After its joyful romp through the multiversal lens of its Night Springs DLC earlier in the year, Alan Wake 2 rounds out its pair of story expansions by going back to what it does best: dialling up the horror, switching off the lights, and having all manner of shadowy ghouls lurch out of the darkness to give you a good old scare. In The Lake House, FDC agent Kiran Estevez finally takes us beyond the chain-link fence of Cauldron Lake’s most secretive, walled-off area – the titular research lab where inside its brutalist, concrete depths lurks an experiment that’s gone terribly, terribly wrong, and threatens to cause another catastrophic event that could spell disaster for the nearby town of Bright Falls.
Alan Wake 2 DLC: The Lake House reviewDeveloper: Remedy EntertainmentPublisher: Epic GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Epic Games Store), Xbox Series X/S, PS5
But despite taking place before the events of the main game kick off in earnest, both the setting and its new protagonist almost make The Lake House seem more like a warm-up for Remedy’s Control 2 sequel than it does its Alan Wake namesake. This three-hour excursion into the lab’s dark, paint-splattered hallways is a mostly tense and spooky affair throughout, but one that feels a little bit lacking in what made Alan Wake 2 so special when it came out last year – namely, it has a lot more in common with Saga’s more pedestrian side of the story than it does with Alan’s reality-bending writer’s board sequences.
This is no bad thing in and of itself, and it’s a perfectly enjoyable standalone set piece for those who have already bought into the game’s expansion pass. But when you take it all together, with its surprisingly sparse number of enemy encounters and a veritable truckload of story exposition delivered through film reels, computer emails and audio log diaries, it can’t help but feel like you’re only getting half the Alan Wake 2 experience here. It’s missing that climatic rocket punch to really give this bold and ambitious game the final, showstopping flourish it arguably deserves – the aural and visual pièce de resistance that ties it all together and leaves you in little doubt that Remedy is a studio at the height of its power. You want Alan Wake 2 to go out with a bang, not a whimper. But for me at least, The Lake House often simply fizzled rather than igniting something deeper.
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Kiran herself is a very affable presence. Her no-nonsense sarcasm and dry wit make her feel just as capable and fun to be around as Saga did in the main game, but she also has moments of vulnerability that make her highly empathetic as well. It gives her a winning, every-woman kind of quality that allows you to really buy into her ominous retelling of events via voiceover that this is going to be one terrible day at the office.