So I guess the first installment was a roaring success that somehow managed to completely pass me by without me even knowing that it existed. I probably wouldn't have bothered playing this one had it not been part of the free games on my PS-Plus membership but here we are and I put about 2 hours into it and I might return to it but probably not.
Instead of focusing on the full story here, I will just brush the surface. You play as FBI agent Saga Anderson (Saga? Seriously that's your name? urgh!) who is attempting to figure out what has happened in a place called "Bright Falls" where some ritualistic murders took place in this otherwise sleepy town.
You walk around the murder scene and later other places as you gather clues that will help you to figure out what to do next as you arrange these clues on your "mind place" which is just Saga's internal storage of clues that apparently she is so much better at than anyone else in the FBI.
you keep moving things around until you eventually figure out where the picture or the scrap of paper is meant to go and then some scribbles on a post-it note end up below it. Are we meant to be reading all of this? I have no idea but I'm not going to. I want to play a game not read a book or do a jigsaw puzzle, and that is one of the main problems I had with this game in general.
You can only arrange the clues in certain places and if you select the incorrect place she just says something like "come on Saga, think!" and then you have to try again and again until you are just randomly clicking everywhere so that the picture or clue will leave your inventory and open up the next area. You are walled off from the next area or part of the quest frequently by not knowing where to put the pictures. It's just kind of stupid after a while since it won't let you do it wrong, why make me figure it out at all? There should be an option to just auto-place it IMO.
Outside of this clue arrangement aspect of the game, you are also running around certain areas and speaking to people in the hopes that a new clue ends up in your "mind space" and then once again you have to arrange it in there to progress.
There are a few action sequences that I have encountered in the 3 hours or so that I have played this, but they are so few and far between that it is actually a surprise when they happen.
The graphics are impressive, the story is decent, and the voice acting is done really well. That all is done very solidly. The issue I have with this is primarily the pacing. You have to sit through so much in order to just advance the story and then when you do so, all you are really doing is walking down the street inside the town so that you can make your way to the police station to just talk to more people and gather more clues. While you are there you can open various cabinets and acquire more ammo and healing items but in the 3 hours or so that I have been playing the game I have only ever shot my gun once. I can only presume that this becomes more prevalent later.
perhaps the game is more exciting once you get to that point but for me, if I am 3 hours into a game and I have essentially done nothing, I tend to walk away from it.
I have for the most part, just walked around the woods, walked around a town, spoken to a bunch of people and then being subjected to a cutscene of an absurd length that makes me want to avoid talking to people in the future, and had a singular action scene that you are not allowed to fail. It just puts you back at the stop when you do it wrong and you probably will do it wrong.
I think that the tension during some scenes are pretty awesome as it attempts to give us that survival horror feel, but to me this just isn't enough. The reason why Resident Evil works for the most part is because the story kind of takes a back seat to you actually controlling things. In Alan Wake 2 you mostly are just waiting for a cinematic to end so you can walk for 8 minutes in order to activate another cinematic. This, to me, is not fun.
I think that the arrangement of clues probably seemed like a good idea on paper and at first I enjoyed it. It didn't take long though before I was just pushing the pictures everywhere on the board until they sunk into place and there was no strategy, no rhyme or reason for me placing the clues where I did.
Maybe I am an impatient gamer.
I would say that this game is extremely casual seeing as how you aren't allowed to do anything wrong because you are gate-keeped in a certain area until you get it right. If you don't get it right, the game forces you to notice what needs to be done to do it right and honestly, this is unnecessarily trivial and tedious and I don't want to play a game like that.
I know I say it too much but if I wanted to watch a movie I have netflix and AppleTV, I would just go and watch a movie. I'm playing a game because I want to play a game...capisce?
I'm not going to gripe too much though because I didn't actually pay for this game. I cannot in good faith really recommend this game to anyone because while I can appreciate a casual game, this one requires no skill at all to play and it simply locks you out of certain areas by having some tedious task that you haven't yet completed.
The professional review world completely disagrees with me on this as almost everyone has given it a 7 to 9/10 rating. For me, this game is a 5/10. It looks great and the story is awesome, but it isn't so much of a game as it is a semi-interactive experience.
Other people have loved it and I do not suggest that they are wrong. There are specific types of games that I like and this just happens to not be one of those types. It is a wonderfully beautiful game that if I had more time in my life I would probably appreciate more but seeing as how I only have an hour or so a day to play, I don't need to be wrapped up in a game that is 25 hours long almost exclusively because of thing like the "Mind Wall" that are forced upon you regularly.
For me I would rather watch this game being played by someone else who knows what they are doing, such as some Twitch streamer, than play it myself.