ALAN WAKE 2: A Threshold Breaker For Psychological Horror

Introducing the players to a completely different type of psychological horror genre, the Alan Wake series has again fulfilled its role to amaze the player with an outstanding story, fictional characters breaking the 4th wall playing real life actors and with a great sense of music composed in it. Even though the game is of the horror genre, the portraying skills of metaphors used in this game is phenomenal. With a 13 year gap for the second part of the game to launch, the game maintains rhythm with time in the real world.

The game has very interesting characters with everyone having backstories of their own. The story of the game is about a writer, Alan Wake, trapped in the “Dark Place”, which is a metaphor for an endless emotion of despair, often compared to an ocean. The writer finds himself surrounded by dark shadows which are reflections of his thoughts which are eating his mind alive. 

The writer had a backstory of hurting his wife, Alice, which led her to commit suicide, as in the game it is showed the writer is still searching for his wife to save her from his evil doppelganger, Mr. Scratch. Scratch is a character who is trying to break out of the dark place and break free of the boundaries that have been stopping him from hurting others. Scratch is a well-made metaphorical character which portrays Alan’s anger issues. Alan fights the shadows with a magic clicker that his mother gave him when he was a kid. In order to stop Scratch from leaving the dark place and to save his wife, he tries to get out of the dark place. The dark place is being controlled by stories of a book he’d written but didn’t remember. Alan assumed the stories were written by Scratch and the stories were constructed with utter horror and bad endings. To break out of the dark place Alan searches for bits and pieces of the stories and manipulates them in order to break the loops of thoughts the stories had created. The stories were filled with murder mysteries and so he needed to find a murder site to break the loop. His own thoughts would become an obstacle for him making him go through the same mistakes over and over again. Alan was locking himself to keep his wife safe because he doesn’t want to hurt his wife, which was explained later in the game.

Alan found a certain individual who tried to communicate with him inside the dark place, Saga Anderson, a detective solving a certain case in Cauldron Lake. All of the cases in Cauldron Lake are somehow connected to Alan because Alan’s wife died there. The game portrays the lake as a gateway to the dark place, where the writer later refers to the lake as the ocean. Saga’s life was being affected by the dark place. Saga had a daughter, Logan, who died in Bright Falls while they were living there. She was deeply traumatized by that and locked her memories away. As Alan and Saga get connected by the stories, Saga’s starts to see the bits and pieces of Logan’s death. Alan needed to write a new ending for the story. For that he had to conquer a new counterpart of his, Tom Zane, the author, the film maker. Everything is an act for Tom, he’s a fan of Scratch. Alan made fictional characters of himself, each of them a part of him he doesn’t want to accept. Alan kills himself as the Scratch to hit the realization that it was him all along. Alan fell into despair, going deeper and deeper into the ocean.

To stop the evil entity known as the scratch and to save Alex Casey, Saga gets into the dark place. There she found keepsakes of Alice, a picture of Alan and Alice’s favorite place and the bullet of light. She searched for Alan and got in the writer’s room, the place Alan would shut himself in, a place away from responsibilities, the start of it all. The story ended there with Alan killing himself along with Scratch, to end it all, he wrote the ending in the same genre as the story, knowing that there is no true ending in a horror story.

The never ending loop of mystery and horror might differ from person to person, which is why the writer said, “It's not a loop, it's a spiral.”