Post Script

Does Alan Wake 2 make a case for the connected universe in videogames?

The first announcement of a ‘Remedy Connected Universe’ arrived just as its biggest precedent was in full swing. A few months before Control’s release, Avengers: Endgame had managed to pay off a decade’s worth of interconnected storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, breaking box-office records in the process. Naturally, given how Hollywood operates, every film studio with a faintly applicable property on its roster was trying to get in on the action. Warner Bros launched efforts with its own superheroes in the DC Extended Universe, while also smashing Godzilla and King Kong together to form the terribly named MonsterVerse.

In videogames, though, this approach has been a lot rarer. Plenty of developers have snuck Easter-egg nods and winks into their catalogues, of course, and there’s no shortage of spinoffs from long-running series. But few have attempted to tell a story with shared characters and plot points that necessitate (or at least heavily encourage) following each instalment to get the whole picture. It’s not hard to imagine why this might be the case, given the lengthy production cycles generally required: there’s a reason that the Rusty Lake games, of which there have been 16 since 2015, is the clearest exception to this rule.

Here in 2023, though, there’s also the sense that the entire notion of a shared universe might be falling out of fashion. Just look at most cinematic attempts to follow in Marvel’s footsteps: even those that haven’t gone the way of the Dark Universe have failed to capture the same momentum. Even the MCU has begun to buckle under its own weight, an increasingly rapid flow of films and TV series undermined by both their relentless release schedule and the struggle to find a second saga-sized tale worth telling. So, as Alan Wake 2 finally kicks open the doors of the RCU, how does it match up?

Well, it’s certainly not being subtle about the connections. References to Control’s FBC were guaranteed, given how that game’s AWE expansion ended, but it goes far beyond the monitoring station first glimpsed there, here found in the woods of Cauldron Lake. The Bureau plays a pivotal role in the resolution of the main plot, through the newly introduced Agent Kiran Estevez (Janina Gavankar), a character surely set up to recur elsewhere. Meanwhile, Remedy seems to have found its equivalent of Samuel L Jackson in the unlikely shape of Ahti, Control’s mysterious singing janitor, who appears in both the ‘real world’ and Dark Place halves of the story.

And perhaps its Loki or Thanos, too, in David Harewood’s Warlin Door. A simple thesaurus will help make the connection to Martin Hatch, a character once played by the sadly departed Lance Reddick. The surprising thing, though, is that Hatch doesn’t hail from Control but rather Quantum Break, a game to which Remedy doesn’t hold the rights and which is thus excluded from its connected universe. Not that this seems to be any real barrier for the studio, as evinced by the appearance of a few other familiar faces and voices.

Over the past two decades, Remedy has built up something of a troupe of actors who pop up in a variety of roles from project to project, and that is taken to its logical extreme here. Matthew Porretta both voices Wake and shows his face in a few brief cameos as Control’s Dr Casper Darling. James McCaffrey, the original voice of Max Payne, returns to do the same for Alex Casey, whose instantly recognisable scowl is once again provided by game director Sam Lake. There’s nothing subtle about this reference, but it’s just the beginning of the intertextual, multidimensional layering here.

The ‘real’ Alex Casey is Anderson’s partner, sick of being compared to his fictional namesake from Wake’s book series and now their movie adaptations – where he is played, inevitably, by an actor called ‘Sam Lake’. Casey is Wake’s most famous creation, just as Payne might be Lake’s, and the thin reality of the Dark Place allows the author and character to meet face to face, an encounter that always ends with the murder of the man wearing Lake’s face. It’s a literal death of the author, filtered through a kind of metafictional grandfather paradox.

This plays out both inside the story and outside of it, in our own reality. Take, for example, the final member of Remedy’s recurring cast: Shawn Ashmore. Having joined this repertory as the star of Quantum Break, here he plays Sheriff Tim Breaker. At first it seems like another wink, but over time he begins to reference dreams of another life, one that has led him to pursue Door, the nemesis of his Quantum Break counterpart. (“The guy has many disguises,” he says at one point.) It took Marvel over a decade of movies to expand into the multiverse – Remedy is going there right from the off.

It’s a bold gambit, especially given how the MCU’s multiversal adventures have been received, but it seems unlikely that Remedy plans to explore these parallel universes. Rather, they provide an in-fiction explanation that takes what can only ever be, for licensing reasons, cameos and analogues in order to make them part of the story. Self-indulgent? A touch, perhaps, but if there was ever a place for that, it’s here. Alan Wake has always been about the way that dreams and stories can shape reality, after all. And, as told in E388’s cover story, it was attempts to make this very sequel that birthed many of the games it is now encompassing. That means Alan Wake 2 comes off as something of a victory lap for Remedy. Of course, this isn’t the endgame but just the beginning – and, as Marvel has shown, it’s keeping the momentum going that really matters. In other words, bring on Control 2.Q

It’s a bold gambit, especially given how the MCU’s multiversal adventures have been received