Alice Wake is a key figure in both Alan Wake games. Alan's wife is the reason why Alan gets swept into the Dark Place, and in all of his thirteen years trapped within it, Alice is his motivation - no conclusion to his story would be acceptable, in his mind, unless Alice is safe in the end.
In the first game, Alice is, honestly, just kind of a damsel in distress. We get some flashbacks to the Wakes' lives in New York, and we see what looks like a happy marriage with just a few odd elements: Alice has an intense fear of the dark - a phobia that goes beyond the mild unease that adults typically get (I'll confess here that I might be a little abnormal as a 38 year old who still gets a little spooked sometimes when I wake up needing to use the bathroom in the middle of the night - though typically only after I've been thinking about some kind of scary story - but Alice has it a lot worse than I do).
There's even a bit of male-gazey portrayal of her, as she is taken by the lake and washes up on its shores wearing nothing but a t-shirt and some lingerie panties. (I think it was the Lady of Lore's overview of the game that really called out that she needs to find some pants).
Really, though, if there's one note that sticks out as more specific and also, well, more problematic, it's that Alice reveals after they've arrived at the cabin that she wasn't just arranging this vacation for Alan to get away from the stress of his writer's block, but that she contacted a psychologist to treat Alan without getting his consent beforehand.
Now, Alice has no way of knowing what a monster Emil Hartman is, but there are some serious ethical concerns about this. I think that Alice thought she was doing the right thing, but it does mean that she ultimately manipulated Alan into going there. There's some room for debate, of course - Alice's move seems almost like an intervention, except without the tried-and-tested safeguards to make sure it's effective and fair.
The Alice of Alan Wake II is, I think, a far more interesting character. We only see her via the video diaries of her "The Dark Place" photography exhibit, making her one of the characters in the game who never shows up within in the actual game world.
The victory of the first Alan Wake game is that, while Alan has trapped himself in the Dark Place, at least Alice has been allowed to escape. What we discover in the sequel, though, is that this escape has not been all that it's cracked up to be.
Initially, Alice is in mourning. As far as anyone can tell, Alan drowned in Cauldron Lake and died. This, after a period of mental instability and drug abuse, is a depressingly plausible scenario. And while the game never really touches on it, the family and loved ones of victims of suicide are often held responsible for not doing more - I remember when Robin Williams died, his daughter Zelda was harassed on social media. Hard enough to lose a parent, but now the world is after you as well?
Alice is an artist, like Alan, but between the two of them, she's not the "successful" one. Alan is the breadwinner for them, his Alex Casey novels selling enough (even in our modern era, when there are so many other forms of media to distract people from reading books) that they can afford a pretty comfortable life. Alan brought work Alice's way by having her do photos for the covers of his books - which is simultaneously kind and also kind of devastating. Alice's most lucrative expression of her art has been in subservience to her husband's art.
When Alan disappears, not only does she lose this life partner (and it doesn't seem like the Wakes were particularly social - Alan basically had a best friend in his agent Barry Wheeler, and Barry and Alice didn't even really get along. And that's all we know about their social lives) but she also loses the foundation of her financial security.
Her decision to get Alan help from Dr. Hartman was probably motivated out of concern for Alan, but there was probably also a fear that if Alan didn't start writing again, they'd run into financial difficulties.
I don't mean to paint Alice as a villain because of this. I just think it's worth noting that Alice was in a really tough position.
Mourning and grief are one thing. The financial problems get more or less solved (or at least deferred) by licensing the rights to the Alex Casey novels so that Hollywood can make movies of them. Artistically, it's not really satisfying, but then again: it's never really made explicit if Alan's novels are actually, you know, good. They're popular, for sure, but I think there's this lingering insecurity in Alan's personality that he doubts his own skill as a writer - his fear of messing up Return keeps him in the Dark Place for 13 years. And I could imagine that there's a part of him that judges himself for writing pulpy detective novels. They're popular, sure, but can he really call himself an artist?
(My stance is that all art is art - there's no minimum quality something has to have to be art. It might not be good art, but it counts.)
Alice earns enough money from the film rights that she's not destitute, but money's the least of her concerns - she starts seeing Alan... or a monstrous thing that looks like Alan, in her home. She's forgotten about her own time in the Dark Place, and so it's the sort of thing that she would be inclined to write off as a grief-induced hallucination, except that she can't. So, she uses her art to solve the problem: she sets up cameras to take photos of Alan's visitations, rigged to motion sensors.
The success of this venture - capturing the screaming, horrific visage of "Mr. Scratch" - simultaneously reassures her (that she's not just imagining things) but also disturbs her (because, you know, weird supernatural stuff happening).
We know that she visits The Oldest House at one point, invited by the FBC to make statements about the photos and what she remembers of what happened to her husband. Her proximity is what sets off the transformed Emil Hartman and his rampage in the Investigations Sector.
Now, here's a point that I'm going to argue that I haven't seen anyone else make: In her video diaries, she talks about meeting with an "organization" that helps her retrieve her memories from her week trapped in the Dark Place. Every single online content creator I hear talk about this story says that this organization is the FBC, typically stating it as an objective fact.
I don't think it is.
I think Alice's interactions with the FBC are limited to the time she visits the Oldest House to talk about the photos she has been taking.
Instead, we in her emails that she and Barry Wheeler have become friends after Alan's disappearance, despite their earlier friction (the details of said friction being left unsaid). Barry has been handling the film rights, and moved to Hollywood to act as executive producer to the Alex Casey movies, feeling a responsibility to Alan to try to make sure the movies are faithful to the author's vision, but also to ensure that the money that they make is helping Alice.
And it is in Hollywood that Barry Wheeler is brought into what he jokingly refers to as a Cult in Hollywood, which anyone who played Control (well, anyone who played it and also followed the between-the-lines stories in the various collectable memos and audio tapes) will recognize as the Blessed Organization - what appears to be a paracriminal organization that, among other things, has killed FBC employees and seems to cause chaos with many of their experiments in the paranatural.
The presence of "Blessed" branded moving boxes in Alice's apartment and her use of the word "organization" to describe the people who helped her recover her memories points, in my opinion, to the notion that through Barry, Alice was put in touch with Blessed, and it was they, not the FBC, who aided her.
Another bit of circumstantial evidence: "organization" maybe can be used to describe a government agency or bureau, but I often associate it with independent entities - I think she'd be more likely to say "I met with some people from the government" or "from a government agency," but "an organization" not only fits the default noun for how we've named the Blessed Organization, but seems broader than necessary if she were talking about the FBC.
The exact goals and philosophy of Blessed are unknown - we see them primarily through the lens of the FBC, though even they haven't necessarily put all the dots together.
If we imagine that the FBC is all about control and suppression (and safeguarding things, to be fair) the Blessed Organization might be the direct opposite - a force of radical freedom, where they just unleash chaos to see what happens.
And for that reason, I think it's plausible that a curious, consequences-be-damned Blessed representative (maybe Chester Bless himself) would be eager to draw forth the hidden memories in Alice Wake's brain.
From there, though, what of Alice?
Well, Alice serves as a kind of guiding light for Alan in the second game. But she does this in a pretty painful way.
The real climax of the story, or at least Alan's story, is when we discover the truth about the shooting in the Writer's Room. One loop's iteration of Alan finds the manuscript supposedly written by Scratch and tries to edit it to prevent its horrors from being unleashed. Another loop's version walks in, and, believing that it's Scratch there editing those pages, shoots him in the head. Why is he so full of anger, so willing to jump at the chance for violence? Well, sure, there's Tom Zane's exhortation to kill Scratch for all that he's done to them (right before Zane pulls a weird, sinister move, grinning and flipping it so that he's holding the gun to Alan's head, only for their deadly confrontation to wind up being a trick of filmmaking) but the real reason is that, in Alan's final trip into Parliament Tower, he finds the final video from Alice's Dark Place exhibit, which purports to conclude with footage of her suicide, jumping into Cauldron Lake.
A narrative has been constructed - that Scratch haunted and menaced Alice unceasingly, and that Alice felt the only way to escape the horror was to end her own life. Blaming Scratch for her death, Alan shoots his prior self, thinking that the man editing the manuscript is the monster. It's a twist of irony - Alan's the monster all along. And it's right at that moment - maybe because of that moment, that Alan awakens on the shores of Cauldron Lake, summoned forth by a ritual that has not yet even taken place.
But it's doubly ironic: the rage and grief that pushes Alan to his most monstrous self is based on a lie. Alice didn't kill herself. She entered the Dark Place. And she even acknowledges that the horror and pain that Alan has gone through was her doing, there to put him on the path he needed to ultimately succeed.
In other words, she manipulated him.
The morality of this is ambiguous. After all, Alan believes he needs to write a horror story in order to save the world, but in doing so, he condemns everyone from Carl Stucky to Cynthia Weaver to become monsters whom we have to then kill. Was it possible to succeed without all this death?
So, was Alice's plan, which involved convincing her husband that she had killed herself and then also getting in a position to murder another version of himself, all for the greater good?
I think it's all done with the best intentions, but you know what they say about those and the road to hell. As we said before, Alan's actions are all done for a higher purpose, but how much of it is strictly necessary? Could a less tortured mind have solved this all a lot more easily?
And what would it mean for Alice to now be an agent of the agenda of the Blessed Organization? What darkness has she brought with her? Alice comes off as a source of wisdom in Alan Wake II, as if she figured all of this out much, much quicker than Alan ever did. But does she actually get it all? Or is she also out of her depth?
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