Today brings good news and bad news for Alan Wake fans.
The good news is that, for the next week, you'll be able to get both Alan Wake games for very cheap, along with some previously unseen goodies. The bad news is that it's the last we'll be seeing of this series for a while.
After a five-week break, Humble Bundle has gone back to its weekly sales, a practice which had initially lasted for less than a month before being put on hiatus. The flavor of the week, as you might have guessed, is Remedy Entertainment's third-person, horror-themed, psychological thriller Alan Wake. The bundle includes the original game alongside its ambiguously canonical and unnumbered follow-up, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, as well as a whole bunch of bonus content, some of which has never been released.
As with most other Humble Bundle sales, you can pay whatever you want (down to one cent), but you'll need to pay at least a dollar to get Steam copies of the games. Oddly, unlike most other bundles, there doesn't seem to be any material incentive to pay higher than the average contribution. Surely, you could just do that out of the kindness of your heart... but if you're not that kind, these games will never be cheaper. The bundle is a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it, even if you prefer the Steam keys, because a similar Steam bundle (minus previously unreleased bonus content) has only gone as low as $9.99 in previous Steam sales.
With this bundle also comes an announcement video from Remedy Entertainment creative director Sam Lake, which might have Alan Wake lovers crying themselves to sleep like Half-Life enthusiasts have been doing for the past five-and-a-half years.
The video, addressed apologetically to Alan Wake fans, reveals that Remedy is working on "something new, something big" — but the key word here is "new" which means, of course, that we're not talking about the continuation of an existing franchise. There's no way around it, so Lake comes out and tells it like it is: Alan Wake 2 will not be released in the foreseeable future.
This might come as a surprise to fans who were paying attention when Remedy seemingly dropped a few clues about an upcoming sequel. Most notably, Sam Lake tweeted a cryptic quote, the same heard as a backwards message in a song performed by Poets of the Fall as the fictional heavy metal band Old Gods of Asgard. It seemed promising, but maybe we shouldn't have been so excited.
The "town called Ordinary" might have been the setting for the next game in the series, but it might also have been a simple reference to the setting of American Nightmare, the game in which the song is featured. That game, after all, does take place in an unnamed town. (The narrator calls it Night Springs, but this is the Alan Wake universe's parody of The Twilight Zone, so if any part of the game takes place outside of Alan's mind then this disembodied voice can't be trusted.)
Regardless, it looks like Alan Wake 2 is on the back burner. Remedy "worked hard to make the sequel happen," says Lake, but the project apparently suffered from a lack of sufficient funding. Although total sales of the original game have exceeded 3 million copies, he notes, it was by no means an instant success upon its release. This makes throwing money at a sequel a risky investment, especially when the success of a modern game is judged so heavily on pre-order sales. One might expect a sequel to do better in that department, given the existing fanbase, but it would seem the franchise is cursed by its initial sales performance.
Lake remarks that Remedy could have done something "less ambitious" (i.e., less expensive) with the next Alan Wake, but explains that such a compromise "wouldn't have done justice to you... to us... and certainly wouldn't have done justice to Alan Wake." Perhaps, while we lament the indefinite postponement of what might have been a great game, we should be glad that Remedy Entertainment was unwilling to spoil the franchise with a mediocre cash-grab sequel. Lake is careful not to suggest that another Alan Wake will never be made; he only makes it very clear that now is not the right time.
Fortunately for Remedy, money isn't an issue for their new project, Quantum Break. The trailer, first shown at the Xbox One reveal, has live-action footage, a creepy girl with special powers, a bridge disaster, and some poor guy dying in slow motion. Sam Lake calls it the "ultimate Remedy experience" drawing on everything the development studio learned from Max Payne and Alan Wake.
Aside from these vague hints, not much is known about the upcoming release. The game is said to be an Xbox One exclusive, but only time will tell if this is set in stone; Alan Wake was an Xbox 360 exclusive before it was released for Windows a couple of years later, so we can afford to be optimistically skeptical. Maybe the same thing will happen again.
Until then, the Alan Wake Humble Bundle sale, along with an accompanying sale on Xbox Live, is Remedy's big thank-you to all of its fans. Sadly, it seems a bit too much like a tentative funeral for the franchise. The last minute of the announcement video is a live-action clip of various Alan Wake paraphernalia being locked in a crate and wheeled off into the back of a warehouse. The crate is labeled "Do Not Open Until..." but the date, of course, is hidden and will likely remain unknown until the Quantum Break franchise has run its course.
