How Alan Wake introduces its darkness

Question: Remedy's Alan Wake games are the reference for a particular kind of horror: an evil that is first felt as a mood, then heard as whispers, then seen as figures at the edge of the light that may or may not be real. How do the two games introduce that evil, how are the whispers and the shadow figures built, and which parts transfer to a game that is not about a writer in a lakeside town?

Short answer: the 2010 game opens with a nightmare that teaches the rules and shows the monster before the story has begun, then spends half an hour in daylight normality where the villain hands the hero a cabin key. The first real enemy is a man the player already knows by name. Every later beat is foretold by a manuscript page before it happens. The darkness is the enemy and light is the weapon, so the audio makes lit places boring and dark ones loud with whispers. Alan Wake 2 builds its whispers from the protagonist's own narration, stripped of a body and played back to him, and fills the dark with silhouettes of which only some are enemies. Its director later said they overdid the shadows. The lesson is the ratio, not the idea.

Alan Wake begins at night, in a dream, with a line about nightmares existing "outside of logic" [1]. Alan drives a dark highway, hits a hitchhiker, and the hitchhiker comes back with an axe. Shadow figures attack at once, and the player learns the game's one rule in the tutorial: the left trigger's light burns the shadow off, the right trigger's gun finishes it [2]. The sequence ends under a lighthouse with a dark tornado behind him.

Then morning: a ferry, a diner, a cast of locals, and an old woman in black who tells Alan the landlord is ill and gives him the cabin key herself. The game later makes her the vessel of the Dark Presence. At the cabin a fight leads to Alan walking out, "only for Alice to disappear and Alan to wake up a week later, behind the wheel of a car that's just been in a crash" [3]. Only then does the night start in earnest. The first named enemy is the landlord, Carl Stucky, met at a lumber yard "surrounded by swirling shadows" (the game's own manuscript names the page "Stucky Taken"; this detail is from the fan wiki and not a source read first hand). Kotaku's preview of the full episode says what the pacing felt like: "The first half of the episode, which would last about an hour, was easy. The second half was tough" [2].

Three techniques carry that hour:

• The nightmare as dramatic irony. The player has already met and killed the Taken; the character has not. One reviewer called the dream a tutorial that "set the scene" at once [4].
• The villain in plain sight. A frail landlady with a key, in a diner the player has every reason to trust.
• Pages that foretell. Manuscript pages lie "out of chronological order" and "often describe scenes that have yet to occur" [5]. The player reads about the attack before the attack.

Sam Lake has said the in-world TV show was built for the same purpose: each episode of Night Springs "would somehow deal with themes and ideas that we are circling around in the main story" [6]. And the rule the whole game rests on, in his words: "Light was an enabling thing; it weakens the enemy, and then you can use conventional weapons against it" [6].

The 2010 audio team gave the game's direction in one sentence: "make the everyday stuff really boring, and make anything from his subconscious really fantastical" [7]. In the light, Bright Falls is "at daytime a normal, cozy place"; when there is no light the nature sounds "had to give you the creeps", with "some creepy wind or an offscreen twig-snap, or the super-cool whispers in quad" [7]. The birds were split into day and night, "the daytime birds sounding more idyllic and relaxing" and "the night birds sound more threatening and ominous" [7].

The Taken's voices were human recordings, one actor doing "a ton of vocals". Three enemy roles had three vocal characters: a low growl for the close fighters, more enunciation for the ones at range, and a breathy, gargling voice for the flankers. The further gone a Taken is, the less you can make out: "The longer and more deeply the Taken have been possessed, the more incomprehensible they become" [7]. The ambiences under them came from ordinary crowd and chatter recordings pushed through reverbs, delays and filters, with low drones and one-shots triggered at random around the player [7]. Light has a sound of its own, electrical: "When the player hears anything electrical we needed them to be attracted to it" [7].

Alan Wake 2 kept the idea and changed the material. Its shadows, the Fade Outs, whisper the protagonist's own narration back at him. The sound designer "decided to strip away the resonances that make the voice so recognizable", since the shadows "don't have a voice box or a chest cavity", then ran the lines "through an inverted impulse response to get that lead-in effect", a reverse-reverb swell before each word, and finally "a whole set of modulating effects that made the voices shift and drift, making them feel more gaseous-like" [8]. The lines loop: "'I'm lost in the dark' and 'I just want to sleep' kind of lines keep pounding Wake's ears", and "all of this whispering becomes like a walla in the world until it turns shouty and aggressive in combat" [8]. When a shadow turns hostile the whisper is dropped for distortion and harmonic enhancement [8]. The Taken proper have "constant underlying mumble loops that are tuned to their alertness level", so that players "know exactly how the enemies feel about them by ear alone" [8]. The brief for the whole Dark Place was "very claustrophobic and very unsure of what you're actually hearing", with the rule that "quiet sounds are loud" [9].

In Alan Wake 2's Dark Place, every shadow might be an enemy: the Fade Outs stand in the streets and subways, featureless silhouettes, and only some of them can hurt the player. The sound team's account above says what they are for: the whispers are a walla "until it turns shouty and aggressive in combat" [8], and the shouting is the tell. Players learn a second one from the game: a harmless figure fades when lit or when watched long enough; a real one holds, carries a weapon, and comes with purpose (from player guides, not a developer source).

A year on, the game director's verdict on the technique is the useful part. Kyle Rowley: "I feel like we kind of overdid it a little bit looking back"; the scares were "meant to be like a psychological attack on the character who's receiving them", but "for a player, it came across basically as a jump scare no matter how we utilized it" [10]. Players said the same in plainer words: "The shadow gimmick on Alan got pretty old for me when I realized it was ALWAYS happening instead of being contained to a single sequence" [11].

Two older designs explain why. P.T.'s ghost, a hack later showed, "actually attaches to the player's back as soon as you get the flashlight" and stays behind the camera [12]. The figure is never spawned in view, so it is never seen arriving. And Frictional found on SOMA that creatures whose intent was ambiguous failed in playtests: players "either ran straight up to the monsters... or they'd stay away from them and not really notice them at all", so the studio made each one clearly docile or clearly dangerous [13]. Alan Wake 2's figures are the same split, harmless or hostile, with a tell to tell them apart.

For a short horror game with a daylight approach and a night-time threat, in the order I would take them:

1. A cold open that shows the monster before the story. Twenty to forty seconds of the night to come, then the sunny start. The player carries the dread for the character.
2. A harmless figure who hands over the way. Whoever gives the player their map, key or warning is whoever stands at the end.
3. Found text that foretells. A register, a notice, a page that describes the next few minutes before they happen. In co-op, one player's page can describe the other's moment.
4. A day that is boring on purpose. Idyllic birds, cosy light, nothing wrong. The contrast is the instrument.
5. Whispers made from the game's own words. Strip the voice of its body (high-pass, cut the formants), add a reverse-reverb lead-in, drift the pitch, loop a few lines at a whisper, and keep the shout for the moment a thing turns real.
6. Mumble loops tied to alertness. Each enemy's voice tells the player its state before its body does.
7. Figures at the edge of the light, mostly harmless, never seen arriving. Spawn them out of view, let them fade when lit or watched, and keep the real ones rare: one in six, not one in two, and a reliable tell.
8. A sound for safety. An electrical hum where the light is, so the ear knows where to go.

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