Nightmare Fuel / Alan Wake II

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why. But there can be no explanation. And there shouldn't be one.

Alan Wake II is Remedy's first ever proper survival horror game, and it absolutely does not mess around. It's Bloodier and Gorier, it's Darker and Edgier, it messes with your mind, and it all comes together to create one of the most consistently terrifying games of recent memory.

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• The Game Over screen when you're playing as Alan, pictured above. It shows a flickering black-and-white image of Wake, dead on the floor in a pool of his own blood with a bullet hole in his head, eyes wide with terror, while Scratch screams at the player in a manic rage. It's startlingly realistic, especially if you're seeing it for the first time, and comes entirely out of nowhere for the player, especially because you start off playing as Saga, whose Game Over scenario is barely more than an ominous loading screen before the game reloads.
• We see firsthand just how much the Dark Place can bend time and space; Alan's been there for thirteen years without realizing it, but when he runs into Tim Breaker, who's been gone for a few hours at most, Tim acts like they've met dozens of times previously.
  • Then there's the fact that Saga is recieving messages from Alan throughout the story as he tries to get out of the Dark Place despite him having already escaped when Nightingale was defeated.
  • And not to mention that the Old Gods are in the Dark Place from the start of Alan's side of the story, de-aged even, despite the fact that they don't dive into the lake until after Saga was tossed into the lake long after Alan seemingly escaped the Dark Place.
• With the Serial Escalation settling in, the Taken have become the actual stuff of nightmares at last. Gone is the secrecy of the night-veiled woods around Bright Falls, and the abandoned mills or trainyards where no one can be heard screaming with it; that's all been thrown out in the sequel. Taken can now appear in broad daylight, and their mad ramblings are even more disturbing when you're trying to pick them out of the woods in the middle of the afternoon, intermingling their old Non Sequitur workplace dialogue with the changed manuscript's lines, as if they embody the story itself. Worse, they're now also appearing in otherwise public locations like the Coffee World park and the darker corners of Bright Falls and Watery.
  • Damaging a Taken now takes the game into full-on Body Horror. It's essentially the "Peeling" system from the Dead Space (Remake), except you're carving up mostly normal-looking humanoid enemies. Hitting a "source point" causes buckets of blood to flow out, and on bosses like Nightingale, you can expose bone and decayed, waterlogged organs. Just regularly shooting Taken in center of mass, however, routinely renders their torso into a mass of red, creating the impression that they really, really shouldn't be surviving what you're doing to them. Most chillingly of all, however, is nailing a headshot on a Taken that doesn't manage to kill it; you're given the nauseating sight of a completely skinned face, with teeth exposed and eyes wide open because the eyelids no longer exist.
  • If you have a good eye, some of the Taken might look familiar to the player, because Saga will likely have seen them when she first arrives in Bright Falls; pedestrians, townspeople, hikers, tourists, all mangled by the darkness and corrupted into its goons. One night later and they're all effectively dead.
• The story not only makes the Taken stronger, the fact that it's a sequel also means Anyone Can Die is in full effect. The biggest named Takens, dubbed the Overlap Guardians because they're fought in sections of the Overlap areas, are all familiar characters a veteran to the series might recognize, all of which having also been given some massive Cerebus Retcons courtesy of the Dark Presence:
  • While Agent Robert Nightingale didn't end up as the next avatar of darkness, he still gets an utterly gruesome fate: after finally emerging from the lake, 13 years after the Dark Presence nabbed him, he's at least semi-coherent and tries looking for help immediately. Then the Cult of the Tree finds him and kills him in a "ritual sacrifice", ripping out his heart, only for the ritual to be interrupted and thereby allowing him to become Taken as a result. In his Taken form, all the bravado and anger Nightingale had is put in service of the Dark Presence, so much so that he repeatedly settles only on "Hemingway" to refer to Alan, his old grudge now only a tool to make him stronger and without the presence of mind to come up with any other writer names as he did before.
    • Closer to Squick compared to the rest of the game, but Nightingale arrives absolutely naked, dies, and there is never any sort of scenery censor when you either find his body or do an autopsy. At least when fighting him, it's too hard to get a good look.
    • Later in the Morgue, just as Saga was undergoing an autopsy on Nightingale, the light flickers and his corpse suddenly reanimates and attacks everybody. Saga finds herself trapped with Nightingale's corpse lurking in the morgue with her only temporary shelter being the light in the autopsy room.
  • The previously comedic duo of Deputies Mulligan and Thornton takes an extremely bad turn, as the two are not only revealed to be members of the mass-murdering Cult of the Tree, there are dialogue moments with the two during the game that hint they've had a racist-misogynistic streak their entire careers. Not only that, the two ended up killing an innocent woman they mistook for a Taken and threw her body down a well in Coffee World so no one would find her, meaning the story effectively destroyed any good will one could feel for the two. The ensuing guilt let both of them be Taken and turned into Guardians, the Dark Presence now twisting the knife even further by mingling their comedic banter with the manuscript lines.
    • The black-and-white visions that Saga gets of them while she deals with them are unnerving - compared to the ones of Scratch being enraged, the ones of Mulligan and Thornton look like the two are screaming in your face with wide-eyed psychotic looks, as if they're going completely insane.
    • Listening to Alan read the manuscript pages that describe these events is no better, if only because Alan usually manages to maintain a level of distance emotionally from the pages he and Scratch write that is all but absent at this point. You can hear the barely-restrained disgust in his voice when he describes the immature and disrespectful behavior that led up to the poor woman's death, turning to legitimate rage by the time you get to the page that describes their attempts to hide the body in the well, thereby avoiding any consequences for their actions and allowing no one who knew her to actually figure out what happened or where she went. Most of the manuscript pages that involve people becoming Taken can usually be inferred to have been caused by Scratch's involvement with the story, but it's not difficult to wonder if Alan deliberately interfered with the two deputies afterwards and allowed them to become Taken out of a desire for justice for their actions.
  • Fitting Mr. Scratch's sadism towards women, what the Dark Presence does to Cynthia Weaver is not only horrifying, it's tragic, moreso than any of the others' cases. It takes advantage of the one moment when she doesn't have her precious lamp (since Rose took it to help "Alan"), plus her years of growing mental instability because of her role as the "Lady of the Light" and her longing for Thomas Zane to basically drag her kicking and screaming into her own bathtub and DROWN her. Not happy with that, the story then uses her Taken figure to do a repeat of Barbara Jagger and seduce Tor Anderson into following her into the Overlap in an attempt to probably take him as well, essentially corrupting her into the woman she hated the most. Scratch used Alan's brief writing lapse to make damn sure one of Alan's old allies suffered extra for helping him, and brought her back as an emanciated and damp apparition that now wants to extend the pain of loss to Saga's own family.
    • The visions of her that Saga gets are among the creepiest, as they show Cynthia screaming in absolute agony and terror in what was obviously her very last moments of life as the Dark Presence murdered her.
• And speaking of the game's Big Bad, Mr. Scratch has gone from a comedic yet still dangerous supernatural serial killer to a fully-fledged avatar of the Dark Presence, one that still carries the idea of being Alan's worst aspects exaggerated to inhumane levels. As a result, he's lost any possible levity from comic relief and became horrifyingly brutal and serious;
  • Part of the full shift into horror is just the way he acts now that its creator has fully taken hold of him: no jokes and all business, full unbridled RAGE at everything and everyone, and most of his spoken lines are said screaming in sheer hatred and contempt for the people standing against him, reinforcing his outburst from the end of American Nightmare that the story now belongs to him and him alone. Alan states that he's basically become synonymous with the Dark Presence itself, and if we take from how Barbara Jagger acted by the end of the first game, Scratch is now a perfect reflection of how it feels: EXTREMELY pissed off, best exemplified by how he's abandoned all pretense of "sophistication" and now tries to attack Saga with a huge metal bar he easily rips from a prison cell.
    • His mere presence is now dangerous too. The FBC had a Black Rock cage and three extremely-powerful floodlights waiting for him at Cauldron Lake so he could be contained. It worked for five seconds. Agent Estevez flat-out says no other paranormal entity did this before.
  • The way he looks now is also unnerving; the three-piece suit is gone and he's basically confined to wearing whatever Alan has since he's used him to leave the Dark Place, until he finally reveals himself at the sheriff's station and kills Jaakko, taking his leather jacket. The slicked-back hair, rugged beard and the jacket make him look like a proper Serial Killer now, with the same Death Glare one would give as well.
• During a trip through the subway tunnels, Alan has to write himself a way through some derailed train cars. Unfortunately, the only story thread he's able to find that can allow him through is one where the Cult has burned everyone in the train cars alive. As such, Alan has to make his way through a variety of corpses that have been burnt to a crisp. Worst of all, however, is that just before Alan finds the door leading out of the car, he comes across a pile of corpses, accompanied by the sounds of fire and panicked screaming. A lot of panicked screaming. As the cherry on top, some of the screaming can be made out as terrified pleading and begging.
  Voice: OPEN THE DOORS! OPEN THE FUCKING DOORS! WHY?! WHY?!
• The Profiling mechanic has its creepy moments on occasion. Saga thinks this is just her intuition helping her analyze a person's thought processes and giving her information, but with the reveal that this is actually a form of Telepathy, it's kind of unnerving to peer into a character's mind and hear someone you just talked to with a cheery or at least "livelier" tone (like Alan or the two Bookers) speaking in a Creepy Monotone what you need to know.
  • It gets creepier when she does it to characters who were Taken, because their pictures in the Profiling "desk" are great examples of Nightmare Face. At least with Nightingale it's understandable, because he was found dead, so of course you'd be looking at a bloated corpse's mugshot. But then you have the Deputies' half-merged picture with their eyes blank, hair messy and darkened and their skin pale, two men that Saga met the day before (if even that long) alive and well, now Taken and corrupted, dead in all but body. And then there's Cynthia Weaver, with her eyes equally blank but also sunken into their sockets, her skin wrinkly and damp from her drowning. It's not only scary, it can be downright hearbreaking for someone who played the first game.
  • Scratch's picture is also severely creepy, fittingly a negative of Alan's face that's heavily distorted and off-putting. But if that wasn't enough, Saga only tries Profiling Scratch once. Why? Because the one time she tries it, he IMMEDIATELY tries taking control of her through the Mind Place. Were it not for her Heroic Willpower, he would've finished the one other threat to his plan right then and there.
  • And then there's Other Saga's picture, which is just as creepy and distorted as Scratch's.
• Thomas Zane may not be malicious, but that doesn't make him unnerving. To start with, he looks like Alan, sans beard and with longer hair, which the game never explains. He also claims that he's a filmmaker rather than a poet, and that Tom the Poet was a character he played in a film of the same name; Saga can find a poster for this film at Suomi Hall in Watery, and it stars Tom as the Diver, Barbara Jagger as the Dark Presence, and is based on a novel written by Wake, who wasn't even born at the time. It's one disturbing Mind Screw after another with Zane, and the game is practically screaming at you not to trust him, but Alan doesn't have a choice. It's even worse if you've played American Nightmare and notice that Poets of the Fall's "The Happy Song" plays over Alan's memories of his and Zane's previous meetings, a song that in AN was only ever associated with Scratch.
• A few times, like in the subway tunnels or the Oceanview Hotel, the Dark Presence takes a page from The Void from Silent Hill: Downpour and becomes an Unrealistic Black Hole that chases Alan until he gets into a safe area.
• The Dark Presence has Taken wolves and they're among the most terrifying enemies in the game. They prowl around, faster than most Taken and hidden by the undergrowth of the woods, with the best way to spot them being to listen for their vicious growling. When they're ready to attack you, they pause for a moment, letting you pick their glowing eyes out of the dark.
• The sheer abruptness of Jaakko's death, going from him taunting who he thinks is Alan to Scratch slamming him against the bars of his cell in mere seconds.
• When Saga is trapped in the Dark Place, with her Mind Place trying to undermine her confidence as a detective and as a mother, it is possible to turn away from the case board only to have a Taken suddenly come screaming at you swinging an axe, who then abruptly vanishes when he strikes Saga. While the game is no stranger to jump scares, this one comes so far out of left-field it's genuinely terrifying.
• One manuscript page in the Final Draft mode ("Lake House", found in the third chapter of Return) reveals that the Dark Presence has infested an FBC site by preying on one of the researcher's need for recognition. Based on how well the FBC's Containment Unit worked against Scratch, it raises the question of just how well the Bureau will be able to handle the situation.
• On the more mundane end, Pat Maine provides an avenue of horror completely independent of the fantastical main plot. The sharp-witted host from the previous game has started getting lost whilst walking trails he's spent his life traversing, frequently loses track of the topic and what he's said on his show, and is starting to forget how to use his beloved radio equipment. While some of the problems are implied to be caused by recalling the pre-Scratch-manuscript town, most of it is simply his senility and dementia is played completely realistically, and the audible confusion and fear in his voice as he struggles to recall what he was doing only seconds before is absolutely heartrending.
  Youtube Commenter thebalzan9475: In a world where reality is constantly being rewritten, having dementia is still the most frightening aspect.
• On the more "normal" side, the people in Bright Falls can chatter and a few have story arcs. As the story goes on, things get more and more unnerving. Of special note is an older lady talking to birds in the park who seems to know way more than she's letting on, and a trio of friends who arrive for Deerfest, only for one of them to go missing, while the others are unable to find her. Presumably the friend became a Taken, but her friends are in tears by the end and we get no confirmation either way.
• A rare piece of dialogue from Ahti shows that, similarly to Maine, even he doesn't seem immune to the effects of Alan's story, claiming that Valhalla isn't his home. The normally unflappable, borderline Memetic Badass Ahti... seems terrified.
• If you enter the room next to Tim Breaker's in the Oceanview Motel quickly enough, you can find and interact with a TV broadcasting video of Dr. Casper Darling from Control, who seems to be trying to get someone's attention through the screen. Watch for long enough, or fail to enter the room quickly enough to interact, and he'll turn to the screen, notice you, and immediately cut the screen out. Alan's lack of commentary on the video does not help make it feel any less unnerving.