Alan Wake Remaster Officially Announced
The Alan Wake remaster is coming with a lot of updates for gamers.
This article is more than 2 years old
Alan Wake, the best-selling thriller novelist, will be picking up his notoriously ineffective flashlight once again this year while returning to the charming yet grim and deadly fictional town of Bright Falls in a 4K remaster of the 2010 horror video game. Remedy Entertainment, the game’s developer, officially announced the remaster of the game, planned to release on latest-gen hardware.
According to an open letter published by The Sudden Stop, an Alan Wake fansite, the game’s writer announced the remastered version of the game launching this fall on PC via the Epic Game Store, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. The remaster will include the graphically enhanced 2010 game, plus The Signal and The Writer DLCs, along with a new commentary track from Sam Lake, the game’s writer and creative director. This presents fantastic news for the horror-loving gaming community and for PlayStation owners who previously couldn’t enjoy the title due to its Xbox and PC exclusivity.
Interestingly enough, Lake wrote an open letter directly to The Sudden Stop, whose community showed unwavering love towards the gaming title over the past 11 years, making the community into an integral part of Remedy, despite not being officially endorsed by the developer. In his open letter, Lake expresses his personal connection to Alan Wake as the character and as the mystery and horror gaming title, stating that the original development process, despite being fun, was an incredibly challenging experience.
The original Alan Wake video game was initially released for Xbox 360 in 2010 and came to the PC via Steam two years later. Though the Xbox 360 version made an incredible financial success at the time of its release, the revenues from sales of the PC version surpassed the game’s development and marketing costs within 48 hours of its release. Unfortunately, this wholly neglected PlayStation console owners, due to the titles Microsoft exclusivity. However, Remedy Entertainment acquired the Alan Wake rights from Microsoft in 2019. The company now has an idea of Alan Wake’s earning potential, so why not make more money by making the multi-platform remaster of the game?
Alan Wake centers on the titular protagonist, a horror writer searching for his missing wife across the Pacific Northwest town of Bright Falls. This third-person shooter pairs the player’s standard weapons with a flashlight, which is used to weaken the supernatural adversaries by shining light on them before using the weapons to dispatch them. Unfortunately for the players, the flashlight goes through batteries like Alan’s life doesn’t depend on it, making the game more intense.
2010’s Alan Wake never received a sequel to complete the game’s narrative due to licensing issues and lack of Microsoft Studios’ approval as the publishing rights holder. However, the game received a spin-off, called Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, which had most of the ideas meant for Alan Wake 2. And while the remaster won’t sate the appetites of those fans clamoring out for a sequel, which should finish Alan’s story, it does indicate Remedy Entertainment’s willingness to, at least, entertain the idea of a new Alan Wake game. Who knows, maybe they’re just testing the waters?
