Debuting today, Alan Wake 2’s second and final expansion, The Lake House, arrives almost exactly one year after the base game arrived. After waiting 13 years for the sequel, it feels too soon to already say goodbye to this chapter of the Alan Wake saga. Thankfully, in the wide, weird world of the Remedy Connected Universe, The Lake House isn’t so much a conclusion as it is a continuation. Just as the studio used Control’s second expansion to build the runway for Alan Wake 2, The Lake House feels like an exciting lead-in to Control’s announced sequel, and perhaps even to its multiplayer spin-off, FBC: Firebreak.
For those who already played the base game, The Lake House fully explores a mystery only hinted at previously. A Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) outpost, The Lake House, has gone dark, and Agent Kieran Estevez, introduced during the main story, is the responding agent and thus a playable character for the first time. For those who finished Control’s second expansion, AWE, the events of The Lake House were hinted at in the final scene of the DLC, when Jesse Faden notices a distress signal that an altered world event is set to occur in Bright Falls.
As Estevez, players will get a new perspective on the high strangeness of Remedy’s quilted story world. She’s no rookie, and where others may cower at the sight of paranatural monsters oozing out of the walls of The Lake House, Estevez is just upset it will lead to more paperwork. As Control players know, even the FBC isn’t safe from bureaucratic red tape.
“[In Control], we do obviously interact with a lot of other people inside the bureau, but it’s in the context of the events that are taking place inside The Oldest House,” game director Kyle Rowley told me during a recent roundtable interview. “Whereas here we’re kind of coming from a slightly different outside perspective. And we were interested in exploring, like, ‘What is the FBC like outside of that headquarters? How does the FBC operate as an agency throughout the United States?'”
That point of view is how The Lake House manages to pull a trick Remedy is getting better at and more familiar with year over year: expanding its connected universe and setting up dominoes to fall in the form of future stories, without alienating players who may be taking it all in more casually or playing these connected games out of order. “We wanted to make sure that the story that we write is self-contained enough and is interesting enough and has its own character arcs,” Rowley told me, “that it’s not something that you need to have played Control to enjoy.”
Still, he says, the team has gone to greater lengths than before to tie the storylines of Alan Wake and Control together, which is interesting when you consider Control’s second expansion was effectively an Alan Wake 2 prologue. Now, the inverse appears true.
“[We] have a lot of narrative objects, including emails between different FBC staff, or like, research documents that are lying around, that if you’re someone who’s really into the lore, that’s there for you to explore […] I think that’s kind of like how we’ve always approached it. On the surface level, it’s accessible for everybody. The deeper you go and explore the world, the more rewarding it can become, especially if you’re heavily invested in our previous games.”
Rowley suggested the team is still learning how to weave this narrative web on a logistical level, with disparate teams on each franchise and everyone’s schedules being routinely overstuffed. However, it’s made possible due to how the studio’s internal Alan Wake and Control franchise teams work together.
“It’s very, very much a collaboration between the two teams, because we are kind of like two separate teams inside Remedy, but, you know, we’re inside the same studio. We’re inside the same building, so it’s very easy for us to just set up meetings and have discussions about stuff,” he said. The Control team has a certain aesthetic this expansion needed to honor, Rowley told me, noting that it’s “not just visual, but also audible.” That led to the teams trading notes and ideas so that The Lake House could feel like the Alan Wake 2 expansion it first and foremost is while also building out another Remedy storyline that’s yet to have its first true follow-up and is managed internally by an almost entirely different group of creators.
As for what else the Remedy Connected Universe has in store, Rowley hinted at the team’s approach, and how lore deep-divers may or may not be able to connect dots they’ll find in The Lake House. “Right now, our key franchises within [the Remedy Connected Universe] are the Control franchise and the Wake franchise. That’s where a lot of our efforts are. But it doesn’t mean, necessarily, that every single piece of content that we put inside either game is specifically tailored to a specific franchise. It’s more just to expand the world that we’re trying to build as a whole.”
The Lake House is also a return to the base game’s survival-horror tone and mechanics after June’s Night Springs expansion tried on a few different genres through several shorter episodic missions, such as sci-fi and an oddly cute, pastel-tinted massacre akin to Ti West’s Pearl. Rowley said he’s glad not to have gone from the base game straight into developing The Lake House as it could’ve been desensitizing to flesh out all of the game’s darker, scarier elements in a row. The Night Springs expansion was the “palette cleanser,” he said. Now, just before Halloween, the game will return to its roots with a more methodically paced, tenser story. And just as that story will fill in some gaps for Alan Wake 2, it will also newly ask and answer some of its own questions, like the nature of its new Annihilation-inspired enemies, the Painted.
In all likelihood, it will ask many more questions Remedy has no intentions to resolve today–if ever. For Remedy, telling one larger, interconnected story is a long process that demands patience from the obsessive fanbase and the folks within the studio alike. Unlike the Marvel saga, which often releases a handful of entwined shows and movies annually, games of Remedy’s size and scale arrive much less frequently. Rowley said he’s been working on Alan Wake 2 for just shy of six years, and finishing the base game was a short-lived reprieve as he was then thrust into creating the game’s expansions.
Now, with Alan Wake 2’s final chapter here, he’s ready to consider it the closing of one storybook for him, too. “I’m going to take a bit of a holiday, I think […] It’s going to be bittersweet in the sense that I’ve really enjoyed working with the team, and really enjoyed working with Sam [Lake]. It’s good to put a pin in it, and then start thinking about other things.”
For players who haven’t played any of Alan Wake 2 but may soon, especially now that the physical Deluxe Edition is on the way, The Lake House will merge right into the base game just like the previous expansion, essentially fleshing out the campaign into one longer, more varied saga, while those who just want to jump into The Lake House after having finished the base game can play it that way instead. It’s available now as part of the Alan Wake 2 Deluxe Edition, or can be purchased via the Deluxe Edition upgrade for those looking to expand the base game they already own.
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