YMMV / Alan Wake II

• Anti-Climax Boss: Cynthia Weaver is a comparatively easy fight for such a late point in the game. She floats in midair for most of the time and is open to headshots, and her attacks in that state can easily be dodged. When she lands on the ground to flail at you, she can have a source point exposed for massive damage. Once you enter combat with her, it can take less than two minutes to beat her.
• Awesome Music:
  • As a throwback to the songs that ended every episode in Alan Wake, this time we get songs specifically written and recorded for this game. The first one announced, RAKEL's ''Follow You Into The Dark'' is a hauntingly beautiful tune that serves as Saga's main theme.
  • Wide Awake, the Chapter 2 ending song provided by Jaimes, is a powerful song that, on top of sounding incredible courtesy of powerful vocals and a catchy melody, is an emotionally powerful one. It's sung from Alan's perspective after he's, at long, long last, been pulled out of the Dark Place.
  • Superhero, the Chapter 3 ending song courtesy of Mougleta doesn't fall far behind. A mournful lament coming at the point when Saga has just started to find out what the story is doing to her own daughter. The song itself is sung from Story!Saga's point of view, calling out just how she failed Story!Logan by not being there when her daughter needed her most.
  • Poets of the Fall brings us yet another song as Old Gods of Asgard: Herald of Darkness. Not only does it give the game an Autobots, Rock Out! moment, the song also serves as important foreshadowing that Scratch and Wake are one and the same.
• Continuity Lockout: In addition to the game being a sequel, players must have also played Control and its DLC expansions in order to fully understand some of the plot elements in AW2 as well as the role of the Federal Bureau of Control. And for full understanding, there's also easter eggs in Quantum Break as well as numerous side materials that the game directly references.
• Goddamn Bats: Taken Wolves. They die to one headshot from the shotgun, but that's assuming you can land that shot. They're faster than humanoid Taken, lower to the ground, and even if you dodge out of the way of their pounce attack, their claws still damage you. And they love to run away from you into the brush and trees around you, making them very hard to track.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • On launch, Saga could cancel her reload animations by pressing the dodge button, but still get a fully reloaded weapon. Sadly, this didn't apply to Alan, and got patched out within a day.
  • A development diary uploaded by Remedy a few months after the game's release shows a hilarious mid-development bug where Alex Casey's character model suddenly rises into the sky. It obviously got fixed before release, but the reveal of its existence spawned a lot of jokes in the fandom, particularly blaming it on coffee.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Casey's repeated brushes with death, both in the Dark Place and the real world, become a lot more somber after James McCaffrey's passing from cancer not even two months after the game's release. Especially his monologue when Saga Profiles him after the attack on the sheriff's station:
  Casey: I'm a goner. Swell. A shadow crawling under my skin. In my head. Call my ex, tell her I'm sorry. Terminal Case Casey.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A number of players commented on the similarity between Ilkka Villi, the live-action actor for Wake, and NFL Quarterback Aaron Rodgers. In 2023, the year of the game's release, Rodgers announced he was going on a "darkness retreat" before deciding to sign and play for... New York.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Pump-Action Shotgun, the last gun you find in Saga's story, can be disappointing. While it technically has better ammo economy than the double-barreled shotgun, you find it much later in the game, and it lacks the double-barrelled shotgun's upgrade that heals Saga on a kill. What's more, there's a very good chance that by the time Saga obtains the weapon, the player will have exhausted all of the upgrade materials in the game, unless they were purposefully saving up manuscript fragments for this weapon or were planning on using it in a Final Draft playthrough.
• Narm Charm: "Herald of Darkness", natch — some of the lyrics are a bit awkward, Mr. Door's facial expressions are (purposefully) way over-exaggerated, and the dance looks ridiculous^*According to Sam Lake, the dance was inspired by the Peacemaker (2022) opening and the calibration poses for motion capture, particularly T-posing and arm circles.... but god damn if it doesn't all combine to be the most awesome thing you've ever seen (bonus points for when you notice Sam Lake clearly having the time of his life)!
  Mr. Door: From what I've gathered, you grew up nice and sheltered, with mama's pretty stories and your own made up furies...
  Alan: [looking absolutely dead serious] And mama gave me a magic clicker - well yes, I think it's true and fair to say.
  [later]
  Mr. Door: So you were drawn to stories early on?
  Alan: My dreams would light up my imagination!
  Mr. Door: And you had nightmares night and day?
  Alan: Yeah, but with the clicker, I chased those frights away!
  Mr. Door: Who knew?
  Alan: [Again, absolutely dead serious] So true!
• The Producer Thinks of Everything: The Cult of the Tree's symbol being a drunken corruption of the inverted black pyramid in the FBC's seal was foreshadowed all the way back in Control, in the backmasked message hidden in "Take Control": "In their drunken fevered state, seeing double, profoundly, the pyramid in the stolen file becomes a spruce tree."
• Realism-Induced Horror: Pat Maine's subplot in his radio shows. While something paranatural may be the cause, his situation is mostly portrayed as a distressingly realistic depiction of an old man steadily succumbing to a rapidly worsening case of Alzheimer's.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Final Draft, this game's New Game Plus mode, was implemented poorly at first; it only checked whatever you had on your first clear, and ignored every bit of progress made afterwards. So if you beat the game without the final inventory upgrade or charm upgrade for Saga, collected everything, and beat the game again, NG+ would prioritize the first clear with less stuff unlocked. This was particularly frustrating as far as the last inventory and charm upgrades go, as they can only be acquired at the very end of the game. Thankfully, this was unintentional, and the game was soon patched to track progression from all previous saves.
• Signature Scene: The "We Sing" chapter in Alan's story, which combines spectacle, backstory, live action sequences, a new weapon (the flare gun), dancing and above all humor in a dazzling musical performance by The Old Gods of Asgard. And to think it was almost cut from the game!
• Slow-Paced Beginning: By no means is it the worst example of this by any stretch, but the first chapter of Alan Wake II does take a little bit to get going. You spend roughly an hour as Saga, piecing together Nightingale's murder. It works well on a first playthrough, since it helps to set the tone, and establishes the stakes of the story, as well as the relationships that Saga has with her peers and her family, but it does take a bit on a repeated playthrough to actually get to the real meat of the story and gameplay.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Surprisingly, to the Show Within a Show Address Unknown from Remedy's own Max Payne. Alan's journey through The Dark Place takes the form of a twisted, dreamlike version of New York City, where he's trying to out maneuver a murderous Evil Twin, aided by mysterious instructions sent over the payphone, complete with the twist that the Evil Twin is actually his own alter ego. The only thing missing is a talking flamingo.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The part where Alan visits a Dark World version of New York City feels quite a bit like Alone in the Dark, specifically the 2008 iteration.
  • There's an argument to be made that this is the closest we'll ever get to a realized version of Hideo Kojima's cancelled Silent Hills. We have several Unnaturally Looping Locations, a highly meta story, otherwise mundane locations being made terrifying, elements of Time Travel all wrapped up in a package of insane graphical fidelity. Helping this comparison is the fact that Sam Lake and Kojima have collaborated in the past, with Lake making a cameo in Death Stranding and Kojima doing the same in Control. Kojima himself retweeted an IGN article that made this claim, so he seems to agree somewhat.
• Squick:
  • Agent Nightingale's corpse looks fairly realistic for a dead body in a video game, and is anatomically correct on top of that. Not something you want to inspect while you're eating.
  • Alan's game over screen makes a very compelling incentive not to die as him, unless you like seeing one of the protagonists with a gaping hole in his head, lying in a pool of blood.
• That One Achievement: "This is the Moment", a simple sounding task where you need to use the dodge mechanic to avoid an enemy attack at the last second. Either Remedy decided to troll the player by requiring cat like reflexes or its glitched. As forum posts from Reddit to Quora can attest, hours of perfect dodging axes, pipes and knives will not bear any fruit. Fortunately, there is a work around, though it seems to confirm the Achievement is glitched. The Taken wolves give this reward easily, to the point it will unlock even if the attack hits. They disappear late in the game, but appear starting in Chapter 3 if one needs to start a new game.
• That One Boss: Thornton and Mulligan are a dual boss that endlessly respawns unless you can unmake points of darkness around the arena. Sounds simple, right? They even drop batteries if you run low! Well, here's the thing: they both have guns. The former has a rifle and stands atop cliffs to snipe you, the latter uses a shotgun that is devastatingly effective at close range. You don't have to take care of any darkness shielding them, but Thornton can also multiply himself if you don't kill him quickly enough. What's more, the motes of darkness you're meant to destroy don't play well with the flashlight boost in this game; if you don't destroy it in one go, you just wasted a quarter of your flashlight's power.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Flashlights work drastically different here than they did in the original Alan Wake, and behave more like they did in American Nightmare; the darkness that protects Taken can't be passively drained by aiming a flashlight in their general direction, and it now has to be boosted. Some Taken don't have darkness shields to mitigate this, but the ones that do dance around in such an exaggerated manner you'd think you were watching Cirque du Soleil put on a puppet show, making it next to impossible to aim your flashlight beam. Even on a target that's standing still, there's no guarantee that the flashlight beam is going to actually work because aiming the beam even slightly off center-of-mass means that you wasted a charge.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Granted, this is a Remedy game, so this was a given, but it's still worth mentioning just how impressive Alan Wake II's visuals are (with the slight caveat that PC players need some good hardware to pull it off).
  • The lighting effects are impeccable, with every single light source dissipating through the fog, rain, and slight condensation to create incredible atmosphere. This is especially great in Alan's New York City with its vast array of neon lighting, and Saga's exploits when the sun is low, casting an orange sunset over Bright Falls and it's neighboring areas.
  • Character models are incredibly well-detailed, with particular attention being given to Alan and Saga's models (obviously, you spend the most time looking at them). Everything about them, from the hair on their heads to the fuzz on Saga's sweater and the seams on Alan's jacket, are rendered in almost photo-perfect detail. Whereas previous Remedy games could potentially be accused of using live-action footage as a crutch for more detailed acting, here, in-game performances are so lifelike that there's no sense of downgrading between the two, and the blending of mediums feels unambiguously like a stylistic choice that enhances the surreal atmosphere and overall storytelling.

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