Summary
One of the most hotly-anticipated legacy sequels in gaming is the Remedy titleAlan Wake 2, which follows the titular novelist’s vacation to Bright Falls, Washington that rapidly takes a turn toward psychological horror after he encounters an Object of Power. The originalAlan Wakewas a multimedia experience that included the prequel live-action miniseriesBright Falls, a few other odds and ends, and has since been expanded bythe 2019 Remedy hitControl. With all these pieces of story stretching over a decade of media, finding a way to catch players up posed a challenge.
Recently, Game Rant spoke withAlan Wake 2game director Kyle Rowley and principal narrative designer Molly Maloney about how the Remedy Connect Universe has grown, what it’s like working on a sequel a decade after, and more.The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: To kick it off, how did Remedy specifically envision making a sequel to a game that has its own fans, but also for fans of Remedy games that aren’t necessarilyAlan Wake? How do you balance creating that sequel but also making sure the game is for those fans as well?
Rowley:When we started the development of this game, the first thing that we were thinking about was, what is it that we want to make for this game? How do we want to improve upon the first one? What are the things we did like or didn’t like?
One of the things we talked about quite a lot is how we felt that there was a bit of a dissonance between the story and the gameplay. I mean,Alan Wake 1had much more of an action focus. We had just come off ofmakingMax Payne.
That was one thing that was important for us when coming into this sequel, making sure that we improved on that, so that’s why we shifted the genre. As part of that process, we were also aware that, by the time this game comes out, it’s going to be like 13 years from the last one. So, how can we ensure that people who haven’t played the first one or even if they have played it, how can they be introduced to it in a way that’s not just watching a video basically?
That’s one of the reasons we have Saga Anderson in the game. She acts as a very good point-of-view character for those players. She doesn’t know anything about what happened inAlan Wake 1. She arrives, she doesn’t know what’s happened in the biggerRemedy Connected Universethat we’ve kind of established, but as you’re playing through the game, she starts to learn those things. As a player, you learn with her.
Early on, we were saying, ‘Okay, we need to make sure that we have this kind of perspective in the game.’ Then, withconnections toControlor other things, they are things we want to put in there, but they’re not going to be the focus. We always focus on the product we’re making first, and once we have the foundation for that, we can start layering these other elements.
Maloney:Precisely, it’s like you sit down and think about what will be the coolest thing. The good news is we’re also fans of Remedy, so of course fans are very important to us. We definitely want them to be excited, but the great news is what we’re usually excited by is the same stuff. It’s like, come up with a really cool game first, and then as Kyle said, start looking for the connective tissue. But if it’s not solid, if it’s not a functioning great idea in and of itself, then it won’t matter how connected it is to, say,Controlor something like that.
Rowley:Yeah, we have different teams inside Remedy, and they’re obviously Remedy fans as well. They see stuff and they’re like, ‘holy shit, that’s the game?’
Maloney:Are you going to connect that? Can we use that? Can we use that?
Rowley:It’s kind of cool. We get validation that way too.
Q: Obviously, you have a new co-protagonist. Could you talk a little bit about the risks involved with making anAlan Wake 2where you’re not always playing Alan Wake, but also those advantages of having Saga involved as well?
Maloney:From the very beginning, duality was a core theme of the game like light versus dark, two worlds, two people. This was always two stories.
I think it’s very easy to say, ‘Oh, she’s a great POV character.’ It’s been 13 years. She’s an entry point.
Rowley:That’s why I said all of those things [laughs].
Maloney: She’s all those things [laughs].
But also, she provides a very valuable point of view. Think about it this way. Alan has been steeped and immersed in this world for 13 years. He’s a man on the edge doing his best. But our best is not always…you know, it’s tricky.
Her point of view, as an outsider looking in, provides a really important foil to that experience. She is also on a very functional level and lets us go to those places that I know fans are going to be excited to revisit. She’s in Cauldron Lake. She’s in Bright Falls. Switching between the stories provides a really valuable, refreshing moment. If you’re really stressed out playing as Alan or if you’re really stressed out playing a Saga, switch.
There are a lot of story reasons why she’s a great add. There are also a lot of functional design reasons why I think she’s great.
Rowley:The worry about creating anAlan Wake gamebut only playing him half the time is something we definitely talked about too. That’s why it was very important that we definitely have it be 50/50 between the two. Then, Alan is present in the other side of the game too. It’s not like he’s only present in The Dark Place. We’ve shown some of that in trailers and stuff like that, so there’s definitely enough Alan.
Rowley:I can just tolerate him.
[Both laugh]
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of crafting a narrative perspective with these dual protagonists and having a lot for the player to juggle in their mind? What are the sorts of challenges you’ve encountered with that?
Maloney:It definitely keeps you busy.
Rowley:Yeah, that was also one of the many reasons we wanted to invest so many resources into things like the case board and the plot board because they act as a means for the player to catch up on stuff. If they’ve been playing through Saga’s sequence for quite a long time, they then go back to Alan and you’re able to check your board. You can see what you did before, where you’re at in the game. It was a nice way mechanically to fulfill those power fantasies but also allow the players to catch up on the narrative they’ve done before.
I think that’s the challenge of trying to create these two worlds with these two characters that feel different enough they feel unique. You’re not just playing the same game, but it’s also similar enough that you do not have to be on-boarded all the time about how you play. That’s why we have this duality of whereSaga has a mind placeand Alan has his writer’s room. Saga has the case board, Alan has the plot board. Mechanically, they’re very similar, so I’m not having to relearn how to play the game. But the context is quite different, and what you’re doing is quite different. That was something that we were quite aware of when trying to come up with this concept. We knew we couldn’t create two games here. It needs to be one game that has this kind of mirrored experience, basically.
Maloney:To Kyle’s point, bothAlan and Saga have unique arcs. They have their own course, but then there’s the interplay between those two arcs that creates something new. From a narrative design perspective, it’s like how do we push a great story through the lens of the player experience? How is the player driving that story forward? When planning Saga and Alan’s respective segments, a very important aspect was ‘Okay, what are these two things?’
There’s a uniting goal in them, but it’s not about what you do. It’s how you do it or what order you do it. How does that recontextualize the story? That was one of our biggest goals: allowing you to bounce between the content.
Q: Awesome. I imagine that designing the narrative and figuring out where you wanted to go with all that was complicated. Did the team plan it out completely from the beginning, or did you just find your way through it?
Maloney:One hundred percent. Obviously, the writing team has a story they are very excited to be telling. Narrative design was part of that process from the outline. It’s hilarious: no matter how many times you make a game, plan out the story, see it on paper, and think ‘Yes!’ You stand it up, and then you’re like ‘No.’
I would say there’s a lot of iteration that was involved, particularly because you bond between the lines. Like we understand Saga’s arc, we understand Alan’s arc, but how do they interplay and how does it feel if I do X, Y, and Z? What if I do Y, Z, X? Does that still feel satisfying? If it doesn’t, let’s re-iterate on that. There’s no real shortcut here, in my experience doing this kind of thing. You just have to stand it up, put it in people’s hands, and try to break it. Yeah, we broke it a lot.
Rowley:Basically, the way the game is structured is that you’re on board, you play as Saga, and we introduce her side of the story. Then, we switch to playing Alan, and we introduce his side of the story. When we’re at that point, we like to switch.
There was a point in time where, as long as we allowed you to switch freely, we found that players wouldn’t switch and they’d just dothe whole Saga arc, and then they go back. They were learning new elements of the game from the very beginning again. We’re like halfway through the game, so that was not good. We did a lot of structural changes to influence how people played.
Maloney:We quickly realized there were linchpin moments where you need to understand something. Like, if you’re going to play as Alan, we need you to leave knowing certain stuff, so this other stuff makes sense.
Rowley: Yeah, there was a lot of tweaking and iteration on that.
Q: So, are there moments in the game where it’s apparent to the player that you’ve seen enough as one character, so you should check out the other?
Rowley:No, it’s not like the stories are built in a way where you need to have played either one to understand the other, but they can provide additional context. The idea was it doesn’t matter how you play: those stories will stand up and they make sense. But the important thing for us was that we weren’t allowing you to switch in at the wrong time, rather than the right time. So like, in the middle of a mission that you’re halfway doing, you would then go switch because then you’d come back to that mission and be like, ‘I don’t remember doing this.’
We tried to basically unlock the ability to switch at a point where you’ve had a conclusion to something because that’s much easier to remember than if you come halfway through.
Maloney:It’s kind of like freeway exits. Once you pass the exit, you’re going to play a little longer before the next.
Rowley:That’s a great analogy.
Q: Do you foresee a situation where players will have any agency in how the story plays out? or is it just completely written as is?
Maloney:Well, there is a story we want to tell here, and that is the story you’re going to get. But there is agency in terms ofbeing a psychological horror game. It gave us the opportunity to really put an emphasis on exploration as opposed to the previous game. First of all, how you experience the story is a form of agency, but more than that, if you don’t pay attention, if you don’t investigate, if you don’t look around and keep your eyes open, you’re going to miss things that provide a lot of additional context.
Is the story going to be fundamentally changed? No. There’s a story that Sam and Clay wanted to tell here. It is a cool one, nobody wanted to change that, but you may not get the whole story, depending on how you play.
Rowley:Yeah, there are scenes in each one that provides additional context to the other, so depending on the order you play, when you experience that scene in the other half, you may have more understanding or context than if you didn’t do it first, and vice versa.
[END]
Alan Wake 2releases July 13, 2025, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
