By
Phil Hornshaw
on January 26, 2024 at 4:34PM PST
Alan Wake 2 was already a dense, twisting game full of story threads begun 13 years ago and meta references to Remedy Entertainment’s other games and the studio itself. Then Remedy released The Final Draft, a new game plus mode that adds even more to the story, as well as a new ending. The Final Draft deepens the story even more and adjusts the conclusion, but its new elements aren’t always immediately obvious. Here are all the new tidbits about Alan Wake 2’s world and the larger Remedy Connected Universe we gleaned from The Final Draft.
Saga and Alan’s plan worked
It’s probably what you assumed, but The Final Draft makes this explicit, where the vanilla game left it obscure. In the final moments of Alan Wake 2’s story, Saga and Alan enact their new ending to “Return” in order to defeat Scratch and save both Alex Casey and Saga’s daughter. In the original ending, Saga calls Logan and we hear the phone ring before a cut to black. Since The Final Draft shows the entire Alan Wake story to be a loop, the implication is that, the first time through, the ending wasn’t enough to undo the horror story and save Logan. In The Final Draft, a new ending scene shows Logan picking up the call and we know for sure that Scratch is defeated and the horror story is undone.
The FBC caused the Dark Presence’s escape
The Final Draft often provides more context for existing story beats rather than offering new ones, but one additional element gives hints at events that happened at an area we never visit: the Lake House. This is the FBC’s laboratory and command center in Bright Falls, but you can’t go there in the main game. Later, Estevez tells Saga that the Lake House has been overrun by the Taken. A new manuscript page in The Final Draft suggests that one of the FBC researchers at the Lake House, Dr. Jean Mormont, might have brought about the events of the game through experiments that released the Dark Presence–and then overcame him and everyone else at the Lake House. The Lake House event might have been the inciting incident for the whole story, and we know we’ll be headed there in a dedicated DLC that should reveal more.
Saga feels the loop
There are only a handful of new manuscript pages in The Final Draft, but one of the first you can find notes that Saga is experiencing deja vu as she visits Nightingale’s murder site. Alan’s intro at the start of The Final Draft establishes the idea of working through the spiral and also sets up that he’s feeling the repetition even though he’s not fully aware of it. The page is clear that Saga isn’t fully aware that she’s repeating events, but it does suggest she’s unconsciously aware of it on some level. With everything else we know about Saga’s abilities, this feels like an important tidbit about her character that keeps her in parity with Alan. The FBC considers Alan Wake a parautilitarian, but Saga should definitely be counted in those ranks, too, and that could have considerations for her future in Remedy stories.
Mr. Door is almost definitely Saga’s father
This is a lore element that players speculated at after finishing the initial game thanks to a lot of hints scattered throughout Alan Wake 2, but on completing another run and seeing all the evidence, along with some new tidbits, I’m pretty confident that this is true. Door disappeared in 1988 at Cauldron Lake after being struck by a bolt of lightning, according to Tim Breaker. Saga’s father was “run off’ by Tor, as he describes it. And a manuscript page in the base game describes a deal struck between Tor and Odin and someone who has to be Door, who disappeared with a lightning strike after agreeing to leave the brothers’ family alone. In The Final Draft, there’s a new, brief scene with Tor and Odin right before the ending kicks off, where Saga meets them in the Dark Place. Odin says they “buried the hatchet” with Door (Tor is not so ready to drop the grudge), and taken together with the story of how Tor tangled with Saga’s father and sent him away, there’s a preponderance of evidence that says the father Tor pushed away and Door are one and the same. That’s definitely going to come up again in the future.
Tor and Odin still have a role to play
As mentioned, at the very end of The Final Draft before Saga heads to Alan’s writer’s room and the conclusion, you run into Tor and Odin one last time. They mention playing on Door’s show and burying the hatchet with him, and also say that while they won’t leave the Dark Place with Saga (“our time in that place is done,” they say, seemingly about the real world), they will see her again in the future, but Tom (that is, Alan) has instructed them not to talk about it. It sounds like Tor and Odin are talking about the DLC additions to the story and that they’ve spoken with Alan from a later part in the story, like the version who calls the pay phone during Initiation 9.
Dr. Casper Darling is in the Dark Place
Alan Wake 2 explicitly links to Control, Remedy Entertainment’s last game, when Federal Bureau of Control agents show up to try to contain the events happening in Bright Falls. While Control expands on the story of Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2 through its AWE DLC, though, the main game doesn’t have too much bearing on Control’s story until you get to The Final Draft. During this follow-up playthrough, we learn something of the fate of the FBC’s lead scientist, Dr. Casper Darling.
Darling disappeared before the events of Control when a malevolent entity called the Hiss invaded the FBC, and it seems that he was somehow transported into another dimension or plane of existence. In The Final Draft, you can find videos that show Darling somehow wound up in the Dark Place. He’s been there for two years, (665 days, in fact, a number that shows up repeatedly in Alan’s loops), and is studying the Dark Place, intercepting snippets of Alan’s narration and writing. There are three messages from Darling but so far, it seems only two have been found, suggesting more of this plot thread could be uncovered in the upcoming DLC chapters.
A glimpse of Ahti’s power
Control first introduced us to Ahti and made it pretty clear that he’s something more than just a regular janitor. He definitely has a few reality-bending abilities and he shows up at key moments, both in the Dark Place and in Saga’s story, to offer a little nudging or assistance. A new manuscript page gives a sense that, like Mr. Door and, to some degree, the Old Gods of Asgard, Ahti’s abilities are strange and huge. Those mop buckets that let you change reality are, of course, Ahti’s doing, and a manuscript page mentions how Ahti places one such bucket in The Final Draft’s ending cutscene so everyone has a way out of the Dark Place. How the page describes Ahti in this moment is interesting, though, talking about him appearing as huge above Cauldron Lake, big enough to block out the sun, as he lifts the lake and dumps out some of its water on the Writer’s Room floor. Is it a metaphor to discuss how Ahti’s mop bucket is a conduit to the lake, or should we see it as a more literal description of Ahti’s power–and, therefore, what he is? I dunno, man, I’m confused all the time about this stuff.
Alice is still out there
In an initial playthrough, Alan Wake 2 suggests that Alice is influencing things in a big way in The Final Draft, but she doesn’t show up all that much, actually. What she does is position a few key pieces at important times and places. She’s the one who guides Saga to the shoebox at Parliament Tower to get the Clicker and the Bullet of Light, and in The Final Draft, she sends a photo to Alan that shows him alive with the Bullet of Light in his forehead. Presumably, this is the piece of art that saves him from his original fate of dying to destroy Scratch. Thanks to Alice’s photo, Alan survives Saga’s gunshot wound with his memories intact and is able to break the loop.
But we never see Alice outside a momentary vision Alan has in The Final Draft’s ending. We know she is in the Dark Place and that she’s interacting with elements of the loop from somewhere. Alan is free of the Dark Presence, but we have no idea how Alice is faring, and it seems like this is a plot thread that still needs resolving.
Tom Zane is up to something
At the beginning of Initiation 8, Alan confronts Tom Zane at the hotel and winds up shooting him in the head for lying to him about who wrote “Return.” Much like Alan, though, Zane survives Alan’s attack, instead acting like the entire incident was a scene in one of his movies. At that point, he has a black, or dark, bullet hole in his head, exactly mirroring the light one Alan will have later. Zane is still part of this story, still trying to escape the Dark Place and execute his own agenda (“Yötön Yö,” anyone?), and might even have comparable abilities to Alan’s at the end of the story, but with a Dark third eye instead of a Light one.
Where we get new information is in the second of Casper Darling’s messages, “Collaboration.” In that one, Darling talks about needing the help of an artist to find his way out of the Dark Place, and who should show up but Tom Zane. Darling is excited to meet someone in this place after two years, but Zane definitely comes off as a little creepy and manipulative. It’s not clear what Zane is up to in the current story, exactly, but he really appears to be more of an antagonist, and there seems to be more to his story to come.
Alan may now be the parautilitarian the FBC thought he was
The FBC has thought that Alan Wake was more than just a writer for a while now, something that comes up in Control. The agency thinks Alan is a “parautilitarian,” someone who can do things outside the realm of possibility for normal people. They didn’t have the whole story–Alan didn’t really have special powers, it seemed, so much as a connection to the Dark Place, which made his art come to life. He learned how to channel that ability, but it didn’t seem intrinsic to him. (Although there are hints in Alan Wake 2 that maybe there has always been more to his writing than just good ideas–Alan’s “inspiration” might have always been glimpses into other realities.)
In any case, things are definitely different at the end of The Final Draft. In the last moments of the ending cutscene, Alan says he bears “the torch of knowledge, the light, the miracle illuminated.” And then he refers to himself as the “the master of two worlds…No, the master of many worlds.” The scene concludes there, so we don’t know what that’ll mean in practical terms, but it sure sounds like Alan’s knowledge of the Dark Place has become a power he can wield much more deftly than before, making him the kind of paranormally powerful being that’ll be squarely on the FBC’s radar.
The Final Draft isn’t so final
We’ve alluded to a few of them here, but there are a lot of hanging plot threads in The Final Draft, and they’re not of the spin-off or sequel variety, either. After our first run through Alan Wake, we might have assumed DLC chapters could deal with side elements–namely, resolving the subplot between Mr. Door and Tim Breaker, and finding out what happened to the FBC at the Lake House. But The Final Draft leaves big pieces unresolved, such as Alice’s fate and Saga’s family ties to Tor, Odin, and Door. The Final Draft is conclusive on basically two points: Scratch is really, definitely defeated, and Logan’s death has been undone by the ending of “Return.” Everything else we were unclear on remains unclear, and even more questions have been raised. It really looks like the DLC chapters, and perhaps even future Remedy games to come, are going to be tightly tied to some of these important plot threads.
Source : GameSpot