For all its emphasis on nightmarish mystery and confounding dream logic, Alan Wake 2 sounds frightfully coherent. Like a lot of media that high-budget games often seek to embody, Alan Wake 2's development seems to have been focused from top to bottom on its story - or at least that's how it's sounded, from my recent conversation with creative director Sam Lake and game director Kyle Rowley, plus an extended demo of it in action behind closed doors.
As you've probably already heard, Alan Wake 2 will be a survival horror game, rather than the action game that was the series' original, and the team at Remedy had quite specific reasons for it. Part of that is a response to the original Alan Wake's reception - there was some "dissonance," as Rowley put it to me, in the amount of combat Alan Wake featured considering its apparent focus on narrative - but it's also just a better fit for the story of Alan Wake 2 itself.
"Horror gives us a slower tempo," Lake said. "Less combat, through the whole experience, meaning that we can spend time on building it up. And then the actual combat is a bigger event, which means we can add strategic elements, resource management into it, and make it really intense." And then because there are fewer encounters, he continued, that means you're able to have a wider variety of enemies and boss fights as well.