The benefit for Remedy is that this location means the developers are no longer constrained by the idea of a tangible reality – and it leads to some very interesting game design. While Alan is very much still a survival horror character, and uses many of the new mechanics at work here (see yesterday’s piece for more on that), the way the world reacts to him can be far wilder.

The key difference is in how you get around this world – navigation is less A to B in The Dark Place, instead taking you from A for a few turns around D, a quick detour to Q, and finally to B, where you were hoping to be all along. Puzzles become far more prevalent. In the mission I played, which saw Alan trying to make contact with someone to help him in the Oceanview Hotel, this meant attempting to enter the front door, and realizing I was stuck in an endless loop that took me back outside. To get in, I instead had to find my way through a maze of rooftop doors, fighting off Taken enemies and using a new mechanic that allows Alan to remove light from, or place it back into an area, shifting its very make-up, to finally find my way inside.

Set against Saga’s more action-oriented sequences, it’s a curious, welcome change of pace, and has the benefit of reflecting quite how messed up things have gotten for Alan in the intervening years.

There’s another key difference to Saga – where the FBI agent can enter her Mind Place to help figure out how all of this fits together, Alan instead enters his Writer’s Room, with an entirely different mechanic to work with. Instead of a Case Board, Alan can find his notes on the story of the Dark Place and, as a writer, he can rewrite them.

Alan Wake 2 is getting two Xbox Design Lab controller designs to celebrate release – check out the Xbox Wireless Controller and Xbox Elite Wireless Controller 2 designs.

Take the Oceanview Hotel – upon entering major locations throughout the building, Alan’s notes build on the story of this place – he has notes on the Entrance Hall, the Ballroom, and more. But early on, he finds out that it was once the setting of an unusual immersive theater experience.

Suddenly, I have the option to rewrite these locations in that context – the Ballroom shifts from an empty room to one with a stage and audience seating, unlocking new clues, items, and discoveries. Other areas unlock new doors for me to explore further.

It’s Alan Wake 2’s greatest trick so far – not just using its environments for puzzles, but turning the environments themselves into puzzles. Once you discover that the Oceanview was also the site of a horrific murder, these rewrites become very nasty indeed.

It’s also a perfect opportunity to expand on Alan Wake’s preoccupation with storytelling – the first game had you follow a writer, but the second plunges you into being one, and reflects that by how it tells its tale.

“I think Alan Wake 2 is a celebration of story,” says Maloney. “I take a lot of pride in it – a single player experience that not only is story-driven, it is story all the way down, baby [laughs] It would be very easy to build this game entirely around, say, cutscenes… But one of the things that I think is really exciting about how we work is we don’t want to just give you the easy way out to convey this exposition.”

Remedy certainly haven’t taken the easy way out. Aside from in-game cutscenes, connections to the new Remedy Connected Universe (Control fans take note, there’s a lot to see here), and scattered notes, Alan Wake 2 takes some very interesting turns.

The most unexpected by far is realizing that Alan’s sections will occasionally shift into full live-action, with the in-game actors appearing in costume, on meticulously recreated sets, taking the place of normal cutscenes. Despite being fully realistic, it somehow feels more surreal, only adding to the broken feeling of The Dark Place.