WMG / Alan Wake II

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

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Pre-Release Theories

Alan Wake II will feature an Obsession system, where both the monsters and Alan will drive each other crazy in their attempts to murder one another for the perfect story.

The Obsession can be related to a creator's struggles with writing a story that won't be basted to hell and back by the fanbase for being half-heartedly written, and the critics who hate the genre and take increasingly demented steps to control a story they haven't written but practically (and in the case of the Dark Presence, literally) live in. The more obsessed the player is with playing a chapter 'perfectly' or killing as many Taken and other enemies as humanly possible, the angrier both sides will get.

• As Alan grows more frustrated with how a story is panning out (like dying constantly), he'll grow obsessed with finishing and perfecting the story, shown by the writing and narration growing bitter and jagged. At full obsession, Alan will temporarily lose his fear of monsters and his light powers will peak, but he will also gain an aura of rage that scares humans away and may even murder innocents by "accidentally" writing their doom because they're in the way.
• The monsters start out as mere predators, treating humans as prey and generally not caring about civilization as long as it dies in the end. As their obsession with Wake grows, the monsters will become increasingly angry and unhinged, planning out unnecessarily complicated traps and attacking Wake's low-nutrition friends because they can, to the point that they even kill their own kin just to make the attacks on Wake hurt. At full obsession, they can even perform attacks that delete game progress.
  • Jossed.

There will be Multiple Endings.

This being an Alan Wake game and a Survival Horror game, there will be multiple different endings meant to reflect various potential outcomes for the story. While the idea that Alan is being corrupted by the Dark Presence makes for a good plot-thread, its unlikely that the game will rely on something as a simple as a Karma Meter. More likely it will rely on a player exploring the environment, finding certain notes Alan had made that effect the story, adding an extra layer behind the documents and audo-logs Remedy is so famous in implementing.

Possible endings may be:

1. Both Alan and Saga manage to escape the Dark Place and shut the door behind them
2. Both Alan and Saga manage to escape Bright Falls, but they end up leaving the exit open. We get a shot of Saga and Alan driving away from Bright Falls, but the town becomes blanketed in an ominous storm cloud, implying that the Dark Presence is already plotting its big nefarious plan.
3. Alan and Saga try escaping the Dark Place, only for the Dark Presence to snatch them and plunging all of Bright Falls into the Dark Place, leading to apocalyptic results.
4. Alan and Saga fail to escape, but they wind up finding the Oceanview Motel & Casino and find sanctuary there, safe but stuck.
5. If you manage to collect all the Altered Items in the game, it ends with Alan and/or Saga being detained by the FBC.
6. Some kind of Joke Ending.

Considering Control 2 is confirmed to be a thing, it will be there we find out which ending is canon, or (knowing Remedy), they'll imply that they are all canon in some round-about manner.

• Jossed. No multiple endings given, though the upcoming DLC might change that.
  • With the upcoming Final Draft, there's going to be an alternative ending, so partially confirmed, but partially Jossed as theres only one ending each playthrough can reach.

Alan Wake is trying to reach the Oldest House.

Concept art and trailer footage shows Alan traversing a neon-lit cityscape that doesn't look like Bright Falls. Either Bright Falls has undergone serious urban development in the last 13 years, or Alan had managed to write a parody of New York into the Dark Place. Why would he do that? We know he lived in New York with Alice before finding himself in Bright Falls. Is this him finding a way back to Alice? Or maybe this is him trying to reach out to someone who can actually do something about it!

In Control, it's implied that he used the power of Cauldron Lake to write the FBC and everyone in it into existence, and the FBC's headquarters — the Oldest House, a building that exists in a location where the walls separating realities are thin — is located in New York City. It's likely that he used Cauldron Lake to construct an exit (the Oldest House), now all he needs is to reach that exit. It's implied that he is capable of entering the Oceanview Motel (Jesse finding him behind one of the other motel doors), but he can't use it to escape the Dark Place in any meaningful capacity, like how Jesse can only use it to open up parts of the Oldest House. So instead, he created a sort of underground, mirror version of New York that can reach the Oldest House and escape through there, kind of like how different floors of a building are connected to the same elevator shaft. It's very likely that if anyone went snooping through the Oldest House long enough, someone would find a threshold that leads directly into the Dark Place.

• Relatedly, Alan establishing this connection to the Oldest House will result in Jesse Faden showing up for the final act to help him out. After all, thanks to that transmission at the end of the AWE DLC, she knows something is about to go down in Bright Falls and there's no way she wouldn't want to check it out if possible. Normally, the ongoing FBC lockdown would prevent that, but if Alan builds a backdoor into the Oldest House, there's no reason she couldn't use it to leave. And obviously, such a backdoor would also be a point of exit for The Hiss, which would be of interest to her. Finally, from a storytelling standpoint, it would be a waste of a lot of time and effort for Remedy to build up a connection between Jesse and Alan if they weren't planning to pay it off in some way.

• Jossed. While the FBC is in on what's happening in Bright Falls at the moment, there's no hint that Alan or Scratch are consciously aware of them.

The Darkness is a false god who feeds on Narcissism. The only way to truly destroy it is for one of its thralls to reject their sense of self-importance

The Darkness has latched on to the Aspect of Hastur, the god of getting-lost-in-a-story-induced-megalomania. By making its artists believe they've become the most important people in the world (typically by making them believe they're causing the end of the world), they can harness the artists' inherent need to stand out as a festering cancer- the part of the darkness that stays within them even in the light. But this comes with a weakness; if any artist ever found the impossible strength to write a fate that was worse than dying gruesomely or even being forgotten - to be humiliated, shunned, enslaved, and ultimately made vain as they die in agony - then they've built an antithesis to megalomania that represents Light better than any flare or light switch. In this way, it's a Heroic Sacrifice that is exceptionally cruel and draws Wake's horrible fate out, but ensures the Darkness feels every last inch of his suffering and dies along with him.

Wake: I... I did all of this. I deserve to die!

Saga: No, Wake. You deserve to live. You deserve to escape this horrible supernatural hell. You deserve to be arrested for the many deaths you orchestrated by the pen, and for the killers you birthed for selfish gain. You deserve to be abandoned by your friends, your family, and especially your wife, who will finally be able to reject you and forget the master who beat his slave every day for twenty years. You deserve to be imprisoned for decades upon decades, watching as your books and your legacy are spat upon and burned, and when you finally find your crumb of freedom, to be shanked for pennies and eaten by starving rats.

Wake: W-w-what...

Saga: And you know the most important thing, Wake? The Darkness deserves to feel every last inch of your suffering as it dies. So tell me: what will you choose? Will you 'honorably' end your life and your suffering? Or will you throw yourself in the depths of Hell to unleash a hellfire that will burn the Darkness away, and show this inconsequential plot hole how strong we humans can truly be?

Alice is dead

Since her original VA died in 2020, the writers might decided that the The Character Died with Him out of respect much like with Chadwick Boseman and T'Challa from the MCU. It could also have been recent and explain why Alan is just now trying to escape the Dark Place because he's reached the Despair Event Horizon.

• Jossed; Alice is alive, but is seemingly played by a different actress. Scratch tries to make Alan think that Alice is Dead, but this turns out to be a ploy to psychologically torture him.
  • Actually, turns out Alice is the one to fake her death to make both Alan and Scratch think she's dead.

The game will make reference to the Energizer and Verizon product placement in the first game

Likely as a form of Self-Deprecation; the most Narm-inducing bits of Alan Wake revolved around the product placement, which was thankfully absent in Control.

Post-Release

Zane is Alan's Father, somehow

According to the original game, Alan's mother claimed that the Clicker belonged to Alan's father. In this game, we find out that the light the Clicker came off of belonged to Thomas Zane. Zane was active in the 60's and 70's, and Alan was born in '78, according to supplemental material for the franchise. The fact that they look so similar is partially a case of Generation Xerox.

• A new scene in the Final Draft features Zane meeting Casper Darling, with Darling stating Zane looks familiar and Zane stating Darling sounds familiar. They decide to team up in order to escape the Dark Place. If they end up trying to do the same thing Alan did with Jesse and create a hero to rescue them, then said creation could very well end up being someone who looks like Zane but sounds like Darling, ie. Alan, thus making both of them his "fathers" in a way.

Alternatively, Balder is Alan's father

This is based on a theory that Dean from Gaming University have during his playthrough of Alan Wake 2, where he suggests that Linda Wake was a bit of a groupie, and because Balder was a ladies' man, the two of them hooked up for a one night stand, leading to Linda becoming pregnant with Alan. And the connection to the Clicker, which Linda claims came from his father, is helped that Balder is a god of light.

Alan will reappear as the next Light Presence.

While nowhere near ubiquitous as the Dark Presence, there is reference to an equal-opposite force called the "Light Presence", Thomas Zane's "Diver" persona in the first game being a manifestation of it. Alan Wake II ends with Saga slaying Mr. Scratch in Alan's body with a Bullet of Light (though whether this works permanently remains to be seen), but Alan himself survives the experience, having overcome the Darkness but still stuck in the Dark Place. This theory proposes that in the next game — whether it's this game's DLC, the next Alan Wake game or Control 2 — Alan Wake will manifest a changed man, becoming a Big Good of sorts who overcame his trials and mastered Cauldron Lake's power without the Darkness's negative influence weighing him down, perhaps even becoming some kind of Messianic Archetype guiding lost souls in the Dark Place back into the light.

The reason why Balder is in the Dark Place is...

...because his 'death' was indirectly caused by the Dark Place - what seemed to be leukemia was in fact an illness created by the Dark Place (or the Dark Presence) which led to him seemingly dying and his mind being dragged to the Dark Place.

• Alternatively, he was never sick, he died/was dragged into the lake during one of the band's battles against the Dark Presence and the rest of the band made up his illness as a cover story since "the evil witch from the magic lake killed him" would have sounded crazy to anyone else.
• Alternatively, he's merely a construct of the Dark Place like Sam Lake and Book!Casey, created by either Mr. Door or the Anderson brothers themselves using the brothers' memories of the real Balder.

Building on the above WMG, the reason Loki Darkens doesn't appear in the Dark Place...

...is because he is the only member of the Old Gods who hasn't been affected by the Dark Place in one way or another.

• This would make his last name of Darkens very ironic indeed, which is actually evidence supporting this theory as his fellow non-Anderson bandmate "Fat" Bob Balder was also ironically (nick)named, and was actually skinny.
• Alternatively, if Balder is just a Dark Place construct, then the brothers simply chose not to create a construct of Loki because they didn't like him.

There are 3 clones of Alan Wake

In the final act of the game, Saga finds a working Clicker and magic bullet in the Dark Place where Alan left Alice's photos of them. How is this possible? Because that's what Alice's art does in the dark place! Alan specifically mentions the dark place can work with photography when Casey is interviewing him. She's a photographer, she captures the subject in perfect detail, since she's in the dark place, bringing them to life allows her to duplicate things. What is she doing all 3 times Alan steps through the door of the apartment? Taking a photo of him, thus creating a clone each time. this is how Alan can be killed twice in each loop and survive the ending. He shoots himself at the end of Initiation, and is also shot by Saga at the end of the game... and there's a final version alive in the Dark Place at the end of every loop who remembers what happened, because all 3 are his astral projections from the Dark Place. Every loop he's getting closer because the copy retains whatever he's learning from the experience. ]]

Alan Wake's confusion and frustration in Initiation:1 is meant to represent Remedy's feelings on the Max Payne Movie

Alan's reaction to the adaptation of his novels is fairly negative; he is confused by the introduction of new plot points and character changes that he had never had in the book he wrote, and when asked if he didn't like it, he stated that he was moreso disappointed that he couldn't be involved in the creation of the film. This lines up with Remedy Games' reaction to the Max Payne film, which was so different to the original game that one of its producers, Scott Miller, released an official statement disavowing the adaptation.

The reason Jesse Faden hasn't been able to rescue Alan, and why Alan doesn't even mention her or the events of Control.

There could be a few reasons:

• The events of Control are still on-going, and Jesse hasn't had a chance to escape.
• Alan doesn't want Scratch to become aware of his ace-in-the-hole too early, as he might try to corrupt it.
• Due to Timey-Wimey Ball, Alan hasn't actually written Control (or at least the events of the AWE DLC) yet - he didn't know about the FBC until after first meeting Agent Estevez in one of the prior loops, and while he did forget their meetings, the knowledge of them being there slipped into Scratch's mind, allowing him to write them into Return.
• The Superhero action genre of Control is too far removed from the straight horror story of Return, meaning it won't work as a resolution to the story.
• Alan made The Hiss too powerful, and Jesse needs to focus her resources on keeping it contained permanently.
• Alan is actively trying to keep as few people involved as possible, as he knows that doing so would inevitably put them in danger.

Parautilitarians are the only ones capable of changing reality through the Dark Place

The pieces of Rose's fanfiction that she left in the lunchboxes have had no visible effect on reality despite being created in proximity to Cauldron Lake. Similarly, the nursery rhymes set up by the FBC didn't manifest until Saga (a possible but unconfirmed parautilitarian) completed them. The other known instances of rewritten reality involved either Alan, the Anderson Brothers, or Zane, all of whom would easily qualify as parautiliarian (Alan's generally agreed to be such by the FBC, the Anderson Brothers have their "Seer" ability, and Zane is...well, whatever the hell he is).

New Game Plus theories

As Remedy has explained in the past, New Game Plus (also known as The Final Draft) will not just be a harder version of the game, but the story beats would have changes. This trooper believes that the following changes may be included in NG+:

• Initiation 1 would only have a single "Late Night with Mr. Door" segment instead of the two from the prior playthrough, with the show going radically different due to Mr. Door's warning from the prior playthrough and Alan not needing to be reminded about the plot of Initiation. As well, Ahti would give the keys to get to where the Angel Lamp is after Wake asks for them (assuming he doesn't start with the Lamp and/or the keys)
  • Jossed - both of the original events still happen in the Final Draft, and the key items aren't transferred over.
• The phone calls would be different - Alan may 'ignore' the first call and just grab the subway card, and wouldn't need to talk with Zane during Initiation 5. He would still need to go to Zane for the ticket he needs to get to the Poet's Cinema (again, assuming he doesn't have it before then) and he may make the call to his past self to tell him to put the pictures in the shoebox so that Saga can collect them later
• "We Sing" will still happen, but the Old Gods may have a new song for Alan to go through.
• There may be a boss fight of sorts involving Mr. Door during the time where in the prior playthrough when he warned him about playing his part should Door believe that Alan isn't making things better for his daughter.
• Finally, there may be a fight between Casey!Scratch and Wake at the endgame - and if the Old Gods don't have a new song for "We Sing", then this is where "The Sea of Night" may play.

DLC Theories

• Post-Final Cut, Saga will be glad to be done with the Dark Presence, but now has to deal with a bigger problem: the Hiss. Even worse… if the story makes her go to Ordinary.

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