title, with different approaches to themes, combat, dialogue and level design than before. It looks like the team has been able to reimagine Alan Wake as a new game while keeping the engine virtually the same. And they did it by changing their source of inspiration. No more is Alan Wake about The Shining and Twin Peaks; it’s about Pulp Fiction and the Twilight Zone. Here are just a few reasons why.

1. Much of the pretension has been dropped

Our demo of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare starts with a logo whose color scheme is obviously inspired by the famous Tarantino film, and once we get to the setting, the references to that directors films increase. We’re trapped in a small Arizona town that seems virtually empty, save for an empty hotel and a huge radio tower. He’s quickly called away to help a young woman trapped in a garage that’s being assaulted by the shadowy creatures Wake has faced before. The atmosphere reminds us of From Dusk Till Dawn.

Our shootout with the freaks starts fast, with no boring walk around a dilapidated trailer park or sleepy town. The hardboiled, genre environment is established so fast that no time is wasted looking around. After grabbing the helpful handgun/flashlight combo, enemies were falling as fast as their shadowy auras could be erased. No boring voiceover on the power of dreams or the symbolism of lakes needed. And once the young lady is safe, you can speak to her as much as you want, or just exchange pleasantries and move on to the next objective, improving on the original’s pacing greatly.

2. Dialogue is much more self-aware

That pretention is erased thanks in part to the new approach to spoken dialogue. American Nightmare’s central concept is that Alan Wake, once trapped in his own books, has now been transported to the fictional Night Springs, a fake TV show from Alan’s world inspired by Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. Early in his writing career Wake did a few scripts for the eerie sci-fi anthology and now he’s inside those episodes. Thanks to that the dialogue takes on a more meta-quality, implying that world is in on the joke.

It’s not a parody of those series, though the new narrator is doing his best Rod Serling impersonation, and we preferred the faux-Twilight Zone narration to Alan Wake’s sleepy delivery in the first game. Instead of describing the loneliness of prose, it’s short, staccato description out of a dime store sci-fi with a slight wink to the audience. It aspires to be high tribute to low art, and from what we saw it looked like the team was having a lot more fun with the concept this time around.

3. Alan Wake is a more active participant in his life

The mopey Alan Wake frozen at the bottom of a lake is gone. This time the author is here to get things done. He’s by no means an action film star, but he’s got much more purpose to what he’s doing. He’s faced these monsters before, he knows the rules of this world, and he’s faster and stronger too. Instead of getting to the bottom of a mysterious town, his goal is clear: he has to save his wife from his evil double, Mr. Scratch.

We saw that Scratch is out to kill Wake’s recently freed wife while posing as him, so Wake needs to get out now. Adding to that drive are the new manuscript pages, as he doesn’t just sleepily read it for clues, he uses it to make things happen. He finds out how to knock a satellite out of the sky and smash it into a radio tower to send it crashing down on the world in an explosive barrage wreckage that Wake narrowly avoids. Then he’s is off to his next stop with nary a moment of quiet introspection. In our short demo, American Nightmare might not have felt as smart as the last game, but it doesn't waste as much time either.

4. It has an impressive collection of weapons

Tarantino's movies aren't filled with wall-to-wall action (save for Kill Bill), but guns and violence often plays a big part in them. While the first Alan Wake had its share of weapons, many had to seem at least likely to be available in a small mountain town. Since from the outset we know this Night Springs world is fiction, thankfully the armory gets to grow beyond believability.

We found AK-47s, military grade rifles and handguns, along with makeshift weapons like a particularly rough nail gun. Of course those new weapons would be a waste without new baddies to shoot. After meeting some of the old crew of shadowy ciphers, we found some new guys that included one that splits into four weaker guys when you try to erase his shadow. Another was a monstrous tank of a man we faced in the demo's finale in the observatory, and our favorite shifts between a man and a murderous murder of crows at a moment’s notice. All great inclusions that add to the increased focus on action.

5. There’s a single player horde mode

Just as The Bride faces a seemingly unending stream of assassins in Kill Bill Vol 1, so too does Wake in American Nightmares new mode. Titled "Arcade Action," the story-free feature ties into Xbox Live in ways the original couldn't. Though still single player, the wave-based action is all about survival and high scores.

We began our single playthrough of the mode in a cemetery, and after a few quiet moments as we searched the surprisingly large area for ammo, the monsters were soon upon us. They come in groups, and if you think you can take them all at once, you can keep running until dozens are there, as the more you kill in a row the higher the combo goes. Should you be near death, multiple street lights are scattered around the stage that recharge your health, but once used they disappear.

In our time with it we vacillated between feeling like a darkness- conquering badass and a scared child running to the nearest night light. We did last the entire ten minutes till sunrise in the mode, but after completing it, we were sad to see we didn't top the high score. Maybe next time (and there will be a next time).

By the end of our time with American Nightmare we were glad it would only be a few months before we get the finished product. This continuation of Wake's story may not be Alan Wake 2, but it addresses many of the issues we had with a series that was already very good. We hope that the finished package maintains that same mix of amplified violence and pulpy, genre-loving themes.

We liked the original Alan Wake well enough, though after we finished it we were left wondering why a game in development for so long had so many shortcomings. After the original was announced a half-decade before going on sale, it looks like developer Remedy Games is taking a different approach with the downloadable sequel. According to the developer, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare will be available in the first quarter of next year.

Though no date was given in the above trailer, when Remedy posted it the description mentions the previously unknown release window of saying the game is “set to hit in Quarter 1, 2012.” To think that a sequel to Alan Wake will come out within three months of its reveal feels as crazy as the setting of A.Wake’s last adventure. The XBLA game takes place in Arizona, or an approximation of it that may or may not be in Wake’s head, as he chases down his evil double Mr. Scratch. We’ll know more about the game in coming weeks, so stay tuned for updates.

Alan Wake was a long time coming, and while the 360-exclusive didn’t pay off on all its potential, after playing the two DLC episodes that finished the first game’s story, we still wanted to see where the series was going. It turns out Remedy’s adventure will continue in the XBLA-exclusive American Nightmare. But if you watch the trailer, you’ll notice this downloadable looks like a “real” game. See for yourself…

Picking up on threads left over from the first game, Alan is out to find Mr. Scratch, his evil doppelganger. Taking place in Arizona and promising fewer places to hide, the combat, dodging and gunplay looks to follow the same light vs dark style of the original. Hopefully we’ll have some more info on the title soon, but this game looks like it takes XBLA titles to new heights.