Alan Wake II, the highly anticipated sequel to the 2010 atmospheric horror game, will release in October. That’s according to the eponymous protagonist’s voice actor Matthew Porretta, who during the ‘Monsters, Madness and Magic’ podcast claimed that the title was eyeing an October release and that developer Remedy Entertainment is hard at work on it. “In fact, I was just in Finland last week, that’s where the company is from… Remedy, they’re amazing people,” he said in the interview. It is worth mentioning that this information was by no accounts revealed in an official capacity. The studio could very well change it, and Porretta himself might not be aware of some internal management affairs.
Immediately after on the podcast, he starts reminiscing about he got into the video game voice acting job back in 2010’s Alan Wake, noting that there was a six-month period of silence before he heard back from the studio regarding his selection to play the titular role. Oddly, soon after, Porretta refused to reveal any further details about the sequel, claiming that he’s under strict NDA. The renowned voice actor has appeared in several other games from Remedy, including Control and the time-bending espionage Quantum Break. Alan Wake II was announced during The Game Awards 2021, with a wet and dark cinematic that saw our protagonist holding up a light bulb as he mused about stories. The motion capture will be performed by Ikka Villi, whom many confused with Jake Gyllenhaal, at the time.
The original Alan Wake followed an author suffering from severe writer’s block, who travels to Bright Falls with his wife for a short vacation. Soon after, his wife mysteriously disappears, spurring an investigative mission to find her, albeit the events play out exactly as he had been writing in his latest novel. The game was structured like a TV series with six episodes, and has you fight murderous shadows as ‘darkness’ takes over all that is living. The release window reveal for Alan Wake II is similar to how Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s launch window got out. In March, the Venom voice actor Tony Todd claimed that the sequel was dropping in September, with massive publicity campaigns coming in August. It has a high chance of being shown off at the PlayStation Showcase event later this week.
Development on Alan Wake 2 went on and off for a while, with publisher Microsoft even rejecting the idea of a sequel and tasking Remedy to create Quantum Break, which was released in 2016. Around that time, writer Sam Lake stated that the sequel to Alan Wake had been delayed and that it wasn’t financially successful enough to gain funding for a follow-up. Furthermore, its IP rights were held by Microsoft, preventing Remedy from shopping it to other publishers. In 2019, the studio acquired complete rights to Alan Wake in addition to collecting a one-time royalty payment for past copies sold — EUR 2.5 million (about Rs. 22 crore). The game will now be distributed by Epic Games Publishing.
If Porretta’s claim is proven true, Alan Wake II will be out sometime in October, across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X.