SHOUT OUT - Alan Wake 2’s use of old school jump scares is annoyingly effective
Should have worn my brown pants.
By Jonathan Garrett
30/10/23
NOTE: thatHITBOX Shout Out’s are not sponsored content. They’re games, developers, individuals, or issues that we want to highlight and share purely out of interest.
Getting horror right in games is a particular kind of challenge given how hard it is to control a players perspective without taking away too much of their agency over the action. It’s a fine balancing act that most titles fail to deliver. It happens all too often in games like Resident Evil, Outlast or Dead Space where gore and fantastical creatures are used as visual ways to strike terror, but eventually that can fall flat. Alien’s Isolation’s systemic AI and Left 4 Dead’s director are two great examples of leaving folks on the edge of their seat without relying on carefully crafted moments.
For Alan Wake 2, it’s all about restraint. Rather than fling hordes of enemies in your face, or attempt to dull your senses with relentless dismemberment, Remedy choose instead to let you feel on edge at the mere possibility of what might lie ahead. There’s a randomness to encounters that is always unsettling (particularly when you’re travelling back through what you believed to be a previously cleared area), but it’s the way they lull you into a false sense of security that can be truly unnerving.
I spend more time in Alan Wake 2 feeling tense rather than screaming in fear. But when those jump scares are delivered, either from foes bursting into a scene or flashes of live action brilliance, it demonstrates how Remedy are master crafters of these set piece moments. I haven’t been this immersed in a world and story in quite some time.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
