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Alan Wake 2: The Lake House DLC review - an undercooked facsimile, or something more deliberate?
This return to Alan Wake's horror roots feels lacking compared to the main game, but its examination of AI arguably hides its most daring meta commentary yet.
Like the main game, the sound design and mercurial visual effects do a lot of heavy lifting to keep players feeling tense and on edge, but outside of its clearly telegraphed fight sequences, it doesn't take much for that uneasiness to start slipping away, its blasting horns becoming little more than irritations that you wish would pipe down just a notch while you read this important case file. At once a meditation on the dangers and use of artificial intelligence in the creation of art, and the folly of trying to scientifically quantify the creative process, reducing that raw, unknowable spark of emotion to numbers and units that can be measured and predicted on a graph, the underlying arc of The Lake House is a shot of pure Alan Wake meta commentary at its most indulgent. When Kiran arrives, the artist at the centre of this story has already hit the angry, abstract phase of his career, giving us little to hold about how the use of his paintings may have changed over time, and the monsters that emerge from like walking, pastel oil slicks are sadly quite one-note - if only because all you can do is run away from them for the majority of the expansion due to your FBC weapons being totally ineffective against them.
Or read this on Eurogamer
