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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?
