SPOILER NOTE: This review contains mild spoilers regarding equipment, enemy type and some environments within the Lake House as well as some minor plot details. It does not contain major story spoilers but sensitivity to these will vary so please procede with caution relative to your opinions on spoilers. Thank you for reading.
Halloween is right around the corner, and refusing to be caught lacking, Remedy Entertainment have delivered some new nightmare fuel for your trick-or-treat buckets with the release of Alan Wake 2’s final expansion.
Ditching the backwater towns, studio sets, and suffocating woods for a world of desks and computer screens, Remedy are sending you on a trip to The Lake House. This isn’t a holiday for Estevez (the DLC’s investigative protagonist) as the name might suggest, though. The Lake House is a Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) research facility, resembling a gorgeous modern holiday home on the surface but filled with the typical FBC paraphernalia within. It’s built into the hillside of Cauldron Lake, complete with a lift to take you down into the depths below. Every corner has that government building feel - hard stone floors and branded pencil pots wherever you turn. It’s almost comforting in a weird way, to have the otherworldliness of Alan Wake 2 brought to the level of mundanity that Control’s grey, office infrastructure affords.
That brutalist architecture of Control’s Oldest House has been given a horrifying makeover here though. Where Control possessed a sci-fi weirdness that made it unsettling, The Lake House paints those same concrete walls in hues of horror and anguish. The lighting is typical of Alan Wake 2 - lots of those gorgeous but off putting shadows that melt away objects in the distance - but here it’s paired with the reds of an FBC lockdown, giving fear-inducing power to mundane office lamplight. There’s a moment where, standing in a room of endlessly clicking, autonomous typewriters, the red alert lights slowly travel to the back of the room, row by row, and come to a stop above an illuminated group of snarling ex-FBC employees. This was awesome. Not only did the slow crawl of the lights put me on edge, but their loud mechanical sound and the incessant clicking of hundreds of typewriters made that huge room feel stiflingly small. It made the oncoming fight feel far more intense.
Unfortunately, the puzzles don’t have as much impact. Alan Wake 2’s main campaign had many visually interesting and mind bending puzzles involving its arresting lighting but here you’re either moving battery cubes or deducing some woefully insecure passwords. It’s a shame that after some fantastic, and on theme, puzzles in the base game that they feel a little superfluous here. However, what they lack in mental punch, they make up for with that Alan Wake dread. I felt like I was about to get grabbed constantly while moving those battery cubes in the dark. It’s truly amazing that Remedy managed to make a fairly simple gameplay structure so frightening. You get to a new floor of the facility, solve some simple puzzles and they open their box of tricks to terrify you in a new, visceral way.
For example, one floor of the underground research facility is set up like an artist’s studio - complete with hanging boards that can be moved around to create new spaces. The walls are strewn with blue, pink and purple paint, from which spawn Alan Wake 2’s most terrifying monsters yet. 8ft tall, gangly and dripping with paint, these… things are beyond intimidating and add to the already very claustrophobic space. The game does a great job of introducing them as a threat, making them impossible to vanquish, or even slow down, on your first encounter. They also make great use of that opressive darkness - as a missed paint drip visual cue can lead to an instant smothering by one as they leap from the canvas walls. My only gripe is that I would’ve liked to see more of them. When not dealing with the paint you’re fending off more of the Taken and while I recognise that for the 2-3 hour DLC to feel as tight and densely packed as it does they couldn’t overdo it, it would’ve been nice to make more use of the cobbled together Black Rock launcher.
Beyond just the Oldest House’s aesthetics, The Lake House contains tangible hints and connections to the wider world of Control and the FBC. This Black Rock launcher is just one of the ways these manifest. The materials for its strange ammunition come from the Black Rock Quarry Threshold - a connection to another dimension within the Oldest House that you visit during the story of Control. This black rock is used across The Lake House and Oldest House to negate the paranatural effects of the many odd objects and beings contained within them. Most notably it lines the walls of the warm, inviting safe rooms (save points) you come across. While the launcher is a small addition, it’s a satisfying inclusion and speaks to the depth and thought Remedy are putting into their connected universe. Their ability to weave their worlds together and make Alan Wake 2 feel both distinct from, and right at home alongside, Control’s concrete science fiction is masterful at every step.
This is perhaps Remedy’s biggest triumph here in The Lake House - they have managed to wrap up Alan Wake 2 in a satisfying and intimate way while bridging the gaps between it and Control, setting up a future to come that’s as intriguing as it is baffling. The Lake House is a masterclass in crafting a dense, rewarding experience that is enjoyable for both newcomers and returning readers. The worlds of both Alan Wake and Control expand and coalesce as you look closer, and as you dig deeper into company records and discarded prose you’ll find loose threads just waiting to be pulled by Sam Lake and his teams. If you’ve played Alan Wake 2, then you need no convincing, but if you’ve yet to take a dive into Cauldron Lake, there has never been a better time than with the release of this terrifying final chapter.
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