Alan Wake 2 is out today, and despite some trepidation about its daunting system requirements on PC (which fortunately appears to be misplaced), it’s going very well: Early reviews, for the most part, are positively glowing. (We’ll have our own review up soon.) With the new tale of the struggling author now out the door, Remedy has offered the world some insight into what it has in mind for future chapters.
The original Alan Wake had two DLC expansions, The Signal and The Writer, and that will also be the case for Alan Wake 2: As revealed in Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 FAQ, two paid expansions are planned, Night Springs and The Lake House, each of which will “tell new stories and offer exciting gameplay within Alan Wake 2.”
The first expansion, Night Springs is about “visions and dreams. Fiction is written and coming true. Fiction collapses and remains just words on a page,” the FAQ states.
“Play as several familiar characters from the world of Alan Wake and experience the unexplainable in multiple self-contained episodes of Night Springs, a fictional TV show set in the world of Alan Wake.”
Night Springs debuted as a very Twilight Zone-like television show in the original Alan Wake, and it also appeared in Quantum Break, but clearly Remedy plans to go a whole lot deeper with the concept in Alan Wake 2.
The second expansion is potentially even more interesting. “The Lake House is a mysterious facility situated on the shores of Cauldron Lake set up by an independent government organization to conduct secret research… until something goes wrong,” according to the FAQ. “Explore the Lake House and embark on two separate adventures as the realities of Saga Anderson and Alan Wake collide again.”
It sounds an awful lot to me like The Lake House will somehow tie into Control, Remedy’s dimension-hopping shooter about a shadowy government agency that conducts supernatural research from a base called The Oldest House. Which fits: Control’s second expansion, AWE, is a direct tie-in to the Alan Wake universe.
In fact, it’s all a shared universe: What the studio calls the “Remedy Connected Universe,” something it’s apparently been working on for well over a decade. It turns out that the very strange happenings in Alan Wake were an “Altered World Event” in Control that got out of hand, leading to the crossover in Control: AWE.
Dates for the expansions are not listed, but Remedy told IGN that Night Springs is currently expected to be out in late spring 2024, although that’s subject to change. Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 FAQ also confirms that a New Game+ mode and a photo mode are on the way, although dates for those haven’t been locked down yet either.
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