Alan Wake II coming in mid-October, promising another cryptic PC powerhouse

Alan Wake 2 has a release date, an evocative trailer, and the requisite amount of meta-contextual horror to come.

The latest title from Control maker Remedy Entertainment, a sequel to the acclaimed Alan Wake will arrive on October 17, 2023, on PC (exclusive to the Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. Given the studio’s track record, we expect to see some impressive ray tracing, storylines that make you question what a story really is, and novel gameplay conceits.

In typical Remedy style, you don’t get much direct information, but instead, some teasing hints. After some flashes of cultish horror, we meet Saga Anderson, an FBI agent that Remedy states (in a PlayStation blog post) will be a second playable character.

Anderson is investigating the murder of a fellow agent, Robert Nightingale, in Bright Falls, Washington, which leads her to Alan Wake. Wake is trapped in the Dark Place, trying to “beat the devil at his own game,” Remedy suggests. At some point, players can play Wake and Anderson’s narratives however they choose, with the two stories locking into one another. Anderson and her partner discover that Nightingale was investigating Wake and that Wake’s text seems to be about them.

“We were all trapped in a horror story,” the trailer voiceover says. “The horror story wanted us dead.”

In addition to Alan Wake 2, Wednesday’s PlayStation Showcase saw the debut of other notable games, a few of them likely to arrive on PC:

• Spider-Man 2, featuring both Peter Parker and Miles Morales as playable characters, arriving “fall 2023.”
• Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, which is a remastered (and renamed) Metal Gear Solid 3. In true Metal Gear fashion, the exact release date is a mystery, though it’s coming in 2024 to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. A collection of the first three Metal Gear Solid games is also due to arrive this summer.
• Final Fantasy XVI, from the same team as Final Fantasy XIV, which promises an intriguing new direction for the series, arriving June 22, exclusively to PlayStation (at least until the end of 2023).
• Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the next title in Ubisoft’s historical open-world franchise, arriving October 12, 2023, on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.
• The Talos Principle 2, arriving “later this year” on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.

You can see other games announced on Sony’s recorded Showcase. A surprisingly large portion of it is Spider-Man 2 footage.