Alan Wake came out in 2010, in the midst of the "Peak TV" era in which episodic television was drawing critical attention that had in the past been reserved almost entirely for film. The game very much played on this idea, with each of its "episodes" ending with a preview of the next and beginning with a recap (despite the fact that, as a single game, you had just finished the previous episode and were able to immediately jump into the subsequent one, making these recaps simply a stylistic choice to evoke that feeling of watching a TV show).
In the last decade-plus since the original game, we've gotten more shows, and even if I think the "peak TV" era might have closed by this point, a number of new influences have emerged to inform this game. Notably, of course, Twin Peaks: The Return, the distant third season of the early-90s mindfuck emerged and was a far, far more bizarre mindfuck itself. We also got True Detective, whose first season is an undeniable influence here.
Spoilers for the beginning of the game to follow:
As clearly shown in the marketing, Alan Wake II has us play as both the eponymous writer and a new character named Saga Anderson. But it's neither of them that we play first: instead, emerging bloated, naked, and seemingly already dead, we play as Agent Nightingale, the psycho FBI agent who violently stalks Alan Wake in the first game with little apparent reason, only to be taken by the Dark Presence.
We stumble in this nighttime (maybe twilight) scene through the woods near Cauldron Lake and eventually wind up getting cornered by a bunch of creeps in deer masks, who capture and stab us before the scene cuts, and we shift perspective to FBI Agent Saga Anderson, who has come with her partner Alex Casey (an agent who looks precisely like Wake's fictional Alex Casey, both of whom of course also look and sound identical to Max Payne).
The two have been brought in to investigate a series of murders - three people who disappeared back in 2010 (the year that the first game took place) and suddenly re-surfaced (quite literally) with their hearts cut out and with signs of bloating, as bodies tend to do when they're left in water.
And just as they get to Bright Falls, another body turns up - that of Robert Nightingale, whose ritualistic killing seemed to be interrupted by some chance witnesses. Not soon enough to prevent his heart from getting cut out, but enough to make the killers abandon the heart in haste.
Despite the quite terrifying cold open, the initial part of the game introduces us mostly to our two FBI Agents and a few supporting characters, as well as Saga's "Case Board," which allows her to piece together evidence to try to figure out where to look next.
Essentially, exploring the world (at this stage only in narrow, limited areas) allows you to amass bits of evidence that can be posted next to questions Saga has come up with, which then lead to new clarifying questions and eventually answers to "cases" that solve the question at hand.
Evidence seems to be gathered in a few ways - the simplest is by talking with NPCs or by simply looking at clues in the environment. Then, upon meeting important NPCs, Saga will have the ability to "profile" them, which allows her to use a nigh-supernatural ability to get into their heads and figure out things they aren't directly telling her. Finally, there are manuscript pages - pages we, as the player, know are written by Alan Wake, but Saga doesn't.
Chapter One ends with the supernatural rearing its ugly head, as mid-autopsy, Nightingale rises from his examination table and kills a couple of Bright Falls deputies, and we get our first bit of action as we have to fend off the undead Taken. Oh, and the Sheriff (who is a Sheriff Breaker, but not the one from the previous game) vanishes with a brief glimpse of a man we know from previews is Mr. Door.
Obviously this is only the first enticing taste of the story, but it's past two in the morning here.
Still, a couple observations:
All the victims seem to have been drowned and their hearts cut out. They also all disappeared in 2010. I suspect that these might have all become Taken. Cutting out the heart, one should recall, is what Thomas Zane did to Barbara Jagger when she was possessed by the Dark Presence (not that it slowed her down).
The "Cult of the Tree" is the group that seems to be behind all of this, but we don't know who its members are, and also... well, I almost wonder if what they are doing is even all that sinister: Because are they actually murdering living people? Or are they capturing Taken coming from the lake? Sure, what they did to Nightingale didn't prevent him from rising and attacking people in the morgue, but notably: they didn't finish their rituals.
Also, as a note, a place on a map I found was listed as an FBC outpost, and of course as a fan of Control and knowing that the connections between the games are going to be more explicit moving forward, that perked my ears up.
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