Alan Wake 2is right up my alley, except for the fact that it’s a survival horror game. I know, I know, that’s the whole point, but as I’ve writtensomanytimes, despite my adoration for the genre, horror games scare the shit out of me. I am so interested in its literary themes, its beautiful cinematography, and its somewhat abstracted gameplay, but actually playing it leaves my nerves frayed and my hands shaking. Despite that, after reading my colleague Jade King’sfive-star reviewof the game, I decided to bite the bullet and buy it on Xbox. I’m so intrigued by the game’s style and concept that I’m willing to brave a genre that has historically never worked for me.
First things first, I made my room as comfortable as possible for this experience. The game came out at 12am Eastern Time, which is a convenient and comfortable noon in my timezone. The sun was out and the birds were chirping – perfect for my first dive into the game. I set up a Discord server so I could stream the game to two of my friends, who would watch and add silly commentary so I wouldn’t be so scared. Ideally, when I screamed, we would all scream at the same time, so I wouldn’t feel so embarrassed about being so frightened.
I did, however, still feel embarrassed. There will be spoilers for the first ten minutes of Alan Wake 2 now, but these are presumably very minor in the wider context of a 12-hour game. The prologue section of Alan Wake 2 starts with a gorgeous cinematic, complete with a gently rippling reflection of a dead deer and a camera that swoops onto a naked man crawling out of a lake – that’s you. You control this man, stumbling through a dark forest full of creepy sounds, down a muddy path leading into uncertain danger.
The first time I screamed was when a deer leapt across my path. I rolled my eyes at myself immediately after, of course, but I was surprised at just how much suspense the game had built with its introductory cinematic and creepy setting in just two minutes. My friends were laughing at me, naturally, but we all yelped when the next jumpscare came – an abstract, Rorschach test-y flickering image of Alan Wake’s face accompanied by an eerie, high-pitched screech. “Fuck!” I yelled, then I laughed while one of my friends groaned, “What was that?” Apparently, this is something that’s going to happen a lot throughout my playthrough. My colleague Jade Kingtweeteda video of herself getting scared at a similar scene later in the story. My reaction was much screamier than hers.
My third scream, and the most deserved, was when seemingly out of nowhere, a man with what appeared to be an axe materialised out of the darkness. I’d already made the mistake of spinning my camera around to try and identify the source of a rustling noise behind me, leaving me disoriented and not quite sure where to go. I forced my naked, bloated character further down the path, and shouted a string of curse words that I don’t quite remember now as the man with a weapon appeared from a black mist, then disappeared just as quickly.
There are many reasons Alan Wake 2 isn’t appropriate for children, but the biggest one is the amount of swearing you’ll do every time something jumps out at you.
Thankfully, for the sake of my rising anxiety, I didn’t scream after this, though getting ambushed by a bunch of apparently ritualistic killers did lead me to whine “nooooo, nooooooooo” into my microphone as I ran in the opposite direction. I’m glad to say that the next section, a fairly straightforward investigation into the murder of the man I’d just controlled, didn’t have any scares. That said, entering darkened cabins in the woods reminded me of the clips I’d seen of Detective Anderson shooting at monsters who appeared in buildings looking very much like the ones I entered, which did jack up the tension quite a lot.
Mercifully, I didn’t have a panic attack in the first hour of playing, but considering my colleague Eric Switzer told me in the company Slack, “dog this is one of the scariest games ever enjoy!”, I’m expecting to have one eventually. I’m still going to power through, but I might have to make a cup of throat-soothing tea before I dive in again.
