During EGX 2023, we were lucky enough to sit down with Remedy’s Sam Lake, the Creative Director for the studio, and the man behind some of the biggest games the studio has ever produced, from the Max Payne series to Control, to the upcoming and much-anticipated Alan Wake 2, a sequel thirteen years in the making.
Q. The horror genre has changed a lot in the past decade, can you tell us about some of the tonal changes that make Alan Wake 2 different from the original?
Yeah, I feel it’s a balance of finding elements that connected to the first one, but at the same time, when we were making the first Alan Wake, we were not thinking that it was an actual horror game. We were making an action-adventure game with some horror elements to it. And now coming back all this time later, it kind of was an answer to a few different challenges that we were thinking about.
The idea is that let’s actually make this a genuine horror game now because it brings it closer to what the story and narrative are in any case. Then we can have less combat, not just kind of like constant fighting, because we did get some criticism on that, it feeling repetitive [the first Alan Wake], so now we have less, there is more build-up, more atmosphere, and then really, really intense and brutal combat. And that felt like the right direction as well.
Just the idea that your playable main character is a flawed human being, not a perfect guy in any way. He has problems.
I feel if I think about horror – which I feel is living its golden years now, there is so much popularity like it used to be a niche thing. Now it’s kind of like something that excites a much wider audience – there is much more, I feel, ambition now. I mean, certainly, there’s been that in different places, but a lot of the horror used to be, you know, shock value and splatter and all of that. And that really never kind of like excited me.
I’ve always been drawn to kind of more atmospheric, more psychological, more a mystery of it, like, what is going on? What does this mean? You know, all of this. So that is what we are leaning in, building the atmosphere, building the world, building a layered kind of dense and deep mystery out of this. And I feel that Control was also, you know, a step into this direction, that, you step into the Oldest House and the whole mood and how it’s stylized is a big part of the whole experience. And I wanted to keep on doing that. Yeah, it’s the feel of a nightmare where you are not quite understanding what’s happening to you or what’s real or what’s imagined, and really, really kind of like spinning around those kinds of questions.
Q. Alan’s been in the Dark Place for 13 years and that’s a literal hell. How has he changed from how he was in the first one? How has he changed in himself? How is he different now to what he was 13 years ago?
Yeah. Very quickly, just going back to the original Alan Wake, what we were trying to do and what we – it wasn’t a given because there was also kind of pushback and questioning like, can we do this thing? Just the idea that your playable main character is a flawed human being, not a perfect guy in any way. He has problems. Because that’s done all the time in movies and in books, but in games, there is a lot of this worry that he needs to be likable so that the player wants to be playing as them. But I feel that – well, it felt back then that this is as far as we can go.
Then there was the beginning, the Stephen King quote, and Alan Wake’s continuation talking about unanswered mystery. I feel that that still, to me, is a very big, important part of Alan Wake’s stories. Then the ending, the cliffhanger. It was – we were thinking that this is a cliffhanger and we’ll come right back with the sequel. Here we are 13 years later. But I think that that worked in a great, great way because already back then, we were thinking that, you know, just the laws of drama dictate that he makes this big sacrifice and ends up trapped there. It can’t be easy getting out. So now it wasn’t easy because 13 years [stuck in the dark place]. And yes, it’s a hell.
So for sure, we will find new sides of him and we’ll be peeling away more layers of him and getting kind of to the darkness also, the pain points of the character. And that was always kind of like – and a lot of this was – I was discussing with our actors who combined to form Alan Wake. When we were shooting the material Matthew Porretta and Ilkka Villi were kind of like “How can we see how much of a raw state this man is” and exploring these kinds of tones that you did definitely not get much of in the first game.
Q. It’s been 13 years that he’s been in the Dark Place. How long has it been since we saw him in Remedy Connected Universe’s Control expansion? Or is it just a matter of – it’s two years?
Yeah, like I really like the idea that so far with Remedy Connected Universe and well, especially the Remedy Connected Universe now that we are kind of in the present day more or less. So our universe is advancing more or less in real time. So the events of Alan Wake 2 now, it’s 81st Deerfest and already in the first game, we established that Deerfest happens in the middle of September. So it’s this fall. What we will discover that Alan Wake is struggling with is that because the Dark Place is such a dream reality, time kind of sometimes works in a funny way and can also be more subjective to his experience. So if anything, I would say that for him it feels like more than 13 years. Even longer in the middle.
…in the first Alan Wake, he’s writing and the manuscript pages and all were in a big, big key role, but that really had nothing to do with the actual mechanics or gameplay.
Q. The influences are well documented with Alan Wake, the character, and the game, but the influences, or what inspirations did you have in mind for Saga’s side?
Yeah. Well, like immediately when we bring in an FBI agent, that kind of opens the way to a lot of crime fiction. And also just that combined with the supernatural, which takes us to some of the original inspirations for Alan Wake, namely Twin Peaks – FBI present there as well. We were talking a lot about the first season of True Detective, Fargo, and other Coen Brothers’ things because like they kind of like a quirky setting, but then there is a capable law enforcement person trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I would say even Silence of the Lambs as well, Jodie Foster’s character.
So once again, we are coming in from many directions and just really, really wanted to find ways to expand our roster of hero characters in a new way and in a modern way and do something that we have not done before.
Q. During Gamescom we were invited to a behind-closed-doors demo of Alan Wake 2 and watched 41 minutes of gameplay. The bit that blew me away was the rewriting of reality and finding the right combinations to progress. How did that mechanic come about?
Yeah, that felt really, really important. That was part of the thinking also for going with a horror game is that it’s slower, it’s more exploration-based and that to me immediately says, okay, more opportunities for story and storytelling and we really wanted to find additional mechanics that are about pursuing the story and piecing together the story, which goes to Saga’s investigation and finding clues and piecing them together there too.
But then also with this kind of mindset that ‘let’s be more ambitious with interactive storytelling overall’ and what does that give us? And yes, in the first Alan Wake, he’s writing and the manuscript pages and all were in a big, big key role, but that really had nothing to do with the actual mechanics or gameplay. And so it felt important that let’s find ways to make that part of the gameplay so he’s actually crafting the story and you as the player are joined with him in that and because The Dark Place is a dream reality where you can concretely come up with something that then changes the reality around him. All these different elements kind of led us to it.
Q. Because you said you thought you’d come straight back to it with Alan Wake 2, was there ever a point in time where you thought you might not get to make it? Because I know you had different concepts, pitches, issues, etc.
Yeah. I mean, trying to make it through the years, you spend time on something, you get excited about it, and then you realize it’s not happening. It is frustrating. There is a mourning period.
But that is the case, I feel, in a lot of mediums where you are creating, you know, scripts or, you know, a pitch for a novel or whatever, you need to be fully invested and involved, and then you get told no. So it’s part of it.
I don’t, thinking back, I don’t think that I ever consciously felt that this is now forever behind us and we are not going to return to it. Always felt like, “OK, you know, let’s put this aside now and see if it comes back”. The funny thing overall, I feel, looking back, is that many ideas that have not gone forward on games or story ideas inside a game or a character concept, they tend to come back.
And if it’s not used, you end up remembering them in a new context. And I’m looking at it from an optimistic perspective that many of these things that we had to cut out from something earlier actually ended up finding a bigger role and a better home in something that ended up being in a game later on.
And there we have it, that is our interview – albeit way too short due to time restrictions, he’s a busy man! – with Remedy’s Sam Lake, the Creative Director for the developer, and the driving force behind their biggest and best games.
Whilst things certainly sound promising for the game and the quality of it, they sound nothing but harrowing and a living nightmare of hell for our favorite protagonist Alan Wake. How do you think thirteen years – or perhaps longer if time isn’t that simple, as Sam Lake suggests – has changed Alan? Let us know in the comments!
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