Alan Wake Xbox Live Arcade Image Analyzed November 10, 2011

Now, we have known Remedy has been in development of a new Alan Wake game for a while now, as Remedy teased us a few months ago. They had said they were working on a new Alan Wake game, and it wasn’t going to be a sequel or DLC. Armed with just that information, I spent a whole article with my own speculations on what it could possibly be. Well, now we know what it is. Earlier in the week, Remedy has announced that a brand new Alan Wake game is in development and it will be released exclusive to Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA).

Remedy has already promised that even though the game is going to be released through XBLA no sacrifices will be made to any of the core gameplay we know and love from the very first game. They have also stated that if you had removed the cutscenes, the physical space the game took up in the retail disc was around 2GB, which nowadays is small enough to fit maximum XBLA file size specifications. Anyone remember when maximum XBLA filesize was 50mb?

Well the first image of the new game has been released. For legal reasons I’m not going to embed it here, but feel free to check out where its being hosted. The cool thing is, a lot can be speculated on from just the single image! I looked at it myself and drew my own conclusions about it, but some other die hard Alan Wake fans I’ve talked to have noticed things in the image that I had missed!

First off, it looks like we aren’t in Washington anymore! Both the background enviroment and Alan’s attire speak volumes to that. Gone are the forests of the Pacific Northwest, replaced by a desert enviroment. Alan’s attire appears practical given the rugged enviroment. Alan could be somewhere in the midwest or even the south. The background and designs of the buildings around him do scream Montana or the Dakotas (which aren’t that far east of Bright Falls), but given Alan’s attire (and the steer on his belt buckle) he could be as far south as Texas.

Alan is still brandishing a flashlight but he has a new weapon in his hand. Upon initial inspection I thought it was some kind of power drill but other people have commented this is actually a nail gun. The player may be forced to using more improvised weapons in this new game. Not content with just one power tool, I’m sure a lot of people will be asking if a chainsaw will also be on the list. There is a light pole behind him (which were heal/savepoints in the first game), so it looks like all the light based gameplay of the first game is quite intact.

A die hard Alan Wake fan also noticed an improvement to the graphics engine has been made. Paticularly, the model for Alan Wake (played by the actor Ikka Villi) looks a lot more like the actual human actor in the new picture than he looked in the original game. I remember Remedy mentioned they had improved their technology a few months ago (before the new Alan Wake game had been teased) so this is probably the first official image of that new techonology as seen in a product.

Next off is the most obvious thing you can take from this and that is the Night Springs sign on the right side of the picture. Night Springs does not really exist in the Alan Wake world. Night Springs was a fictional series in the game which was probably influenced by shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Over the course of the game, some of the televisions in the game will show various episodes of the show. The major significance of them is that Alan’s agent, Barry Wheeler, had mentioned Alan had written a few episodes of that show, although I don’t think we saw any episodes he had written in the game. In the opening of the game, Alan did have a nightmare (which served as the game’s tutorial) that he was driving towards Night Springs, which was to make it clear to the player he was in fact dreaming. Sarah Breaker did mention in the first game that the older residents of the town were fairly certain that their town was the original inspration for Night Springs. I mean Night Springs is pretty much the opposite word of Bright Falls. Could Alan be traveling through fictional episodes of the series that he created?

Another tidbit no one has really talked about. I’ve kind of sat on this information for a few months now but the Poets of the Fall (who recorded the song “War” for the game’s soundtrack) did tweet that they heard The Old Gods of Asgard recording some new songs. I wonder what that was for…

The first full trailer for the new Alan Wake game will premere on the Spike Video Game Awards Show on December 10th, 2011. If you can’t wait till then a teaser for the trailer has just been released and you can watch it here.